
A Revolution Sweeping Railroads Upends How America Moves Its Stuff - ycombonator
https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/TDJNDN_201904035791/a-revolution-sweeping-railroads-upends-how-america-moves-its-stuff.html
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steve_gh
I do a lot of work with the rail industry in the UK (both heavy and light
rail) - but the UK is much more passenger focussed.

Reducing cost can take a lot of tweaking to get right, and is likely to take
more than one cycle to do. But new schedules do take some bedding in until
they are running smoothly. Once that happens, you can then look for the next
round of optimisations - tweaks to the way the trains are assembled in the
yards which then start building the incremental gains.

If you have a better scheduling system, you build resilience into the
schedule. You open up more time for maintenance, you keep your assets in
better condition, so you have fewer breakdowns. One thing to remember is that
(in general) there is a Pareto on train breakdowns - 20% of the locomotives
cause 80% of the problems. It will be the worst locomotives that are taken out
of service, so the reduction in service affecting failures should be quite
significant.

You make some money on the OPEX side by doing more scheduled maintenance, and
less emergency maintenance (overtime is really expensive!). You also make
savings on the CAPEX side, because your assets last longer.

[edit]. Changed para order

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yazr
Can you please explain why "new schedules do take some bedding" ?

Cant u sort of simulate the expected scenarios and get sort-of expected
performance?

I realize there is unexpected events, but these will occur anyway in old and
new schedules

Also - does real train software has nice graphics or do u get a boring excel ?
;(

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liotier
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice...

As for software, the optimization of rail slot allocation is far beyond
spreadhseets - for the whole French network it is a math-heavy process for
which a whole team harnesses a bunch of specialist software. More about the
process (in French): [https://tel.archives-
ouvertes.fr/tel-01423840/document](https://tel.archives-
ouvertes.fr/tel-01423840/document)

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k3liutZu
> In theory there is no difference between theory and practice...

This is really good.

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Animats
The customer perspective:[1] The metrics grain shippers use all got worse.

[1] [http://www.grainnet.com/article/160328/precision-
scheduled-r...](http://www.grainnet.com/article/160328/precision-scheduled-
railroading-operating-ratios-and-grain-service-metrics)

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sathomasga
> CSX spokesman Bryan Tucker said the company could have done better
> communicating the changes to customers, but he defended the actions by
> pointing to its financial results.

I think the most telling part of the article

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bluGill
I don't understand: how/why is service worse? The article makes it clear that
service is worse, but the details on why are important.

I can come up with a number of different scenarios, with different faults and
restrictions. Without knowing deeper reasons I don't know if this is a bad
idea (as BNSF claims) that needs to be scrapped or a great idea that just
needs to get over growing pains.

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OldManAndTheCpp
This seems to be an argument that one scheduling system is worse than the
previous. However, one of the major objectives of a scheduling system is to
reduce cost, which this seems to have done. What is the downside?

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ropeladder
You are missing the key pay of the question: reduce costs _for whom_? Since
railroads are effectively a (regulated) monopoly reducing costs for Norfolk
Southern or CSX can mean Wall Street profits combined with worse service for
customers at the same price.

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Nasrudith
Wouldn't that be a question for regulators then in terms of how much profit
can be extracted without lowering costs or using the savings on other
investments?

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supernova87a
I'm not sure I get the problem. Doesn't this just call for modeling a network
of branches, nodes, with set of realistic max/min/stddev timings to traverse
each, and an inventory + desired times of trains to be released into the
system?

Is it that railroads don't have the expertise to do this? Hard to imagine.

Why are railroad execs huddled around a physical table + map trying to propose
timings for trains to run through? Maybe the article is simplifying things
that makes it sound really inefficient.

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SideburnsOfDoom
Is precise scheduling of trains really a revolution?

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exabrial
For cargo yes. Trucks arrival times are predictable within a few hours, trains
are within days.

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SideburnsOfDoom
If trains are already running precise schedules on those tracks, then it's not
that revolutionary really?

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SilasX
So, basically a routing/allocation problem? You could throw SAT solvers at it,
right?

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adamc
The layoffs are going to hurt. Fewer good jobs for people with those skills.

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EmilStenstrom
Behind paywall unfortunately.

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Luc
Try ‘web’ link.

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gpvos
Has that ever worked for you with the WSJ paywall? Not for me.

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masonic
One just worked for me for this specific article.

