Crew shortage

From today

This is really quite bad given that they're not even running a full schedule during the week.

We know that they're perennially short engineers, and there is a long lead time to fix that even if they hired a bunch tomorrow. Any idea why today was such a problem? People out of hours? Sick out? Beautiful and no one wanted OT? It's not as though the Sunday schedule should be a challenge to crew.

Could be due to HOS rules,even with the "modified" schedules,crews are burning thru their active duty hours,
you don't fight the federal rules,you work the best you can till you use all your avaible duty hours .

This is old news. Weekend train annulments due to crew shortages have been the norm all year long.

SEPTA has been short engineers for decades. Let's say they are budgeted for 200 engineers....well, if you can make the system work with 175 engineers, you (the manager) get a gold star for saving the company money in operating expenses.

In the last year or two, most of the SEPTA train crews hired after the Conrail crew exodus in 1983 began hitting retirement age and nobody in the ivory tower saw it coming, or cared enough to take proactive measures to alleviate the manpower shortage.

Now the crews are working 6 days per week to keep the system running. Working 6 days per week (involuntarily) for months and months gets old. It's hard enough to get Millenials to show up 5 days per week.

My guess.....the weather was ABSOLUTELY perfect today and the Eagles were playing. Sounds like a great recipe to call out sick, meet some buddies at a sports bar and have some hot wings and ice cold pitchers.

Regardless of the weather or what sport team is playing, SEPTA has admitted being short 21 engineers in a few articles. If your try to run your business with 21 less people, I think you would have some operational issues also.

FOX 29 article...

http://www.fox29.com/news/local-news/208132108-story" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Edit:

Letter to the editor on philly.com ...

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20 ... _buzz.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

While I'm glad this is getting press and a SEPTA spokesperson is claiming they're training more, assuming that is nothing other than a Band Aid approach, it'll probably take pressure from state elected reps to see any longer term fixes as the understaffing has existed for a long time. I've contacted mine; you all should too.

You have a politically appointed board of directors calling the shots at a pool of "insider" managers. Don't expect a call to action by your elected representatives to go after SEPTA for waste, fraud, or mis-management. Just look at the Port Authority, Philadelphia Airport, Public Utilities Comission, Penn DOT etc.

I'm not saying all managers at SEPTA are incompetent or uneducated, but 90% of the managers running the place were former union workers that drove busses, trains, subways, or came from a trade union. You won't get real change until you restructure the board of directors, how they are ELECTED, and start hiring senior and middle managers from the outside to get fresh ideas and solutions to our region's transportation problems and inefficiencies.

The emergency schedule has been a disaster for employee morale... as it places a vastly disproportionate workload on certain crews, basically the bottom-half of the roster. Burnout is becoming a real issue. What the spokeswoman failed to mention, or more likely doesn't even know, is that a sizable number of those trains that did run were crewed by members of management, at fantastic expense.

Middle management was telling upper management for about the past 20 years that the engineers had to be involved in the OJT training. OJT training was where the engineer training came to a standstill. SEPTA upper management refused to acknowledge the issue. Now, with a change at the top level, they finally realized that they needed to get the engineers involved to get the roster numbers up to the proper level and have done so. Its too bad it took 20 years to do so.

Crew shortages problems took quite a turn for the worse sometime in the later evening on Saturday, Oct. 15th. With the weekend shutdown of one of the commuter tunnels that SEPTA uses west of 30th Street, the Airport and Media/Elwyn lines are running as buses and the Marcus Hook/Wilmington line is bypassing University City station altogether (passengers are boarding at 30th Street Lower Level).

Well, the last Wilmington run yesterday was cancelled (both inbound and outbound) thereby stranding a number of passengers relying on SEPTA for getting to/from Delaware. Even a Norristown in/out run wasn't spared from the ignominy. Things are appearing to be going pretty drastic these days and this is really looking bad for SEPTA's public relations image.

JeffersonLeeEng wrote:Crew shortages problems took quite a turn for the worse sometime in the later evening on Saturday, Oct. 15th. With the weekend shutdown of one of the commuter tunnels that SEPTA uses west of 30th Street, the Airport and Media/Elwyn lines are running as buses and the Marcus Hook/Wilmington line is bypassing University City station altogether (passengers are boarding at 30th Street Lower Level).

Well, the last Wilmington run yesterday was cancelled (both inbound and outbound) thereby stranding a number of passengers relying on SEPTA for getting to/from Delaware. Even a Norristown in/out run wasn't spared from the ignominy. Things are appearing to be going pretty drastic these days and this is really looking bad for SEPTA's public relations image.

I wonder if DelDOT was made aware that the last Wilmington train was cancelled on Saturday 10/15? Delaware is paying for that service to be extended to Wilmington. You would think that staffing that trip would be a priority for SEPTA.