Seamless transportation: an implausible dream?

Railway Age, Jan, 1997 by Gus Welty

Shippers are demanding it. Railroads, with high-tech help from their suppliers, are working hard to provide it. The task is daunting. In the first of a series of articles, Railway Age examines the challenge and the potential rewards..

For the railroad industry, performing a truly "seamless" service often seems like an implausible dream.

This is, after all, an industry with nine Class I railroads in the U.S. and Canada along with about 30 regional operators and perhaps 500 short line or local carriers, all linked to make up a 170,000-mile network. It's an industry that must cooperate while it competes, an industry where gold plate and rust coexist, an industry with powerful competitors that are by their very nature far more "seamless" in their ability to perform for the customer.

Railroads do a number of things extraordinarily well. Unit-train service for coal and other bulk commodities has developed into a true partnership between shipper, carrier, and receiver in which each benefits. Intermodal and automotive services get premium handling and their performance measurements are in the 90s, often the high 90s.

Railroads have invested heavily and wisely to create a fixed plant that is second to none in the world for high speed and heath, tonnage freight operations. Railway suppliers have designed and built the equipment to take advantage of this world-class infrastructure, and railroads have lined up to order the most technologically advanced motive power and freight equipment in the world.

Railroads have developed information systems that have brought precision to operations, down to the dock-to-dock scheduling of individual car movements, with specific contingency plans in case something goes wrong.

Railroads have invested in equipment identification and communications-based train control/separation technologies and in new braking technologies, all designed to make operations more efficient, to increase track capacity, and to improve safety of operations.

Railroads have more sharply focused their own research and development programs and in some cases they have entered into partnerships with suppliers to bring new technology to the market more quickly.

CUSTOMERS ARE DEMANDING MORE

But in customer survey after customer survey, railroads come in a poor second to motor carriers when it comes to reliability and dependability of service, speed of service as reflected in transit times, and the simple matter of ease of doing business with the carrier.

Why? That's not an easy question to answer. But whether the question deals with perception or performance-based fact, it requires a considered and thoughtful response.

Several years ago and with some fanfare, the industry announced that it was embarking on an industry-wide Interline Service Management program. Progress has seemed to be agonizingly slow. Building blocks designed to help with management of intra-industry affairs have been put in place, but development of a results-producing management scheme for interline service is still in test. This is an ISM trial that began with two railroads, one shipper and a single service lane; it's been expanded, with the same customer, to include all major railroads and about 30 lanes, but it remains a test project that needs more work if it's to produce the desired service excellence.

In addition, while the industry can boast of excellence in the coal and intermodal/automotive service sectors, a high percentage of traffic doesn't move in unit trains or in solid train4oad volumes. That part of the traffic mix still goes through the blocking and switching drill that has characterized railroading from the earliest days. Handling and rehandling cause delay, but even worse, they create the potential for the kind of mishandling that can make a mocker), of service reliability at the destination end.

Single-line service should always produce greater service dependability than interline service and, therefore, mergers of railways should be a powerful tool for creating faster and more reliable service. But it takes time to make a merger work, to get people and computers all working together. Too, management has to get a fast and firm grip on an operation that may have virtually doubled in size; its timeframe for doing that is limited, because if people are slow to change then service disruptions can quickly develop. The Penn Central debacle of almost 30 years ago should have taught that lesson, but did it really?

IS A MORE PERSONAL TOUCH NEEDED?

Nobody would suggest that railroads should revert to the olden days when there was an agent in every. town. But the surveys seem to be saying that the industry has lost the vital personal touch except for dealings with the biggest customers. Intermodal marketing has been turned over, in large part, to third-party companies set up to do just that, but now the largest of these firms are broadening their scope to handle their customers' total logistics needs and becoming more involved with motor carrier services. Even IBM, once the leader in customer hand-holding, had to relearn the essentials of getting back to basics: