[redshirtrob]

I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago.

There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:

- Wheel Impact Detectors

- Hotbox detectors

- Acoustic bearing detectors

- Truck performance detectors

To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:

- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)

- Top of rail friction management

- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)

I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).

I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).

I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.

As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.

[brnaftr361]

They have and it is slowing them down, but they're using different metrics to define and track productivity. If you're interested in hearing about it this guy has a pretty good perspective on the overall issues:

https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300

[Sniffnoy]

Can you perhaps summarize?

[tdeck]

I gave it a shot (watched the testimony at the linked timestamp, which was just a few minutes). Here's what I got from it, but I didn't fully understand everything:

This guy is a "yard master" - the air traffic controller of the rail industry.

1. Railroads are focused on "units per train" - increasing the length of the trains.

- They're running long trains that are 10k+ feet long, but we have many old RR yards from WWII era that only fit 3k ft long trains. Takes 3 hours to put these trains together exiting the yard and no other trains can use the yard during that time.

- Something I didn't understand that causes train cars to derail on bridges

- Some trains are longer than the range of the 2 way radios that conductors typically use. There's a procedure that involves a conductor inspecting the train as it goes by, and apparently they can't always contact the train.

2. Consolidation of terminals.

- Some regional stations for inspecting coal trains closed down. I didn't understand this explanation either.

- Moving yard masters to a central location and having them run the yard with cameras. Has resulted in peoples' deaths

3. Workload on people. Yard masters work 16h/day 365 days/year.

4. Management metrics reducing headcount + extra engines / equipment leads to lack of redundancy

Two things he'd ask for:

- Max 8k ft length of a train

- Disincentivize any reason to store a locomotive

[engineeringwoke]

> I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.

That would be true in a non-monopolistic situation, but it's well known from the investor side that what the railroads are doing around rates is driven by collusion and lack of regulation.

CSX stock was at $8 in 2016 and is at ~$33.50 now. There is no amount of throughput increase that could drive those financial results. You could lever up your cap structure with tons of debt (even 6-7x) and not even get close to this kind of return on equity.

Throughput doesn't matter when you have pricing power; in fact, abrupt drops in throughput make people even more desperate so that they can raise the freight rates even more.

[richardhod]

and this is why strong and intelligent regulation of many structurally monopolistic industries is essential. (and known in Europe)

[mym1990]

That was an interesting comment in itself, thanks for the insight!

[truffdog]

> railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput.

Throughput optimization destroying latency- sounds like bufferbloat!