Norfolk Southern moving to a Centralized Train Dispatching Center

[NW Mailing List]

Bruce,

Having a daughter and a son-in-law who are both MBA's, and are very smart,
and who make more money than I ever did, I have to respond.

You are absolutely right, and the kids will agree with me.  A manager who
is brought in from outside, however smart, well educated and well
intentioned, who starts making changes without learning the job
fundamentals, is courting disaster.  And it's not just in railroading, but
men and women I've talked to in other fields (and even in my own field, the
Federal Government, believe it or not)have had problems with managers who
are experts in "managing" but don't understand that the "book" doesn't
cover all the little idiosyncrasies encountered on a railroad, a GM
assembly line, a steel mill, or a bureaucracy.  Get a bright manager who
learns the job before "fixing" things, and you've got a find.

The other thing that outsiders brought in tend to do is make change for the
sake of change, and they don't learn the history.  Therefore you get what
we call "reinventing the wheel": e.g. Centralizing dispatching, a few years
later decentralizing dispatching, a few years later centralizing
dispatching.

Let's see what discussion we're having in 3-5 years on this subject.  Here
endeth the pontification.

Frank Bongiovanni

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 9:12 AM, NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 7:20 PM, Larry wrote:
>
> It’s kind of like carrying all your eggs in one basket . Drop the basket
>> and break all your eggs at the same time. For the security of this nation
>> seems like a bone head move.
>>
>
> ​CSX got taken over the coals when its Jacksonville dispatch center shut
> down for a hurricane threat, which shut down ALL rail operations, including
> commuter service in Washington, D.C. Even though the area wasn't anywhere
> close to the potential hurricane, many people were impacted when they
> couldn't get home in their usual manner. I believe it still took a while
> for CSX to figure out there were more advantages to having dispatchers in
> or close to their territory.
>
> On one hand, given the computerization of dispatching, a division could
> probably be run from just about anywhere. This may be the thinking of some
> MBA who works for NS but doesn't really know railroading. He (or she)
> probably looked at the seniority list and salaries of dispatchers, decided
> that anyone who could use a computer could do the job, and determined that
> many of the current dispatchers won't be interested in pulling up roots and
> moving to Atlanta. With all the open spots, lower-wage entry-level people
> could be hired locally (avoiding moving costs) and money would be saved.
> Chaos may ensue because the new people don't know the nuances of various
> local conditions (try not to stop trains at location X because it is tough
> to start again, watch out for this curve in bad weather, never block this
> grade crossing unless it is a true emergency, etc.), but those costs will
> fall to another part of the budget while the MBA gets an award for reducing
> the cost of dispatching.
>
> Given the security issues of today, "drop in" visits to a dispatcher are
> probably impossible. I do remember visiting the Radford Division dispatch
> office when it was still in the GOB (wish I had taken more pictures), the
> new dispatch office after it had been moved to Kimball Ave., the new
> Pocahontas office not long after it went to computers (but still had the
> large display wall), and the P&LE dispatch office in a corner of Station
> Square in the old passenger station (I do have a set of slides of that
> operation). Sad that an old connection between the railroad and the local
> community is less and less accessible.
>
> Bruce in Blacksburg
>   ​
>
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