Posted on 05/10/2022 4:03:57 PM PDT by Intar
Main point of the article:
“PSR has [made] engineer’s trains almost impossible to control. Shareholders roll the dice with communities, cities and the environment daily. They don’t live here. Trains have more than doubled in length. Imagine a train 16,400 feet in length weighing 17,500 tons: That is three miles, 560 feet and 35 million pounds. One train. And it is hauling hazmat, tanks of say, chlorine gas, or anhydrous ammonia. Just one tank car alone weighs 131 tons, that is 262,000 pounds. To give an example from history, 262,000 pounds of chlorine gas is approximately two-thirds of what the German army used during the trench warfare of all of WWI. One tank car alone.
“And then we pick up more enroute! My conductor is three miles away while I reverse this train into an active rail yard! Crossings don’t matter, and communities? Are you kidding? No sane country would move materials like this. These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very cars themselves. The risks the Class I carriers are taking is a race to disaster. It is absolutely dreadful and grotesque.
Another Precision Scheduled Railroading factor in supply chain failure: Even when the majority of these PSR trains make it, without dramatic ends, they rarely get across the road during a crew members hours of service (HOS) time limit, which is 12 hours. Several factors:
“The rail infrastructure, in particular rail yards and sidings, were designed and built during the great Industrial Age. They did a lot of things right: they overbuilt bridges, for one. But it is not a failure of imagination that they could not foresee, from a sane perspective, that someday the bosses would want to normalize 15,000-foot trains.
“Yards and sidings do not accommodate this scale. It is a clash of function and design. So, imagine this: A 15,800-foot train with distributed power locomotives placed in the middle and at the rear of a train, comes to work a station with 4,500-foot tracks and needs to pick up and set out cars in the middle and rear of the train. This will not be lickety-split.
“Yes: Crew after crew expires on HOS. It is incredibly tense work shoving 12,720 feet of train, with a human being holding on all the way back there, well over two miles away, in reverse, into a rail yard, to pick up, say, 23 more cars. To then add those cars and run a battery of required air tests on the train, before departure. The scale of these trains compounds the time required to make these moves many-fold. Sometimes, in the winter, the train’s brake system cannot be adequately recharged to allow the train to depart. And while this is happening, another monster train is waiting outside town (losing on-duty time) to do more of the same! Now, both trains need to be recrewed. This is another reason people are leaving: There is no human being I know who can take being called at 7 PM for a 9 PM job, and go through this to finally arrive at the hotel at 2 PM, without an impact on their wellbeing. It is brutal.”
Just curious but why do it this way? Why not just run 3 separate trains at ~5,270 feet each?
Fully automated shorter trains.
Kinda like packet switching.
TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY PETE is home breast feeding his baby, shortage of Enfamil.
Unmanned engines.
Bookmark
Mookbark
“Just curious but why do it this way? Why not just run 3 separate trains at ~5,270 feet each?”
Apparently it is less costly. Linked below is a 2019 article in Trains magazine about Warren Buffett studying Precision Railroad Scheduling (PSF), at rival Union Pacific, for his Burlington Northern Railroad.
Here is another article about PSF and other cost reduction programs at US railroads.
https://www.breakthroughfuel.com/blog/precision-scheduled-railroading/
The railroad business model is built on enormous economies of scale. You can move 5+ truckloads of a typical commodity in a single railcar. Now multiply that railcar by 150 cars in a train, and you have the equivalent of more than 750 truckloads of freight handled by a single crew.
BNSF refused to adopt PSR - Warren Buffet still knows how to run a business.
We need the rent is too damn high guy to say....the trains are too damn long
Interesting article. Thanks for posting. Imagine a three mile train coming down a hill and trying to stop. Crazy.
I'm not going to accuse him of misrepresenting anything, but I fail to see how the practice of "precision scheduled railroading" (PSR) has anything to do with the length of the trains these railroads are running. If anything, the whole system has gotten more efficient and the railroad supply chain has become more streamlined by eliminating classification moves in intermediate rail yards between ends of a haul.
In a nutshell ... the trains can be longer because the locomotives at the front of it don't pull or brake the entire train. They are supplemented by additional locomotives in the middle of the train that help pull and brake the train. This kind of arrangement used to be seen only in mountainous areas where trains needed to climb steep grades. Now it's being used all over the place.
When your business model is entirely based on hiring as few people as possible . . .
there aren’t many trains on hills here in the east. (out west i don’t know) They are usually built along river banks.
PSR actually stands for Precision Scheduled Railroad. HOS is a very real problem with these longer trains. Fatigue causes the operators to make mistakes, and mistakes can be very costly. Particularly when hauling something like anhydrous ammonia or chlorine, both of which were mentioned by the author.
BNSF refused to adopt PSR. They’re still running trains that the crews can handle without exceeding HOS. I realize this is the sort of thing a Democrat says all the time, but community interests have to be balanced against private interests.
Ah, that actually makes sense. So the controls for the other engines are located in a single locomotive.
Works fine until there is a communications failure.
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