Scheduled railroading

I’ll bet there are a lot of people out there who think all railroading is scheduled. It’s not.

There is going to be a lot of talk about scheduled railroading, whether Hunter Harrison remains CEO of CSX transportation or not. Scheduled railroading is part of the method and practice used by Harrison to improve financial results of every railroad where he’s been at the helm. Harrison’s version is Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). Harrison himself has made no secret about how it works, and it isn’t rocket science.

Scheduled railroading involves more than just running trains to a timetable. In fact, most trains involved in the practice don’t need a timetable, per se, just a scheduled beginning and end point, and a computer to work out where and when they will meet other scheduled trains and make stops for locomotive servicing and crew changes.

What Amtrak does is running trains to a timetable. Only on some lines does Amtrak do scheduled railroading. In others, there is so much padding in the timetable, and so little consequence for failure to keep it, that it might be called railroading by suggested guidelines.

Okay, then. If running trains on time at the endpoints is scheduled railroading, what more is needed to make it precision scheduled? The necessary element is an operating plan that accounts for the movement of every train on the railroad, all the time, and with clockwork regularity. This means knowing things like exactly how many locomotives will be needed and where they will be needed, where they will move, and how they will get back to their home shop for class inspections and rebuilds. It means knowing how every train will fit in with every other train, and what, exactly, will happen when there is a breakdown, delay, track failure, or anything else that would tend to put a monkey wrench in the works. A good precision schedule plan will give people on the ground specific instructions as to what happens in any eventuality.

The next element is being able to accommodate any customer’s needs within the confines and constrictions of the operating plan. If operating ideally, PSR will identify the correct car for the shipper’s needs, its availability, and when it can be delivered to the loading point. The PSR plan will also tell the railroad to tell the shipper when the car must be loaded and exactly when it will arrive at the destination point. The railroad should also know exactly when the car will arrive at all intermediate points.

My readers may begin to see why some shippers don’t exactly like PSR, while other shippers accept that it provides their customers with better service at the expense of a lazy approach to car loading. What I mean by the latter is that, under a policy of precision scheduling, both the shipper and consignee cannot hold onto a car for any longer than the railroad allows, without paying extra charges, called demurrage.

But it’s not just a scheme by the railroad to secure extra charges for slow car loading or unloading. The real financial boost to the precision scheduled railroad is the moving of the optimum amount of freight at the most competitive possible rates using the absolute minimum of cars and locomotives at any given time.

The cost savings are enormous. Fewer locomotives means lower crew, fuel and maintenance costs. Fewer cars on the railroad is mostly accomplished by reducing car idle time to the absolute minimum, hence strict demurrage.

The biggest upside for shippers and their customers is the ability to know where their shipment is and when it will arrive. Used correctly as a sales tool, shippers can offer premium service to their customers, relying on the precision scheduled railroad to “deliver the goods.”

When the railroad can’t deliver? Shippers’ experience at CP, Harrison’s last railroad is mixed. On-time performance is not an issue, but flexibility is. Harrison’s no-bullshit attitude filtered down to the sales level, where shippers experiencing heavy or erratic business got the feeling the whole precision thing was so etched in stone that they couldn’t get needed changes in service fast enough, or at all.

And just because the railroad is saving money, or, said another way, improving the bottom line, it doesn’t mean those savings are passed along to the shippers. In fact, CP’s rates for American service areas remained steady or increased. Canada has a different regulatory regime in place, so some shippers there had other recourse. Nonetheless, both sides of the equation aren’t necessarily holding hands and singing campfire songs just because more freight arrives on time.

Insofar as CSX is concerned, it’s likely that many of the tenets of PSR have been implemented there well before Harrison’s advent. In fact, it’s a business strategy for railroading that makes sense and is no secret. It would be surprising if some or all of the ideas weren’t already, or soon to be, implemented at every Class I railroad.

Grist for the mill of another blog post: Could a variation on PSR save Amtrak? Stay tuned!

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)