For the year-to-date compared to the first quarter of 2017, average train speed on NS has declined 16 percent, to 19 mph, while terminal dwell has risen 23 percent, to 29.9 hours, largely due to problems centered on the Alabama and Georgia divisions.
“Our No. 1 priority is to return velocity to the railroad,” Chief Financial Officer Cynthia Earhart told an investors’ conference last week.
Norris Yard in Irondale, Ala., outside Birmingham, is plugged, forcing NS to hold trains outside the terminal for miles in each direction in sidings on the former Southern Railway main line.
NS has temporarily transferred 55 train and engine employees to Birmingham from around the system. Earhart says 44 have arrived in Birmingham and are already qualified and working, while the final 11 crew members will arrive within a week or so.
The new crews will primarily be working in the terminal, Earhart says, but some will be handling road trains.
“We need to get the terminal turning quicker,” she says. “There’s a lot of traffic that we’re trying to get through there.”
To ease main line congestion on the East End District between Birmingham and Atlanta, NS has returned through traffic to the Central of Georgia District. Through trains were shifted off the Birmingham-Columbus-Macon, Ga., routing in the middle of 2017, Earhart says.
Earhart could not provide a firm estimate on how long it would take NS to restore service to prior levels.
“This is weeks. It’s not days for sure,” she says.
Systemwide, NS has enough crews and locomotives to handle its current traffic levels, Earhart says.
Terminal dwell at Norris Yard was 53 hours last week, well above the 31-hour average in the first quarter last year. Across the system, five other yards were operating with average dwell times above 40 hours, including Chattanooga, Tenn.; Columbus, Ohio; Elkhart, Ind.; Macon; and Sheffield, Ala.
NS is far from alone in experiencing service problems.
Last year all of the Class I railroads reported year-over-year declines in Association of American Railroads’ performance measures as train speeds slowed and cars spent more time in yards, notes independent analyst Anthony Hatch of ABH Consulting.
Canadian National is adding yard and main line capacity, as well as crews and locomotives, to handle a surge in traffic that has bogged down its Western Corridor.
Union Pacific executives say they’re not satisfied with lower train speeds and higher terminal dwell.
And CSX Transportation’s service problems last year drew shipper complaints, regulatory scrutiny and forced some shippers to divert their freight to trucks and NS.
Wonder why more freight is moving over the highway ? To the railroads, ratios are everything and customers have to conform otherwise ship by truck. Overall, the market cannot tolerate what service NS and CSX offer. The railroads will only grow with low paying bottom feeding freight.
So, is this the new “Customer Service” Mantra?? Who is the BOD going to fire for this plan? Themselves?? Seems like there is a lot of lip prints on the backsides of Upper Management.
Detroit is so slow due to power shortage they had 3 decent yard goats(GP38) left Detroit on 110 empty coke never have returned, yard has out fractures plus supports Conrail Detroit with power, Plus no carmen.
Can anyone imagine D.W. Brosnan, L.Stanley Crane or Graham Claytor standing for any of this?
Are you kidding me? Weather? The reason NS is struggling is poor upper management decision making. In order to “keep up” with CSX NS has tried to copy every move they make without thinking of the repercussions these changes will cause. Shutting down hump yards combining devisions, you guys really need to dig deeper on this issue.
NS started the EHH effect spiral when EHH was still with CP. As you all recall, EHH was trying to force a shotgun wedding between CP and NS. The brass at NS developed their own versions of EHH’s strategies to reduce costs and show the shareholders a marriage to EHH’s CP was not a good idea. A regulatory hurdle the height of Mt. Everest not withstanding, a marriage of CP and NS would have been a Charlie Foxtrot of Biblical proportions.
That was the start of monkey-see-monkey-do.
NS closed Chattanooga but didn’t “muscle up” Birmingham, Sheffield and Linwood enough to pick up the slack. None of those places have run as well since the Chattanooga downgrade. Is NS pushing too hard to get to 65 OR? Maybe that’s the wrong goal? This is going to be a big setback for them.
Where I am at, the railroad wants to cut costs by cutting back on cabs, and they are trying to turn crews and deadhead them back home versus putting them up in a hotel. They deadhead the turning crews on a train instead of a cab, again, to save money. What happens when the train can’t get into the terminal? Well the deadhead crew sits too. And then they go dead on their hours of service and just sit on the locomotives until the train gets in. Crews are spending 14, 15, 16hrs on duty. Then the company wonders why there are no rested crews.
I had the issues on Alabama Division pegged as a crew issue two months ago. Local crews out of Mobile were running out of hours and there were no spare crews to “dog catch”. Consequently, even if a local crew still had more work to complete, the TM would tell them to quit and run back to their terminal so he wouldn’t have to taxi them back into town and leave their train parked in a siding somewhere.
The problem became acute enough that at one point in January one of our production sites went seven straight days without a switch. Kind of difficult to run a business and take care of our customers when we aren’t getting service.
NS (Southern) is my home road. From that perspective, it is sad to see the Throughbred plodding along the tracks.
Funny thing is, with coal down at least 30% over the last 2 years, what would NS be doing if this traffic was still going great guns???
I’m not familiar with NS, except what I read in TRAINS MAG about the Crescent Corridor intermodal service. It would be a shame if NS ever tried to EHH itself, as some commentators have implied. EHH actually did some good at IC, CN and CP. Anyone with a brain knew it wouldn’t work at any of the USA Big Four.
I still say Norforlk & Southern dropped the ball and should have upgraded from single tracks to double tracks that goes for the new bridges they have installed ,with the longer trains with double the power ,the sidings are way to short and need up grading , unless they like the trains and crews sitting idlely by waiting , freights that keep moving make money ,freights that sit on sidings do not very simple!
Hey, Trains! Nothing much happens at Columbus OH. Drop it from your chart. The ones you want to look at are: Sheffield, Macon, Linwood, Birmingham. These are the humps that are handling large volumes and it’s where you’ll see the magnitude of the problem.
When they shut the hump down and furloughed 42 Carmen (myself being one of them after 13 years of service)in Chattanooga is when it all started to decline. They started parking trains for days in sidings on the main line because the yard could not take them because of every track being full in the yard. Ns was trying what the refered to as Block swapping to eliminate Carmen jobs in Chattanooga to save money. Use to when asked where I work I was proud to say Norfolk Southern but now it’s just the Railroad!
Chris, check your history. NS started scaling back before Hunter ever got to CSX.
This what happens when, in the interest of keeping the shareholders happy for the next three months, you slash and burn to make the numbers look good in the short term or Wall Street will want heads on a platter.
CN choking on business and not enough track to move it in some spots.
CSX…well there has been enough written about that so no need for me to add to it.
UP, with their “G55 regardless of the consequences” mission right now ( We can do it because we are the UP and EHH won’t show us up), having issues moving traffic.
And the NS with their mini meltdowns in selected spots.
MeanwhIle, the BNSF, without all of the locker room hype, just keeps quietly plodding along making solid gains.
Dows anyone with any common sense think that a shipper who has had a load sitting on a train that has been parked for three days because the power has been robbed off it, or a has a unit train that has been delayed due to a lack of power or available crews, really gives a rats backside about the operating ratio? Perhaps his bottom line is being impacted by delayed shipments.
For all the hyperbole I hear about attaining rock bottom operating ratios, railroads are a service industry. They are there to move customer goods from Point A to Point B in a reasonable amount of time for an agreed upon price. All the push to lower operation ratios has had a significant impact on providing service in a reasonable amount of time. My wife reminds me of her Ex selling Amway and trying to get to the top of the pyramid. She always told him someone has to sell a box of soap to someone who wants to buy it. Regardless of how low the operating ratio goes by slashing operating expenses, the stockholders will ultimately lose out when customers go elsewhere to buy their transportation services.
This is a classic example of monkey-see-monkey-do. NS brass tried to emulate EHH at CSX. What everyone forgets to remember is that CN and CP are railroads with different route make-ups. CN and CP have very long runs with few intermediate way points. Railroads in the mid-West and on the East Coast are very condensed with hundreds of intermediate way points and routing pairs.
To go from Toronto to New Orleans on CN, you have one route; CN across Ontario, then across the old GTW to Chicago and then down the old IC to New Orleans. You can easily schedule those endpoints and intermediate points. To go from Toronto to New Orleans on NS or CSX the routings are endless.
A one-size-fits-all paradigm for a scheduled railroad does not work.
Lets all remember now that according to Hunter, 52 hrs was acceptable, provided you only go through the sole remaining hump on the system and not three humps of old trying to get from here to there.
Imagine how bad things would be if EHH had taken possession of NS…
31 hours in a yard is considered acceptable?! Wow. More and more the velocity of trains is going down. It’s starting to resemble to darkest days of the 1970’s.
Hope it will help the Crescent’s timekeeping. It sits for hours waiting for track openings to go from one town to another!!!
I wonder if they will reopen the hump at Chattanooga? Also, I seem to remember they lowered speed limits on the Sheffield-Birmingham line to 25 mph to save money. These things always backfire, seems like.