If PSR is indeed about running "all" trains on a schedule, that might be a good thing. Thus a shipper would know when his stuff would show--it's on scheduled trains, and they keep their schedule. Hooray!
But Mr. Burkhart never even mentioned that. He mentioned a number of ways management was doing a bad job of running a railroad.
That's because PSR is not about running a railroad on a schedule. It's a marketing term. Kinda like how the
Clear Skies Initiative allowed for more pollution by removing certain pollution controls and allowed for overall more pollution. In the context of the 2-day hearing Mr. Burkhart spoke at PSR was mentioned numerous times and it was pointed out that it was neither a precise nor scheduled way of operating.
This is a good example of something dreamed up by people who have no idea what they're doing. "If I have two crews on two 7500 foot trains, why can't I have one crew on one 15000 foot train?" It's a reasonable question to ask and it would be reasonable to expect an answer why it isn't being done. Mr. Burkhart gave several reasons why it shouldn't be done, but the people who ask this question do not have anyone like Mr. Burkhart to answer them. If anyone does not agree that the emperor's new clothes are glorious and radiant he or she is no longer part of the management team. So the only people in management above trainmaster or terminal manager are those who see the invisible clothes.
This purging of anyone who dares to question leadership has gotten worse as PSR has been implemented. The COVID-19 social distancing protocols that were put in place were welcomed as a way to get management further separated from craft employees. It's much easier to imagine cuts if the cuts are dehumanized. Decisions that were once within the purview of a trainmaster or terminal manager, such as approving time off requests, were escalated to a manager off-property. The organizational structure has been changed to eliminate the ability to communicate about barriers to acheiving tasks. They don't want to know why it can't be done and they don't want to hear it. They simply want it done. A manager who wants to die on a hill will die on that hill. Dissent is not tolerated. If they have craft seniority when they are dismissed they are told to exercise it. And since HQ is just down the road my terminal is usually where they exercise it. Suffice it to say I've met some interesting people who came from that place.
Well that's the big misconception. It's not about making the railroad the best it can be, it's about keeping things the same but spending less money to do it. Invariably you cannot keep things the same by spending less. Just think about every time in history railroads have kicked the can of maintentance down the road. Penn Central? Rock Island? Examples abound of how destructive that strategy is and at its heart that's what PSR is all about.
Here's a good example: Carman positions have been eliminated at various locations on the system in an attempt to control the cost of train inspections.
Say you have a yard that outbounds 6 trains a day. You have 3 carman positions each day for 7 days each week to cover every shift. Each carman will inspect two trains each day. You already have conductors on the trains arriving and departing and yard switchmen in the yard breaking down inbound and assembling outbound trains. Like the carman craft, these people are qualified to perform the required inspection and air test needed to depart the trains. So someone adding up the costs of running the yard might think these carman positions are eating up money doing a job I'm already paying someone else to do. Not only that, they have to lock up the track under blue signal protection which takes more time than a conductor or switchman simply walking beside the train and they are more likely to find bad order cars which cause the train to depart late.* Let's get rid of them and have the conductors and switchmen do the job instead.
Well, it turns out there is a difference between the training a carman has and the training a switchman or conductor has when it comes to inspecting and air testing cars. That's why a carman is more likely to find a defect. For example a carman might spot an insecure bearing cap and leakage around the bearing seal that a conductor or switchman would not catch. The bearing might last a few trips before it gets overheated and becomes a problem on the line of road but it might not. There's another difference: a carman can make a repair to a defect up to a point while the car is in the train. Obviously they won't be swapping out a wheel or coupler in the train but replacing an air hose or securing a plug door is doable. Conductors and switchmen can replace air hoses but it's more likely than not they won't have the tools required even if a spare air hose is available.
There's a lot of "might" and "maybe" in these scenarios so they get dismissed. And the person bringing up these scenarios gets tagged as not a team player and won't be considered again when it's time to move up. So they are ignored and the carman positions are eliminated.
For awhile the system works: money is saved and the trains generally depart at the same rate. If yard crews don't have enough to do, we can make them do the air test after they build the train. Having the outbound conductor perform the inspection and air test costs time and will likely result in a second crew being required to get the train over the road. Some conductors try to prove a point by taking an extra long time with the air test, but we'll watch them like a hawk and wait for them to screw up so we can fire them.**
Eventually the number of trains getting down the road and experiencing a problem begins to increase. Knuckles break, air hoses tear or separate, loads shift, bearings overheat and so on. The cost of correcting these problems might even outweigh the cost of keeping the carmen on staff. But these costs are no longer part of just that train and just the originating yard. They are spread over all the trains on the road at the time of the delay or service interruption. That money is in a different budget.
Based on its name - Precision Scheduled Railroading - you'd think someone would take a holistic approach and consider the cost of the ounce of prevention vs. the pound of cure, but that never seems to happen. The ounce of prevention is only seen as a target to get down to a gram. PSR is about cutting costs, even when the cuts are destructive. And you can extrapolate this carman scenario to every other cut they've made on the system. It's never about improving service or honestly even keeping it the same. It's about controlling costs to take the Operating Ratio down.
I can almost forgive this approach being used at the publicly traded companies who have to answer directly to their shareholders. OR is the primary way of communicating the operating costs and change over time. I cannot forgive it being used at BNSF, which is privately owned by Berkshire Hathaway and does not need to put on the same dog and pony show to uneducated activist investors glancing at a few numbers. These people have a much greater opportunity to investigate what is going on. And right now the cost of the numerous failures is less than the cost of the cuts. They simply don't care because it still makes money.
Well, that's not how railroads have worked probably ever. The relationship between management and labor is adversarial at best and toxic at worst. It wasn't great when I started but it's downright awful now. I worked in various fields from customer service, restaurant FOH, heavy construction to land surveying and civil engineering before starting with the railroad. I've never seen such distrust of labor. And during my career with the railroad the percentage of management who had performed any of the jobs of their subordinates previously in their career has plummeted. Quite simply they don't know what we do, what it takes to get the job done and most importantly what can go wrong if the job is not done right. So every failure is a complete surprise to them and an inevitable consequence to everyone else.
I remember when the president suggested getting sunlight into the body or injecting bleach into the lungs to cleanse the body of coronavirus during a press conference. Without getting political, I was struck by how poor his understanding of biology or human disease was. At the end of the day the president doesn't need to be the expert, but the president should get the experts together and take their advice. In railroad leadership today nobody wants to listen to the experts. They don't want to listen to the people who do the job. They don't want to listen to the customers. They don't want to listen to the regulators. And so you get new plans and initiatives that to the people who have to execute them sound as insane as, "did you try injecting bleach?"
* I asked a trainmaster several times why he had us (the yard crew) perform air tests on outbound trains when there were carmen on duty whose job it was to perform that work. His response? "They take too long to lock up the track and they find bad orders. That causes the trains to be late getting out."
** Conductors who take too long to inspect and air test the train have come under fire for "malicious compliance" but I haven't seen any of those accusations stick. What does happen is those people get followed around and observed, especially in their 11th and 12th hours on duty when they are likely to make a mistake. When they eventually do there is a full throated effort to discipline the employee.
