Norfolk Southern moving to a Centralized Train Dispatching Center

[NW Mailing List]

Frank
  So well said my thoughts also. It’s nearly impossible to manage  something well that you have never done .  The company I just retired from Is eat up with mangers who got the job from kissing up or some degree in a field not related to the industry. It’s just one big rolling circus. And as long as they make money and have no major disaster  no one every notices. Good management  comes from bottom up not top down.

Thanks
Larry Evans



> On Jan 29, 2018, at 4:08 PM, NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:
> 
> 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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