Penn State professor questions long term effectiveness of Precision Scheduled Ra

[Iain]

http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2019/10/04-penn-state-professor-questions-long-term-effectiveness-of-precision-scheduled-railroading

[TLOC]

PSR is meant IMO for unit trains. Or as large manifests moving from one city to another. Locals are not part of the PSR mentality. As a shareholder I have no issue with railroads trying to maximize assets if they can do it without the loss of their customer base. An academic  talking about Railroading needs to really show me his credibility in discussing this. To me he just re-hashed what we have heard for a few years now.

Tom

[Hawghead]

Well I read it and as someone who has been working for a class one railroad for the last 15 years, I'd have to agree with everything professor Swan said.

Scott

[Missaberoad]

After reading it I can't find anything that I disagree with in the article and we are experiancing all of the problems first hand that the professor describes.

Unfortunately the reality is that PSR puts short term gains before long term health, costing customer satisfaction, experianced employees (especially in management) and piling up deferred expenses.

CN paid for the flaws in Hunters model and the rest of us will follow suit, just a question of when.

[Blazeman]

Doc Swan was at Jim Hertzog's ops session last Saturday.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Unfortunately the reality is that our global economic model puts short term gains before long term health, costing customer satisfaction, experianced employees (especially in management) and piling up deferred expenses.

Fixed that for ya. 

[dem34]

Fixed that for ya. 

I mean yeah, the problem with the accepted model of corporations and investors is that both expect exponential growth but even if you have an uncontested monopoly you're eventually going to hit a brick wall on growth and then the company s**** the bed trying to cut as many corners as possible to squeeze every bit of extra profit.

[Hawghead]

Last trip, I had a consist that the lead unit wouldn't load more than about 15% of what is should have been loading.   The second unit had an air leak so bad that even with two other units feeding it, it couldn't maintain main reservoir pressure above 100 psi (should be 120-140 psi).  This consist was supposed to be the leading consist on a train going over the Blue mountains (2%+ grades)  That obviously didn't happen. (Sorry customer your cars are going to be late).  The trip before when I cut out the cab signals on the lead locomotive, (we run with PTC or cab signals but you are not supposed to run both), train went into penalty brake application and wouldn't recover the air brake system and additionally the third unit was bad order because of dead batteries and wouldn't start.   On today's consist the lead unit PTC system didn't work, the distance counter didn't work and the independent brake air pressure was 20 psi low and this same consist is going out tomorrow without spending a minute in the roundhouse. 

It's rare to get a consist that doesn't have at least one significant problem since "PSR" took over and they fired the vast majority of the roundhouse personnel system wide.  This is only going to get worse with time and winter's coming so motive power problems will cause significantly more delays in the bad weather.

The really scary part is these systemic problems have affected the car departments as badly as the roundhouse departments.  You know what rides in those cars that are subject to the same shoddy maintenance practices that the locomotives get?  That's right:  Anhydrous Ammonia, Chlorine, LPG, Crude oil and Gasoline just to name some of the more frightening ones.  So, before anyone thinks that PSR is good economy, think about what is rolling through your community and what kind of maintenance it's receiving.

Scott