“Since September, overall operating inventory has been reduced by 10 percent, car velocity is up 7 percent, and dwell is down 10 percent, all of which indicate we’re moving your freight faster,” Kenny Rocker, the railroad’s executive vice president of marketing and sales, wrote in a Dec. 28 customer announcement.
“Beyond speed, our service is becoming more reliable, too, with on-time delivery of cars increasing by 5 percent since we initiated the new operating plan,” Rocker wrote. “These improvements have happened in the midst of volume growth, with total carloads up 3.6 percent year over year. I am encouraged by these numbers, as they demonstrate our Unified Plan 2020 efforts are already paying off.”
UP launched its new operating plan, based on the principles of Precision Scheduled Railroading, on Oct. 1.
It’s currently in the second phase of operational changes, covering the railroad’s routes between Southern California and Chicago.
The first phase was in the Mid-America Corridor linking Chicago with the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mexico.
The new plan aims to get UP out of an operational funk that has lasted more than a year. Congestion, particularly on Gulf Coast routes, forced UP to pull locomotives from storage and hire additional road and yard crews.
UP’s average train speed has yet to return to the levels of the fourth quarter of 2017 and remains about 6 percent below December 2016, according to data filed with the Surface Transportation Board.
Federal regulators have said UP’s rollout of its new operating plan appears to be going smoothly and that they have not received service-related complaints from shippers.
