Commentary
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Applying the “Old-School Philosophy” of “Free Outages”

Written by William C. Vantuono, Editor-in-Chief
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Soon after the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., a former passenger railroad chief engineer approached Railway Age with ideas for performing much-needed trackwork during a time when traffic is lighter than normal, and track time—difficult to schedule and manage under “normal” circumstances—is more readily available.

Preferring to remain anonymous (why, I don’t quite know), he describes himself as having “40 years’ experience and worn out work boots from kicking ballast, with a high regard for the value of every minute of track time and the reverence for passenger and train crew safety.” His ideas would be applicable specifically to the Northeast Corridor Hudson Tunnel repairs, but could possibly be applied to just about any high-traffic-density passenger rail corridor. He expressed concern about a loss of many people with experience, as evidenced by operating on “modified schedules” during periods of adverse weather, and now the pandemic, and its drastic effects on ridership.

In his words:

This is really just the old-school philosophy of taking full advantage of valuable track time on any busy corridor. Any outage requires “all hands on deck”—with anyone in an office out in the field. It’s a great opportunity for:

  • Accountants and procurement people to perform inventory and field audits.
  • Maintenance on vehicles and equipment. 
  • Taking full advantage of everyone’s talents, especially management, with minimal expenses. 
  • Newer talent to showcase their abilities with the supervision of more experienced folks in many areas.

When states enact stay-at-home provisions, people engaged in the maintenance of critical infrastructure—railroads—are generally permitted to continue their duties. When traffic is down, or as a result of another service interruption (grade crossing replacement, turnout replacement, derailment, etc.) the idea is to throw everyone into the blocks on both sides of the outage. If I had any type of planned outage, I put everyone into that area, even if I had to get help from somewhere else. If operations could live with it, the resources were piled on, and if it were possible, I would “roll” the length: from shorter on one end and longer on the other, to longer on the short end and shorter on the long end. We used to call this a “free outage.”

The Hudson Tunnels should be a no-brainer: Deploy all hands between New York Penn Station and Newark on one track at a time. Use Secaucus Transfer as a staging location. Perform all signal, bridge, catenary, culvert and frog welding work. Walk every inch of the unoccupied OOS (out of service) track, and after a week, swap the OOS track and do it again. The third week, go back to the original OOS track. Anything that you didn’t or couldn’t get to during the first outage, you had better get to during the second outage. Then, keep leap frogging down the entire NEC, as well as other corridors.

This is also a great time to e-clean (extraordinary-clean) and repair anything that is OOS (cars, locomotives, stations, facilities, offices, inspection vehicles). Although it costs in terms of dollars, this is a free lunch when it comes to reigning in the repairs and extending the periods for COTS (Clean, Oil, Test and Stencil), signal inspections, ET (electric traction—catenary, third rail and substations), bridges and tunnels, elevators, etc..

Every manager who knows anything should be out there inspecting tracks and signals, and inspecting the inspectors., and even replacing light bulbs and hand digging the mud in the tunnels. Use this opportunity to perform detailed rail integrity inspection and surfacing. They may never again have this opportunity.  Pull any manager who came from the field. Close the office and put people back in the field, like we did during 9-11.

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