Trains sitting for days at Portland

I have been seeing strings of cars (possibly entire trains) sitting on the tracks between the Fore River and Rigby a lot lately. Last week, one sat all day. This afternoon marked over 30 hours another train just sat there. If I was a shipper and saw this, I'd be livid my goods were sitting idle for so long. I don't know what's going on with Pan Am, but I don't think CSX could do worse.

These issues were discussed in the hearing. Billerica has insufficient staff to get the job done and has been ghr status quo for sometime unfortunately. These issues will disappear when the PAR does.
On a side note, these cars could be SIT cars as well.

The sale has only made the current man power shortage worse. I can think of 3 engineers who have retired or just left the company in the last 3 months, because they want to have no part of what is to come. I have a feeling that many crews wont be so keen to how much they are monitored, between inward facing cameras, tracking systems, etc...
I think that its the general consensus that there has been a lack of supervision when it comes to crews, which has resulted in some well known time wasters on the east end. That will definitely change under CSX, but I have a hard time believing that they will be able to retain large portions of the current work force due to the nature of the changes.
Its not just an issue with Pan Am, CP has had a hard time keeping positions filled after the CMQ takeover, and thats with higher pay than CSX as well as sign on bonuses. Prior to the takeover CMQ had to cut Job 1/2 back to 3 days a week because crews on the Quebec side were jumping ship prior to the sale. Since then, there has been a revolving door of crews. CP lost several guys to Irving, as well as several who had enough years in to retire. Last year they had quite the crew shortage and were bringing in "new" CP crews from the mid-west. Quite a few of those guys got done after a few months and moved back west.
CSX will be hard pressed to find existing crews that will be willing to adjust to the level of Class 1 micromanagement. The current labor market has been discussed several times in other topics. Its hard to find someone who wants to work unpredictable hours until they get enough seniority, work 12 hours a day as well as staying away from home, when half a dozen companies in the same area are offering the same if not better pay with regular hours.

That is correct. There is near zero oversight once a crew gets on the road outside of passenger territory on Pan Am. There is a reason they drag their balls so much, there is no incentive to go faster when you're only paid by the hour and not mile. It makes no difference if they get to their destination on steel wheels or rubber tires. When I worked there it was not uncommon to stop for 45 minutes inside large blocks for lunch and just say the train is pulling hard. Crews go 7mph in 10s, 18mph in 25s and 25mph in 40s all over the place and get away with it daily. They take twice as long to get out of the yards as it has to take and twice as long to switch consignees.

In the end yes, they will lose employees that do not want more oversight but if they did their jobs as the general instructions and handbook stipulates it's less of a problem. The customers will be better off once their carload doesn't take 3 days to traverse Maine and that's the point of running a railroad.

Newpy ☝

I loved the PH-1 / Do-1 crew of the early 2000s who would roll into Rockingham Jct. Get off the train and walk quarter mile down the road to Shell for fried chicken, taking 45mns or so then calling D2 informing them they " Just arrived at Rockingham".
Another practice I can think of is to call D2 on a road job, lie about equipment issues, be thrown into the siding only to have a pizza delivery car roll up to the crossing where they sat or disembark the train completely. After they ate the radio would crackle alive with a message to Billerica saying to cancel the car knocker/engine maintainer everything's all set.

I owned a local for about 6 months and we would have to sort out the loads going to the NS and set them up to the fouling point on the branchline so a westbound road job could pick them up from the main. When we did this, it would box us in because it's a single track branch and we needed to shove them up. Day after day I would hear the back and forth from the road job to the dispatcher that "they switch wouldn't throw", or "the head car is a cripple", etc and so on. Never did a Road Foreman or Trainmaster intervene to have these supposed "hot" loads get picked up. The whole time we had to handle these cars to get them out of the way to make moves because they weren't being picked up.

This is one of many similar examples. The terms "throwing out the anchor" or "fiddle f*cking around" were as common as using vowels on that railroad. It is amazing anything moves.

Or a local that frequently would take 2hrs to cab up, move about 5 miles and then can. A vacation covering crew tipped the hat recently when NA1 was able to make it from Nashua to Concord, and then start back, canning at River St. in one shift....with work in between.

Damn eager-beaver newbies ruining things for everybody....

Not long after I moved into my current house near the FML, a MEC retiree who lives in the neighborhood observed a train rolling along and observed, "yeah, he's in no hurry...." They still are regularly canning trains on the second track between CPF192 and 194; I had wondered if it was partly because Rigby was overloaded with snow because it happens more regularly in the winter.

While there certainly is traffic (LPG, food, ect) that is time sensitive and can at times moving quite well on Pan Am.... most folks who ship rail understand cycle times, inventory management, production lead times, ect..... a matter of hours really doesn't make difference, we always schedule rail transit in days. Faster isn't always better in the manifest rail department, sometimes you ship railcars to move inventory off your floor that isn't needed by a customer for a few weeks or months. Can't jeopardize your machine productivity, especially if you settle into a nice production run you might pull forward some orders that are 2 or 3 months out and then throw them in a rail car to your next RDC.