DarkMonohue said:
I have a cuckold tubing bender.
NickD said:
There is a scary Doom monster hiding inside you RIGHT NOW
NickD said:
914Driver said:
Alternative text: "Wait, I thought you said we'd be *bong* sniffing."
I came to a fork in the road, the choice was clear but it made the decision no less difficult...
Mr_Asa said:NickD said:
It's not even just the paid time off. This goes so far beyond that, but PTO is the visible issue. Those with PTO say they aren't ever allowed to use it because they've cut crew rosters to the bone. The railroads have cut crews down from 5-man to 2-man, and are pushing for single-man crews. When CSX was getting shredded by the Surface Transportation Board this summer over poor customer service, they blamed it on lack of crews. When the STB asked how many crews they were going to hire to fix things, their response was "Well, if you would lit us run single-man crews, we could just spread them out more and not need to hire."
The Precision Scheduled Railroading operating philosophy has resulted in all sorts of boneheaded moves to appease the stockholders at the expense of operating personnel: storing as many locomotives as possible, building as long of trains as they can with as little power on the front as possible, tearing up their own excess capacity to reduce taxes, leveling state-of-the-art humpyards to go back to flat-switching, strong-arming or just outright neglecting customers.
I heard an engineer talk about how under PSR, they had him running a 250 car trains with just two locomotives. The engines could barely even start the train themselves. He just got clear of the yard, pulled apart a coupler, then had to walk a mile and a half back along the train by himself to replace the coupler. Then he didn't have enough horsepower to get the train moving again and had to call the yard and wait for the switcher crew to give him a shove to get moving again.
Hell, just yesterday Norfolk Southern had two major derailments because under PSR, they don't build the trains by car type, they build them by where they are getting dropped off. Both of them put lightweight empty center-beam flatcars in the middle of the train, which caused a "string-lining" derailment that yanked cars off the inside of a car. For decades it was known that you put heavy cars at the front, light cars at the rear, but now they threw common knowledge out the window to save time switching, and they're having a derailments left and right and still keep doing it.
Maybe if they just cut expenses harder then everything would work out?
In reply to NickD :
Thank you for clarifying this.
Memes to follow...
In reply to NickD :
Hunter Harrison was the creator of the current problems and he became a rich man running CSX from a hospital bed. Crazy story if you like business stories.
When I was selling to EMD (Progress Rail) a design engineer told me that the train engineer should remove the engine covers and inspect inside before a cold start. The joke was nobody did that.
Starting a v12 or V16 2-stroke diesel engine is not as easy as a Camry. These guys need people to run those trains.
johndej said:
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