MASSIVE INFERNO, THREAT OF “CATASTROPHIC” EXPLOSION AFTER ~50-CAR TRAIN DERAILMENT

[Joe King]

Any merger will cost at least some jobs.

It wouldn't make sense to have duplicate workers doing the same jobs that fewer workers could do just as well.

That was one of the big mistakes that bankrupted Penn Central. They kept all workers and all lines open. Even the ones that duplicated routes and jobs.

I don't want anyone to lose their job, but if mergers are going to happen at all, I don't see how it can be avoided.

The good thing about a UP/NS merger is that there isn't a lot of over lap between the systems that would necessitate very much reduction in workers.

With Penn Central, they could've easily shed a third of their workforce and abandoned numerous duplicate lines, as the Pennsylvania RR and NYC had tons of overlap.

Had they done that, Penn Central might still be around.



1100 jobs at a class 1 RR, is not really a lot of jobs.

Especially when one considers that between the two RR's in question, they currently employ approx 60,000 workers.

So it drops to 58,900 employees.

Yes, it sucks to be one of those 1100, but it's not as though the RR's haven't laid people off before.

 

[Casey Jones]

this should make riding a train, or shipping by train more safer right...?

It's not necessarily, automatically, going to make shipping moar dangerous.

What it WILL do, is...increase the rigidity of the monolith of management. There is a REASON why rail traffic dropped so steeply in the 1970s - it was partly, but not at all totally, union work rules. The large carriers, getting larger every year, didn't want to deal with smaller industries which had been a steady feeder of traffic, with smaller companies that worked with them.

I'd seen this. Two examples: Wisconsin Central, and Montana Rail Link. WC, was a small investor-pool buying the remnants of the Soo Line in the Wisconsin-Michigan area, working to continue rail service and revitalize it. They were successful, almost grotesquely so. They had priorities right - good work rules, good union relations, equipment was old but maintained top-notch. I was surprised by how WELL the old SDs and GPs had been rebuilt. We saw power a third the age, off the major lines, much moar beat-up.

And the WC WANTED local business - grain shipments and timber, lumbering. They LOOKED for such shippers - who were themselves eager to get it off the secondary roads of the area. WIn-win.

Until the major lines, parasites all, got interested. The Canadian National bought them, to get a route from Duluth into Chicago.

And once they did, they basically told the small shippers to pack sand. Same as the old Soo did as it tried to morph into a competitor for the BN, back in the 1960s. Local shippers were forced back into truck shipments.

Rail Link, also. (Interestingly, the same man, E. Hunter Harrison, was involved in both the CN/WC mess, and the BN's spin-off of the MRL property). MRL was set up by a local construction magnate to prevent abandonment of one of two major rail routes through Montana. The envisioned business called for 90-percent local shipment, with a few through-freights...the BN tied in at Billings and also Sandpoint, Idaho. But it was to be a leisurely Class II local line.

The local business was growing, but so was the traffic on the new BNSF. They bought the line back for BILLIONS - Dennis Washington, who owned the company that owned MRL (think, Buffet, Berkshire Hathaway) had purchased control for a song. He is in his 90s now, and his sons are...ne'er-do-well's. He gave up and sold it back, and now at least can dictate how his sons are to inherit the 40-percent they'll get after Probate, in a few years.

But the big carriers are not, repeat NOT interested in local or even medium-distance shipments. Switching trains is SUCH a bother...they liked the "Bridge Line" concept they had in the 1990s, containers in Jersey, just ship them to Long Beach, offload, pick up moar, come back the other direction.

That was a temporary thing, but you can't tell that to today's Business-School graduate managers and CEOs.

Me, I think the Ugly Pathetic, as a coast-to-coast FUBAR line, is gonna wind up like the Penn Central.

 

[pmbug]

Train related:

Watch a Japanese train driver for one minute and you'll see something strange.

He points at the signal. Out loud, he calls its color.
He points at the speedometer. He calls the number.
He points at an empty platform. He announces it's clear.

Alone in the cab. No one is checking on him.

It's called shisa kanko. Pointing and calling.

Japanese railways discovered something about the human brain a century ago:
your eyes will lie to you. Your finger won't.

Seeing a signal is passive. Your mind can drift.
Pointing at it, naming it, hearing your own voice —
that forces the brain to actually process what's in front of it.

Studies found it cuts human error by about 85 percent.

New York's subway quietly copied part of it.
Their conductors now point at a marker at every single stop.

Japan looked at the most boring moment of a workday —
the ten-thousandth time you check the same signal —
and decided even that moment deserves full attention.

It looks ridiculous.
It has helped make Japanese trains among the safest machines on Earth.

Sometimes greatness is just refusing to do anything halfway.

 

[Casey Jones]

Done for the audio recording.

COMPLIANCE.

I don't like it. I'll tell you why: I made good money driving trains. I made that money because I, because all of us with FRA cards in our wallets...had EARNED that, by BEING RESPONSIBLE.

Early on in my railroad career, an old-head conductor gave me a tip. It's frequent that you're called out of your sleep/wake cycle and you're not gonna be at 100-percent.

His tip: WRITE DOWN every signal aspect (what it's communicating; a green signal indicates "Clear," an amber indicates "Approach" - write it down with the mile marker. So if you space it you can go back to what you wrote - and if you're missing a signal (say, four miles past it) you know you done farked up (or at night, a signal was dark); bring it down to "Restricted" speed until you see the next signal aspect.

We didn't need to video-audio recorders. I guess that's not true anymore. I'm glad I'm out - I wouldn't work in today's micromanaged Kafkaesque Hell.