Freight Yard and Train Make Up

I have some question about train makeup.

1. Who makes the trains up?

2. How does the yard crew know what cars are to be in a particular train?

3. Who decides where the cars go in a train?

4. How does the yard crew know where individual car are located in the yard?

BoilerBob wrote:I have some question about train makeup.

1. Who makes the trains up?

2. How does the yard crew know what cars are to be in a particular train?

3. Who decides where the cars go in a train?

4. How does the yard crew know where individual car are located in the yard?

Hey dude, heres how it works.
#1 switch crews make up the train, yardmaster supervises, or in the case of a local that builds a run threw, they get the train together, air test it and what not.

#2 and 3 The yard crew gets switch list from the yardmaster, he decides the make up of the train. All this info on the UP is stored in computers. He can look at a summary of the yard inventory and see how many cars are scheduled to be on that train for that day. He then generates "dope" and gives it to the switch crews. As far as who decides where the cars go in the train, unless they see a blocking error, hazmat rules and what not come into play here as does load empty rules and a few others, what ever way is easiest (fastest) for the switch crew to get the cars into the track.

#4 The "dope" has car numbers, sequence of the cars in that track, contents, car type, and lastly what tracks these cars are suppost to be placed, "kicked". The yardmaster can look at a summary on the computer and see the destination of the cars in tracks and see what rails need switched to get all the cars on the train being built.

Its really not as complicated as it might seem there Bob. When cars are released by the customer they tell the railroad were the cars final destination is, they enter this into the computer, scheduled it to the right train. It pretty much works just the same as UPS does, tracking your package and putting it on the right trucks until it reaches your house.

It seems time consuming for the switch crew. Making up a train before computers must have been a headache!

I have a manufacturing company in Delaware and I want a car load of my product to get to California.

Who decides how long it will take? Me or the RR company?

What about interchanging? One railroad company cannot be responsible for another.

Where do I get a railroad car for my product?

It aint that bad Bob, heres run down on how things work. The yardmasters here have to show up about an hour before "there" (the crew thats gonna switch his dope) switch crew does. He gets the "upload" from the yardmaster he relieved on "whats going on" today, what the switch crews have done so far and what not. His job then is to look at the yard summary, see what tracks need switched to build his trains on that shift. Theres a yardmaster program they use that decides for him what cars in what rails, go where. Sometimes theres more cars then can fit into the assigned out bound track for that train, he eather picks another track, lets it hang out one end of the yard, or makes two trains out of the cars. Then he decides the order in which the crews are gonna pull rails, im guessing thats where he trys to see how the cars are gonna be when the trains done, looking for hazmats, load empty ratio, tons, and any other possible placement errors. All that takes a bit of skill. When hes happy he sends the switch lists to the crew room on the printer.

The switch crew cuts up the lists, and heads out. Switching cars is the easy part, the better yardmaster you have the easier the work is. Its like sorting out dirty laundry, or putting groceries away. As with most jobs, things change during the shift. A yardmaster and i use to work together so good that he would know where i was gonna be at on my dope within a couple minutes. Thats something!!!

Cars on trains get grouped together with other cars headed in the same general direction. At the last yard where the train gets broken down it gets kicked into the track with the rest of the cars headed to that customer, in which that local will set out at.

At an interchange the receiving railroad knows where your car is headed, they too get paid to handle your freight. So they treat it just the same as if it never left there system.

How do get a car? I dont know how much they do with computers now a days, im guessing they have a account with the servicing railroad, which they make a request for soo many empties to be set out on there track. Alot, im guessing still happens on the phone.

How long buddy? The bigger the customer, the better service you get. Dont put all your eggs in one basket? lol Same thing goes for a box car. It could get B/O'd at anytime, switch crews could destroy it, they could put your car on a "big dog". Usually they try to take the quickest route with freight. But alot could happen.

Where i work we service large customers soda ash, and a coal mine. And in a nearby town we service many small customers with a switch engine job. There is no yardmaster there, the forman is the footboard yardmaster. He looks at the yard, receives phone calls from customers and handles there needs. We do drilling pipe, sand, pick up gons full of scrap metal, set out B/O's to a repair shop, build a local, pull coke hoppers, deliver tank cars. Its a traveling switch engine job or something like a shortline RR would do.

--It seems time consuming for the switch crew. Making up a train before computers must have been a headache!--

It's only as time-consuming as the guys in the tower make it for you. Despite the conflicts you occasionally have with them, those guys have a LOT on their plate. Not only do they cut lists for the crews (sometimes half a dozen or more working both ends of the yard and in between, you have to orchestrate movements so guys aren't running into each other), they deal with getting trains in and out of the yard, recrewing dead trains within the hub, dealing with industries needing pickups and setouts, handling power issues in conjunction with the roundhouse, calling train crews in conjunction with CMS, and on and on...it takes a special kind of monkey to be up in that tower and like anything, there are some guys who are better at it than others. Most of the switch guys realize this and will try not to sandbag the tower, but there are a few who have personal beefs and/or bad attitudes in general and will "hose" their least-favorite YM every chance they get.

BoilerBob wrote:Making up a train before computers must have been a headache!

Well, yeah, but they didn't know any different, right? They had systems that relied heavily upon paper/pencil records that were continually updated manually. Lots of clerks! Lots of little boxes for waybills, like sorting letters in the post office -- a very similar process, by the way. Where have all the clerks gone? They've turned into computer systems!

Pre-electronic data systems, switch crews and yard clerks had their own system of marking the sides of cars with chalk to keep the various "classifications" (car destinations) clear for them as they sorted and made up trains. Just as with today, it was vital to have an inventory of "classified" cars on each track in the yard. Each track of such equipment made up all or a portion of an outgoing "block" of cars that would advance to the next classification yard for further sorting and delivery to destination. It's still the same now, but a lot more efficient and accurate with modern systems.

Railroads were among the earliest industries to take advantage of data processing technology. When I started railroading in the late 1960s they used IBM punchcards to keep track of all of the records involved in moving cars across the system. The hump where I worked actually had an analog computer system that controlled the switching process, automatically routing each car to the track set up for the destination of the car.

They also had a system of teletype machines that transmitted the train information around from location to location. Long before a train would arrive at our terminal, there would be an "advance" list of what supposedly was in that train, with each car designated by the system for a different connecting train out of the terminal.

Even with all of that, the human element would often cause the advance list to be wrong, requiring that the train be visually checked, car by car, by a clerk to verify the list. At the hump yard where I started, they had a system of remote TV cameras so the clerk could just sit in a nice warm room and watch the train go by, writing the initials and numbers of every car. As you brought your train in, the YM would say, "Slow by the camera for track 9," or "Slow it down, the clerks can't read the numbers that fast."

For a time they experimented with an optical scan system, with each car having a color bar code panel on its side that would represent all of the pertinent identification data for the car. This system was an abject failure, for many reasons, and they went back to the visual observation process.

Technology has advanced now to where each piece of rolling equipment has little units on each side (AEI, or Automatic Equipment Identification) that allow for automated wayside "readers" to pick up the car information in an instant as the train passes at normal speed. These readers are strategically located around the railroad so that the computer system can have a true picture of where every car is on every train almost continuously. Most customers can go online now and find out the last point and time where their cars had passed a reader, much like tracking a FedEx package online.

Here's a story about AEI development: Here

These days, at interchange points, railroads have their computers set up to talk to each other (EDI or Electronic Data Interchange) so that they know in advance all of the info for every car that comes along. Shippers also have EDI connections so they can notify the carrier when cars are ready to be pulled from their industrial spurs, or when they are ready to accept inbound cars. It's all very sophisticated today, with information flowing continuously between shippers, consignees, and interchanging railroads.

Several years ago, when Wisconsin Central Ltd was spun off by Soo Line, someone in the company who was obviously opposed to the new non-union operation, scrambled all of the car data in the system so that they had no clue about where each car was, where it came from, or most importantly, where it was to go. They were months recovering from this, as you might imagine. What a mess!

I was working as a trainmaster for Conrail in Enola for a while. We had one train that we received from the Eastern Shore (DelMarVa) that brought cars up from Virginia, interchanged from NS. We also had one train that went back there every day. I received a call one evening from an irate NS traffic manager who told me there were several loaded auto racks with new Ford vehicles on them that had been moving back and forth between Enola and the interchange point over several weeks. A mismark in the shipping instructions kept telling our system the cars were empty, and to return them to the origin for loading. Just imagine what that fiasco cost! Fortunately, someone finally noticed!

Railroads today could not operate for a day without their extensive data processing systems.

LCJ has it right! "Back then" the clerk would go out and walk the yard two, three or more times per trick. The yardmaster would provide you with a list showing what tracks the crew SHOULD have switched the cars onto, but it was common to find a "fluke", a car lined up in the wrong track. Of course this usually was a hot car, and the track was due to leave soon, so the crew would have to dig it out. With today's emphasis on safety it's hard to imagine walking down a 3-foot wide space between tracks writing numbers in your book, while crews kicked cars into the tracks from both ends. There would be a deafening "BOOM" and the track on your right would jump 10 feet west, and about the same time the track on your left would slam toward the east. By the way, that might be in pouring rain, or with 2 feet of snow on the ground.

Taking numbers on inbounds was fun, too. Our tower was on the west end of the yard, so eastbounds went right by our second-floor window before they dropped. It was a temptation to take the numbers from the office, but about that time the yard engine would pull up the switcing lead with a cut of cars, blocking your view. Now you either sent the list upstairs and hoped the advance was accurate, or went for a walk and checked the drop once it was in the yard.

And those IBM cards - you had to have them in order with the proper "header" cards to transmit the proper reports. Sometimes they would jam in the 026 machine, the paper version of a main line derailment, and the clerk would spend the next 15 minutes prying scraps of paper out from the intimate parts of the machine. (This usually happened about 2:45AM when you were ALMOST ready for a nap).

Some conductors would bring you a neat, accurate list of what they delivered to the yard. Others, especially on industrial jobs, might bring in 38 cars, a list of 21 numbers, (3 of which were not in the train after all) and some vague scribblings which included a babe's phone number, the lunch order, and some math calculating his pay for the week. You had to figure out which cars were loads and empties, where they came from, and what to do with them.

The computerization of the industry has been a mixed blessing. It obviously has streamlined the process, generating far fewer lost and unknown cars. It's easier to find out what a "mystery car" actually is, and the carriers have eliminated a lot of clerical jobs with quite a savings. But it also has created a generation of employees who only know what the screen says - most of them don't understand the logic of where things go, why a given car might be where it is, or anything else - just what the computer says.

To close, I once had an argument with a woman at Conrail regarding a certain ATSF boxcar. She INSISTED the car was in Buffalo, about 100 miles away from our short line, because the computer SHOWED that's where it was. It made no difference to her when I explained I was looking out my window at the car, 30 feet away. The computer said it was in BUFFALO, and that was that!

BR&P wrote:The computer said it was in BUFFALO, and that was that!

Oh yes. The displayed info is only as good as the input source. If it's a manual input, it's much more likely to be faulty at times.

The situation reminds me of present day cashiers who couldn't -- if their lives depended on it -- figure out the change due without the computer telling them how much to give you back. It really throws them off when you give them the odd change with a larger bill. You can see a cloud come over their face when they desperately try to figure out what to do next.

I guess that's progress!

--For a time they experimented with an optical scan system, with each car having a color bar code panel on its side that would represent all of the pertinent identification data for the car. This system was an abject failure, for many reasons, and they went back to the visual observation process.--

I remember as a kid reading, and seeing, these color bar codes on the sides of cars. Fast forward to now, I still see the old cars with remnants of them and think "How could they have possibly believed that these would work?"

So is train space booked in advance ? i.e can a customer be told , your frieght is booked into the yard on xxx date , it will leave on xxx train on xx date , and be at its destination on xxx date . ?

David Benton wrote:So is train space booked in advance ? i.e can a customer be told , your frieght is booked into the yard on * date , it will leave on * train on xx date , and be at its destination on * date . ?

The carriers do make an attempt at operating in this fashion. On the originating end, variables come into play with the pick up of freight cars from customer sidings, getting the cars back to the serving yards, and getting them into trains for advancement to destination. After departing the original terminal, intermediate switching terminals and interchange between carriers are also factors in how accurate delivery projections turn out to be. At the destination serving yard, the variables include getting the cars swicthed out of the arriving train, and getting them on a local switcher for delivery to the customer siding. It's all supposed to happen like clockwork, but quite often does not.

A best estimate for delivery is given, much like sending packages by FedEx. If you want to pay a premium price, you can get more of a guarantee. If not, the "window" may be several days in length depending on distance and the number of interchanges and switching terminals the cars will go through on the duration of their trip.

In reality, most freight shipments are part of an ongoing process in which regular shippers have cars moving in a "pipeline" from origin to destination.

One of the biggest drawbacks to car-load rail shipments is the lack of consistent arrival times - or too much variability in transit times for individual shipments. Shippers/customers have to decide how much variability they can stand in their business operation. Customers who have no choice of transport mode are stuck with what they get.

The Yard Master sounds like he is a walking computer. He has to mulit-task.

I assume that if I ship my product by rail, I need to insure it for damages. Correct?

BoilerBob wrote:The Yard Master sounds like he is a walking computer. He has to multi-task.

A good YM is good at juggling several "trains" (sorry) of thought at once, for sure -- in addition to being skilled at using the various electronic tools at his/her disposal. The degree to which multi-tasking is required is determined by the size of the yard and the number of crews that are working under the YM.

BoilerBob wrote:I assume that if I ship my product by rail, I need to insure it for damages. Correct?

This is not my area of expertise, but in my experience railroads are liable for damages caused by mishandling of freight. I did some work with my railroad's damage prevention group. I tagged along with inspectors as they went out to examine claims of damage to determine the extent of culpability by the carrier.

As you'll find with carriers like UPS (who almost always waive inspection of damage), for several years our company had a policy of just paying claims as stated and waiving inspection. They figured it was a wash financially.

Unfortunately, some unscrupulous customers took advantage of this and started making frequent claims of damage, figuring no one would bother to challenge them. We then instituted a more rigorous inspection policy.

One of our most troublesome customers in regard to damage claims was a certain Philadelphia newspaper that shall remain unspecified here. Statistically, their damages were often an extreme outlier on the control charts. Practically every load of newsprint that came in had damaged rolls. Our damage prevention group spent an inordinate amount of time trying to solve this problem. Inspectors would often have to be on the scene to see the cars opened and unloaded, just to be sure the damage didn't happen as the rolls were taken out.

I've been away from it for several years now, but it wouldn't surprise me if the issue were to be still alive today there.

Here's BNSF's approach to the issue: BNSF Customer Tools