"Railroading is rocket science"

Railway Age, May, 2003 by Frank N. Wilner

Thirty-nine years in the railroad business have tethered Chuck Dettmann--who retires this month as the Association of American Railroads executive vice president for safety and operations--determinedly to the reality that productive, palpable, and persistent change comes slowly to this industry.

An ever-present unlighted cigar clenched firmly in Chuck Dettmann's jaw dissipates a frustration-a frustration that despite a career of teaching, preaching, and beseeching that customers matter most, the industry's collective energy still focuses too much on train efficiency and too little on where the freight ought to be.

"You have to spend money to make money," says Dettmann, who frets that too many peers worship at the deceptive altar of perpetual cost cutting. Don't misinterpret Dettmann's constructive criticism. "There are a whole lot of folks in the trenches making things happen who have been doing a lot of work to get this industry where it is today," he says. But it's not good enough. Railroads, says Dettmann, must spend more on people and tools to prove to "wary customers" that railroads can and will deliver freight "predictably and reliably."

"Railroading is rocket science," Dettmann says. "It is an unbelievably complex set of permutations and combinations as freight cars move through the system. We are very good at unit trains of coal and grain," he says, as the jaw compresses that cigar. But when it comes to meeting shipper expectations for individual railcars, railroads too often can't get the rocket off the launching pad.

"In the customer's eyes, railroads succeed or fail in terminals--not in over-the-road service," Dettmann says, explaining in his mild southern drawl his resolute advocacy of car scheduling. "Car scheduling tells us what ought to be done and what you can do to change it." Alas, if there is sadness to Dettmann's career, it is that he will retire short of seeing his car-scheduling goal fully implemented--a result, he says, with the potential to boost substantially both traffic and profits.

Schooled as an industrial engineer at Georgia Tech, Dettmann, a Lakeland, Fla., native, constructed the calculus of car scheduling in 1974 as the Missouri Pacific's assistant general manager for transportation in St. Louis. "Hotshot trains rolled with half the loaded cars left behind in order to get trains out on time," Dettmann says. "Freight cars had no visibility. They laid around. Car scheduling showed us how to manage 36 hours ahead. Yet there are still people saying it won't work." He says this painfully, his jaw now having turned much of that cigar into something not fit for description.

"If you can't measure, you can't manage," Dettmann says. The rocket science is using measurement tools "to get the right car on the right train" and then "to where the car is wanted and when it is wanted--and the freight in the condition it is wanted--by the customer."

From his first day on the MoPac, where his assignment to investigate automation came directly from legendary Chairman Downing Jenks, Dettmann went where the operating challenges beckoned--ten moves during his first 17 years.

As the MoPac-Union Pacific merger gelled in 1981, Dettmann was named vice president-staff and was later promoted to vice president-transportation for the merged railroads. When operating functions of the MoPac and UP were combined in Omaha, Dettmann became AVP-service design, allowing him to redirect energy to the oft-ignored car scheduling conundrum--a challenge he carried with him to the AAR in 1993.

Dettmann bequeaths two legacies beyond car scheduling. One is his design of the industry's hazmat emergency response system, providing immediate information on the location and specific dangers of hazardous freight. The other is his superintending of the industry's post-9/11 security plan, coordinated with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, law enforcement, and hazmat shippers. "It's an extremely definitive plan that ratchets up according to intelligence on the level of threats," he says.

Retirement may well mean consulting on car scheduling and security--but certainly more time with his beloved wife of 34 years, Donna Lou Needham, not surprisingly the daughter of a MoPac trainmaster. Who else would have understood for so long the life of a railroader?

Frank N. Wilner, a former Railway Age Contributing Editor, is the author of Railroad Mergers: History, Analysis, Insight, published by Simmons-Boardman Books.