by guilfordrailfan
F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:F-line, you hit the proverbial "Guilford / Pan Am" nail on the head!MEC407 wrote:Agreed. That said, upgrading from 25 to 40 makes a huge difference, cutting travel time almost in half — assuming, of course, that it's maintained and doesn't drop back to 25 within a year or two of being rehabbed.Taming the slop-ops is almost a bigger challenge for this outfit than whacking the speedos. It's been described here by multiple ex-employees how they could be making tolerably functional time getting across the MEC or B&M within a crew shift even at timetable 10 MPH if they would only get out of the damn yard on-time and not end up in a staring contest between crew and dispatch on who's waiting for whom to forget what. Speedos whittle the HoS margins down too small for a carrier of their size, but wretched coordination is the primary source of canning hell across the system keeping them consistently afoul of HoS crew limits. With equipment maint standards also playing a significant role. Both the speedos and the slop-ops used to be better, and unfortunately closing the gap on slop-ops and canning hell hasn't seen as many recent strides made as the raw radar readings so the essential problem facing PAR has not changed much. Timetable 25 on the Back Road is still going to be hard to meet consistently enough to run high-volume IM service if Billerica's attitude towards making schedule is still: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Hasn't it been said that the biggest immediate improvement to PAS in an NS-takes-over scenario is not the armada of track gangs being dispatched from out-of-region to tie-replace the whole corridor up to TT 40...but rather the pinkslips that'll be handed out across D3 to wholesale-replace everyone who's been part of the problem with imports (and re-hires) who'll conform to NS-quality ops standards? And isn't this what value any new buyers would be seeing in the system when they size up D2: how much more valuable and high-leverage are a POSE/SEPO, its post-partition NS equivalents, and deeper Class I relationship considerations therein if Worcester-Portland (and beyond to Waterville) were simply run like on-time was a core company value? I don't know if or how Billerica has it in them to reform these deep-seeded attitudes so thoroughly as needed here, because so much of what we analyze on this forum seems to point to an inevitable conclusion that it can't/won't be Billerica doing the 180 on ops reform...it will/has to be somebody else because these attitudes are far too ingrained in the way Mellon conducts business for himself.