Malfunctions Galore by Frank N. Wilner

Malfunctions Galore
by Frank N. Wilner

from Rail Intelligence Newsletter
(Published by Traffic World / Reprinted with permission of the editor)

Don't call it a meltdown. But evidence is mounting of service failures on the former Conrail. And while the more severe problems are occurring on Conrail lines acquired by Norfolk Southern, the CSX portion is not immune. Begin with 600 service failures on United Parcel Service trailers since June 1, spread about evenly among CSX and NS. A service failure is not just a late arrival, but an arrival so late that the promised delivery date is missed entirely. There are about 65 UPS trains daily on CSX and NS. "Every UPS train on both systems is now late," said UPS spokesman Norman Black Friday afternoon. "It's normally zero. They're no longer predicting when things are going to get back to normal. There just seems to be mass confusion out there. They're going to have to show some big-time improvement over the weekend and Monday, or it's going to start getting pretty serious."

On CSX on June 7, three locomotives pulled an eight-car UPS train from Northern Virginia all the way to Jacksonville, Fla., in an effort to save face. The CSX mainline between Washington, D.C., and Jacksonville remained so plugged last week that the daily southbound hot-shot UPS train, No. 173, often ran three hours late. CSX officials are so fretful the UPS business will be lost that the 79-mph Amtrak Silver Star and 70-mph Auto Train-which previously didn't conflict with No. 173 -- have found themselves behind the slower UPS intermodal train and not permitted to pass. That would require holding the UPS train at a siding.

"I'm not allowed to hold that UPS train for God," said a CSX dispatcher.

The law, in this case, may trump God. Amtrak has registered a complaint with CSX for violating a statutory requirement that Amtrak passenger trains not be delayed.

Computer Problems
Entire merchandise and intermodal NS and CSX trains from what used to be Conrail are arriving at western connections without advance waybill information. "We're sort of blind," said a western railroad manager. "We know what trains are coming, but we have to physically walk the train and look at the cars to get their numbers. The computer system isn't telling us what cars are coming or where they're supposed to go. Some trains are taking different routes than they took on pre-merger Conrail and that is making things more difficult. Eventually the data arrives." Crew shortages also are affecting service. In Michigan, Norfolk Southern's computerized crew-calling faltered, resulting in train crews failing to be called at appropriate times or not at all.

NS employees described the classification yard at Bellevue, Ohio, as "plugged up so badly it requires an enema." At a CSX classification yard at Willard, Ohio, trains are not being properly blocked by destination, yet being sent west just to keep Willard from becoming plugged, said a railroad manager.

The CSX classification yard outside Albany, N.Y., received a train from a joint assets area terminal 130 miles south at Oak Island, N.J., which had to be returned because nobody could figure out where the cars were supposed to go. A clerk at Oak Island blamed it on a computer failure. Yard crews at two Northern New Jersey shared-assets terminals were sent home when the yard ran out of cars. Rail officials confirmed that a GM facility at Linden, N.J., was shut down briefly because of a railroad service failure.

At Cove, Pa., an NS intermodal train sat on a siding for more than a day, Rail Intelligence was told by railroad watcher Fred Frailey, deputy editor of Kiplinger's Personal Finance, who has been interviewing CSX and NS employees. Near crippling congestion at Enola, Pa., now controlled by NS, was related to Frailey by NS employees. On CSX between Baltimore and Philadelphia, train delays caused several crews to exceed maximum allowable hours of service. This caused additional delay as new crews had to be found and shuttled to the stalled trains by taxicab from Perryville, Md., and Philadelphia.

More Chaos
The Association of American Railroads reported that the car count on CSX and NS-including the former Conrail-had jumped by more than 10 percent or some 45,000 last week. NS acknowledged that 2,500 double-stack intermodal platforms it had received from BNSF at Chicago for former Conrail destinations weren't returned west in a timely fashion. Only a surplus of intermodal equipment prevented a calamity for shippers. At Chicago, where until June 1 pre-blocked westbound trains arrived at Cicero on BNSF if the destination were the Pacific Northwest, and at Corwith if the destination were the Southwest, hundreds of cars have been delivered to the wrong yard. One train arriving at Corwith last week was said to have at least 30 cars that should have been delivered to a CSX yard and as many that were supposed to have been delivered to Union Pacific's Global II yard. Another 30 cars should have gone to Cicero but arrived in Corwith.

As BNSF does not have track that connects the two yards-Corwith being a former Santa Fe facility; Cicero a former BN yard-BNSF had to pay the Belt Railway to shuttle them back and forth.

A 160-car intermodal train reached Corwith last week from NS with no documentation. Union Pacific's Global II yard in Chicago also was visited by a mystery train. "Yards are backing up, but to drain the swamp and keep things flowing through Chicago we're accepting the mismatched trains rather than sending them back," said an operating officer who didn't even want his western railroad employer named because he is so fearful of being disciplined by senior management.

BNSF President Matt Rose sent a memo throughout his system warning employees not to say a single negative word about Conrail integration problems. Union Pacific managers report similar warnings. Rail Intelligence received a message from one railroad officer, "Don't even call me at the office. I'll call you at home tonight."

Deja Vu?
Union Pacific deja vu? How about Penn Central deja vu. In Fortune magazine of Aug. 19, 1970, Rush Loving wrote that when New York Central Railroad and Pennsylvania Railroad merged, "Penn Central was just a goddamned operating mess. Routes were changed immediately for some types of traffic, but since none of the classification clerks had been taught the 5,000 new combinations of routings, cars started flowing by the thousands into wrong yards.

"They'd get a car for Harrisburg, which wasn't on the old New York Central, and they'd say, 'Where the hell is Harrisburg? I know where Pittsburgh is. I'll send it to Pittsburgh.' Worse yet, many cars had no waybills-the papers that accompany each car and show its routing and destination-and yard superintendents were sending out entire trains of no-waybill cars just to get rid of them, thereby making more confusion at the next yard down the line," wrote Loving.

Just Glitches?
That was then. Last week at www.trainorders.com, an Internet chatroom where railroad operating officers visit under aliases known to each other, the discussion last week was increasingly grave and sounding much like what Loving wrote almost 29 years ago.

Perhaps these are glitches. Perhaps the problems are more systemic. Time now is not on the side of either CSX or NS-and neither are investors, shippers or lawmakers who are petrified of a Union Pacific instant replay.

Worse and Faster
"The information technology guys screwed up badly," said Washington Post transportation writer Don Phillips, who writes a monthly column for Trains magazine and who has been talking with managers and union employees on NS and CSX. "Some of it is typical railroad-management arrogance," Phillips told Rail Intelligence. "CSX and NS are getting cooperation from former Conrail employees. Nobody is trying to sabotage this merger. Union officials are urging their people to help."

Former Association of American Railroads official Eric Wolfe, who helped design a nationwide railroad computer messaging system, said the TRAIN II system has been "performing with 98.8 percent accuracy" and that any problems are at former Conrail locations where information is not being transferred properly. BNSF last week was receiving only about 20 percent of the computer messages that are supposed to precede train arrivals, said a manager who asked not to be named.

"Our livelihoods and jobs depend upon helping CSX and NS," said Jim Carrico, the United Transportation Union's state director in Indiana. "But if they don't ask us for help we can't help them. They're trying to divert too much too fast. NS doesn't want to listen to the people who actually do the job."

Another union official, asking that his name not be used, said, "Management arrogance played a role. Instead of asking us what the post-merger manpower requirements would be, NS told us. Not so CSX. They at least asked our cooperation and we're seeing less turmoil on CSX where they aren't suffering the crew shortages that are affecting NS," he said. "NS didn't think this out deeply enough," said a western railroad operating officer. "They didn't understand the functionality of the Conrail system.

NS still doesn't have a method for tracking Conrail trains. I think CSX had more respect for the task. On NS, things are a lot worse a lot faster than happened on Union Pacific."

NS Responds
Bob Spenski, chief labor negotiator for NS, denied any serious problem. "There are a few bumps and glitches, but we're working it out and getting excellent cooperation" from local union officers. "We're working hard to make former Conrail people proud of NS," said Spenski. "The problems have been identified and we've about fixed them," said Dan O'Brien, Norfolk Southern's assistant vice president for Conrail integration. "Blocking problems have been squared away." He said temporary software problems created "data deficiencies. Each day there is a little more progress," said O'Brien. Another NS official said that until the computer problem is eliminated, NS would try to ease the malfunction by sending information to destination railroads by facsimile. "We're still experiencing some difficulties," said NS public relations officer Susan Terpay. "We've solved many problems and we're working to fix others to meet the expectations of our customers and our own standards. We've a way to go before we meet them," she said. At CSX, officials asking not to be named said its problems-almost all in information technology-have been "largely resolved." Morgan Stanley railroad analyst Jim Valentine, who has had his team of assistants calling shippers, said, "The problems at CSX do not appear to be as troublesome as Norfolk Southern's. We are at the lower end of the range for CSX and NS in terms of second-quarter earnings estimates, in part due to concerns that we have had about temporary glitches such as this," said Valentine. "If we do not get a resolution to the problems in the next week or so, we may need to take down our numbers further.

"We are not even remotely suggesting that these transition difficulties are anywhere near the proportions witnessed during the integration of Southern Pacific into Union Pacific, as the primary difficulty for UP had to do with a lack of capacity and resources. CSX and NS have retained extra resources in the event that these transition problems developed." UPS spokesman Black echoed that assessment. "Nothing was moving on UP," said Black. "It was a true meltdown. Here trains are moving. Certainly this is not comparable to UP yet, but it sure seems to be going that way."