“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.
I live by the former Railex produce facility in Rotterdam N.Y. ,which Union Pacific purchased last year or so. Union Pacifica engines bring in produce from Walla Walla Washington every couple of days in specialized reefer cars in 50-100 cars per train just for the produce facility ,and then a day or so later head right back to Washington , now I noticed they put these m/t cars on a siding track were they sit for a day or too and I believe go to the Selkirk yard to lash up with other cars for the ride back west . maybe this is part of the new pression railroading ,if it is then its a waste of time and money if a fleet of cars has to wait days just to hook up to a longer train when it use to go right back to Walla Walla Washington with U.P. engines the minute they were empty directly from the Railex facility. This a step backwards not forward simply put
Passenger train service is an unreliable joke for the LD trains in this country. Can anyone tell me what use late trains by hours are fulfilling? As to PSR, when did the railroads delivering cars on time actually mean something to the customers. I bet average speed of the freight trains has now risen from 22 mph to 24 mph. What a joke. Truckers still eat the lunch of the best Class 1 schedules and will continue to do so until the Class 1’s stop worshiping at the alter of Wall Street. After 100 years plus, the railroads are still learning how to operate the business efficiently? What ever they revert too, it is not enough to expand their market share, not that they care.
With Precision Scheduled Railroading, the movement of freight trains becomes faster and more efficient. However, this may not mean less “freight train interference” as far as Amtrak is concerned.
At the time of this writing, 3 January 2019 at 1:05 am CST, Amtrak’s westbound “Sunset Limited” is over eight hours late and now due in Houston at 2:02 am. The train should be in San Antonio at this time having a through sleeping car and a coach from Chicago on “The Texas Eagle” added to the consist.
It just goes to show what making the effort to actually operate a railroad can achieve. I don’t think there were any really radical changes, unless you consider requiring rail management to actually think about how to run a railroad better as radical. Too much HQ personnel often results in lots of meetings, talk, and theoretical powerpoint presentations. Participants felt satisfied, but little real action ensued. Arbitrary departmental or personal bonus targets all too often create bunker mentalities contrary to the overall benefit.