Railroaders' Nostalgia > Conversations with the boss-1

In almost three decades employed by railroads, I have worked for some excellent bosses, some really tough bosses, just plain bullies, and some that I was amazed could find their way home after work. The same goes for managers that I did not work for but worked with and they affected my job.

Some of my communication with them has been memorable (or I wouldn’t remember decades later). Some of the folks I have encountered are probably known to some here, such as AR “Pete” Carpenter of C&O/B&O, CSX and (indirectly) Hays T Watkins of C&OB&O, Jerry Grinstein of BN, and E Hunter Harrison of SLSF, BN, IC, CN, and CP. However, most are folks that maybe one or two people on trainorders might know, maybe, but probably not. There are folks for whom I had great respect and folks that I had no respect for regardless of title. Anyway, maybe some folks will find these stories interesting.

A precursor to the stories: At the beginning of my career, I learned from my mentors, my first and second Chief Dispatchers, and Peter Josserand (Rights of Trains…in an additional chapter in the 1945 edition that was not in the earlier or later editions) that a good train dispatcher must be knowledgeable, confident, decisive, and not timid. At the beginning of my career, I was spoiled by demanding bosses who knew their stuff, forgot more than many would ever know, and set very high standards of acceptable performance. Most of them railroaded in the US during WWII and most of them were Train Dispatchers through the war. A couple of them did it in Europe. Later in my career…uh not so much is the high mark. The attributes that my late 60s-early 70s bosses wanted were exactly what bosses from about 1978 on didn’t want. In fact, they were the attributes that they were afraid of.

The subject comes to mind because of the frequent discussion on trainorders about EHH and his management style. I find the conversations to be interesting, having had a couple of uh…close encounters of the third kind of sorts. EHH was the regional Assistant Vice President of Operations for BN in Seattle. I was second trick Assistant Chief Dispatcher. Since EHH is a frequent topic here, that’s where I’ll start.

Close encounters-EHH:

Some background is needed to understand the context.

In the early 80s, BN was sort of like CP is now. We were holding trains for power all over the railroad and storing power at the same time. BN was not subtle about driving traffic away. They had meetings with complaining customers. VP Bill “Pisser Bill” Thompson repeatedly told groups of customers that we don’t intend to give you better service and we don’t want to hear about it. We want you to go away.

BN was going to be a “Lean Mean Green Machine.” Management didn’t have a clue about how to figure out what we needed, so that strategy was take away until the whole thing stopped then back off.

In that era, we were required to stop being proactive about anything. If I called somebody out for flooding, slides, or snow, a supervisor would call and ask if the line was shut down. Uh, no, I’m trying to prevent that. No! If the line is not shut down, don’t call anybody out, ever! Is that clear?

Engines were stored to prevent having “too many.” There was no method to their madness. The power bureau would call and tell the chief what engines to store, and do it now. Some were on trains. Some were on consists that had already been set up and tested for a train that was called.

There was an edict that only locomotives assigned to helper service could be helpers. Those units were not allowed to be used as road power. I ran a guy out of Wentchee with the two arriving units plus 2 F45s on the point and pick up two units off an east man at Cashmere for the helper. It was the best way to make the move. I intended to set out the two helper units and the two F45s on the point at Skykomish for the helper crew to take back to Wenatchee for another train. The train consist was entered at Wenatchee and when the train was out of Cashmere, power control called, reading me the riot act. You have assigned helper power in the road consist and system power helping. Switch them around now. Ok, stop at Leavenworth and spend an hour following orders.

The next trick was to store all six of the helper units. I got a call once telling me to shut down the helpers on a west man out of Wenatchee, not up to the Cascade Tunnel and the summit of the climb yet. Put them dead in consist on the head end right now. Take them to Interbay to be stored.

After the helper power was gone, the power bureau started running deadfeight trains to Wenatchee and sending the power back on the next east man. Wenatchee was straight across. There was no more room, but the trains kept coming. I challenged the power bureau about it when another one was let loose from Spokane with nowhere to go. “Work it off as fill or use helper power” “The helper power is all stored and all trains that you let by Wenatchee are full already.” Then you’ll just have to wait until you have a chance to move the traffic”

I fought with the power bureau a lot in those years.

They would also take units out of storage just as haphazardly. We had a couple of tracks on the east side of Interbay (Seattle) full of stored units, 20-30 on each track. I would have a train on duty and get a call telling me to store maybe the first and third unit in the consist, right now, and replace them with two specific engines that were first out from the middle of a track or two places in a track of 20 units.

We also couldn’t get parts and didn’t have a lot of people left who could use them anyway. The company decided that all locomotive repairs would be done in Springfield. There was no need for mechanical personnel or parts anywhere else. We were reducing revenue tonnage in order to haul dead engines to Springfield.

In the middle of all of this we had an austerity program of another sort. We could only run full tonnage trains. The limit over the hill to Wenatchee was 6600 tons 7000 feet with a helper. The limit for a single train was 4800 tons 700 feet, but they didn’t want any single trains. At least we got them to count the dead units for Springfield as tonnage or we would never have run any trains.

82 was the merchandise and perishable train for Northtown and beyond. It was supposed to be hot and not use a helper, but that went away. 88 was the deadfreight Northtown and beyond train. It had a much longer schedule. All hi-wide cars, including the Boeing fuselage cars could only move on 88. We weren’t running 88 because of insufficient tonnage. If there was 6599T or 6999 feet for 88, it was not a full train, fill 82 and save the rest. Since the entire Boeing fleet of cars was hi-wide, none were moving.

Boeing’s entire fleet of cars wound up in Everett. They couldn’t ship any more plane assemblies and production stopped. I complained to the regional transportation office (presided over by the Regional AVPO, which would be EHH). The response was that Boeing would just have to get used to the fact that we’re not going to run trains just because they want us to.

One afternoon, I told the power bureau that I was going to run an extra train to Pasco. Nope, you can’t. Run today’s train full and run the rest tomorrow. But I’ve already got a full train figured for tomorrow. How do you know? It’s not tomorrow yet. Uh…it’s a closed system. Trains and freight cars don’t fall out of the sky by surprise. The answer: These shippers are going to have to learn that we have a railroad to run and we can’t be running trains just because they want to ship something.

One of the highlights of those years was that there was a big grain car shortage. BN was buying new ones as fast as they could. At the same time, they would not allow us to use power to run empty grain trains. They were “just empties.” Every west coast elevator was full of grain empties and we were running 10 unit light engines to Havre and Chicago a couple of times a week. We couldn’t land any grain loads because everything was full of empties. We were parking grain loads at Wenatchee and Hauser and all along the SP&S and NP east of Pasco and SP&S west of Pasco. We were out of places to park grain trains. The power bureau decided they would “fix” those customers for holding out the grain. They started telling us to cut off the power of any train that was held and run it light back to Havre or Northtown to get more grain.

That’s the environment I was working in, or at least a glimpse of the highlights. A lot of us were having a lot of trouble with coming to work every day and trying to run a good railroad in spite of management, or more accurately, fighting them the whole way. I hated coming to work and spent every minute of the day hating being there. My tolerance for BS was severely limited. The thought of getting fired for doing the job right was kind of attractive. Ultimately, the folks that were the most competent chief dispatchers also had enough seniority to hold almost any job they wanted. We bid off chief jobs to trick jobs. The chief jobs went unfilled and wound up going to the bottom of the seniority list.

One afternoon, I came to work and started my regular routine of predicting and planning. I had a deck of IBM card queries a couple of inches thick. My colleagues and I were trying hard to run a good railroad in spite of opposition from management. Every day it was cards in the hopper first thing and wait until it all ran, providing me with hundreds of pages of printout. There were block consist lineups, block on hand for every yard, consists of every train on my territory, power on hand reports and much more. That was my crystal ball. I could scan the whole thing in an hour and have a good idea of what to expect.

Talking to the yardmasters and the roundhouses would tell me about what was happening now. Putting that together with the reports gave me a clear picture of tomorrow and part of the next day. Every afternoon, I would let the previous shift’s plan run the railroad for the first three hours or so while I figured out what would come next (as it should be), develop a plan and publish it. I typically had a really good picture of most of it by 5pm.

On this afternoon, the phone rang about 5p. I answered in my usual monotone “Chief.” The voice on the other end, on a speakerphone, was the guy in the regional transportation office. Oh boy, here we go with another shoot from the hip, no relation to reality, half-fast “plan cooked up by a complete fool.” The voice went on with “here’s the plan….blah blahblah blah.” I broke (interrupted) him with loud laughter and told him that was the stupidest thing I had heard all day.

Another voice said “Yeah, well if you’re so smart, what are we going to do?” I proceeded to outline the plan I was developing. We have this much here and there for this train, so much for that train, Interbay is switching and will have this much switched out in time for this but they are swimming in cars with no place to spread so I’ll send two tracks to Everett (where the yard was empty because they drove most of the business away) etc. etc. There was silence, then the second voice said, “That sounds good, we’ll do that tonight.” Click! A little later, the transportation guy called back. “Are you trying to get me fired? That was Harrison.” I told him I didn’t have a clue who it was and didn’t care, and if he was so worried about what I would say, don’t have me on the speaker. I never heard any more about it.

The second encounter occurred some time later. I had become really good at running trains with no power on hand. Every engineer knew that on the days I was working, I wanted all of the units in their consist, the direction, if each was fit to lead, and how much fuel each one had. I did lots of on line power swapping. A hot train might come out of Interbay with local service Geeps or even a goat, but they were always on time. Whatever I could scrounge up by leaving time is what they got. They would swap with a west man at Mukilteo, Everett, Gold Bar, or if they could get that far with what they had, Skykomish. The roundhouse foreman at Interbay was a magician. He could produce enough working power to get by out of a roundhouse of bad orders every afternoon. He was a good foreman and his guys would do anything for him. Of course it was no questions asked because some of the bad orders or stored units would be organ donors for other ones, something that is not supposed to happen.
My phone rang. I answered. It was the Interbay trainmaster. He was a good guy and a good rail. We got together to keep the bandages on and the railroad running every day. It seems that every day we had to come up with something more outlandish than we did the previous day.
“Mr. Harrison is here and he told me to tell you that he is sick of the sloppy way you run your railroad. You’re useless. He wants action out of you and he wants it now. Number four is on duty and he doesn’t see their power. And blah blah blah and blah blah blah and if you don’t want to do the job, he’ll get somebody who does.”
I listened to the tirade then replied “Is Harrison there with you?”
“Yes sir, he’s here at the White House (East end yard office) and he wants you to quit the BS and get to work.”
“Tell him for me that he can scream and yell and order me to run from here to Seattle Center (Space Needle, etc. 2 ½ miles from me at King Street Station) and back in two minutes and I can’t f-----g do that either!” and hung up.
A while later, the trainmaster called me about another move we needed to figure out. I asked “Did you tell Harrison what I said?”
“Sure did, every word just the way you said it.”
“What happened?”
“He left.”?
So that was it, my two encounters with EHH.

Years later, I was working as a consultant for British Columbia Transportation Financing Authority. The job was to find a better passenger rail route into Vancouver BC, a better station location (the current station was downtown in 1910, not any more), or both. Washington State was in the process of developing the Cascades service. We were looking in the short term at a second and third train into the current Pacific Central Station before anything else would happen. CN was quite vehemently opposed. They opposed the first one in 1992 and lost. They were not about to let more passenger trains happen.

That led to big meetings of CN management with Amtrak, Washington State, BNSF, folks from the Minister of Transportation, Transport Canada, and BCTFA. The CN folks had a holier than thou or anybody else anywhere attitude. I tried to talk common sense railroading with them but they refused. At one point the head of the CN delegation started telling me how they operate at Vancouver and how the passenger trains would interfere with their normal operation. I started citing rules and Timetable Special Instructions that what he just told me they were violating. I asked if there were any other confessions before we went on. After a long silence, he said “We have Hunter Harrison now, he’ll deal with you.” I looked across the table poker-faced and said “I’ve set him out twice before, send him on by for Number Three.” There was silence in the room...and the meeting ended. (...and there is a second Amtrak train between Seattle and Vancouver BC)

TAW

TAW, this is very good reading. I always enjoy stories where the bad guys gets told off or smacked down.

At the time the mangers were doing their best to wreck the railroad, do you thing they had any ulterior motives or orders from above say to make the bottom line look bad? Maybe by doing away with customers they could claim better tax status or something like it.

Just some random thoughts.

KR

Keep up with the stories, thanks.

Boy can I relate to all this. All I would have to do is fill in the blanks for what situation or person is involved for the roads worked for. I suppose every railroader has stories that are similar. I can remember back in the early and mid 70's the Mopac had for the FFT Fast Ford Train ,which ran on a 16 hr schedule between KC and Pueblo. So radical was the Mop was about the Ford Train schedule that it wanted conductors to submit minute by minute delays and have a explanation to go with it. I layed out the FFT a couple times and got called into the Trainmasters office to explain as the Western Dist GM K.D. Hestes got involved since as far as he was concerned, no explanation was good enough. After lots of back and forth second guessing of how ,why something took so long, I finally asked the TM if he thought any rules were involved? "Well no there weren't" he replied. Well what do you want , cut corners, violate some flagging rules, or do you want rules compliance which you said more important in the conductors promotion class I was in a few months earlier? With that the conversation was over and the TM told he would Mr. Hestes what I said. Never had more problems after that.

kdrtrains Wrote:
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> TAW, this is very good reading. I always enjoy
> stories where the bad guys gets told off or
> smacked down.
>
> At the time the mangers were doing their best to
> wreck the railroad, do you thing they had any
> ulterior motives or orders from above say to make
> the bottom line look bad? Maybe by doing away with
> customers they could claim better tax status or
> something like it.
>
> Just some random thoughts.

Good question.


I (and some of my colleagues) thought at the time:

* I was working for idiots...or at least people who didn't have a clue of how to run a business, let alone a railroad.

* But I thought that they were also shrewd. They were driving away enough business to be able to cash out the railroad for everything they could get out of it. Under ICC, railroads were an essential public utility and had to provide transportation. With Staggers, railroads were just another industry, an expensive one. They could do almost anything they wanted to do to make money. If they started cashing it in while it was still considered vital to a large segment of the commercial world, it would be harder to sell for scrap. Driving away customers made it easier to stop service, tear out track, scrap or sell assets, etc.

Part of the expense was capital, but part was labor. It would have been possible to deal with labor without gutting the business in the process, not that labor is lily white in that regard. The standard procedure, though, is treat labor like the enemy and defeat them in battle. I have always found it to be interesting that the railroad industry typically values the people who count the money much more than the people who make the money.

That's what I thought at the time. It has proven to be accurate in many ways, although vastly more complex than my simple version here.

TAW

mopacrr Wrote:
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> Boy can I relate to all this. All I would have to
> do is fill in the blanks for what situation or
> person is involved for the roads worked for. I
> suppose every railroader has stories that are
> similar. I can remember back in the early and mid
> 70's the Mopac had for the FFT Fast Ford Train
> ,which ran on a 16 hr schedule between KC and
> Pueblo. So radical was the Mop was about the Ford
> Train schedule that it wanted conductors to submit
> minute by minute delays and have a explanation to
> go with it. I layed out the FFT a couple times
> and got called into the Trainmasters office to
> explain as the Western Dist GM K.D. Hestes got
> involved since as far as he was concerned, no
> explanation was good enough. After lots of back
> and forth second guessing of how ,why something
> took so long, I finally asked the TM if he thought
> any rules were involved? "Well no there weren't"
> he replied. Well what do you want , cut corners,
> violate some flagging rules, or do you want rules
> compliance which you said more important in the
> conductors promotion class I was in a few months
> earlier? With that the conversation was over and
> the TM told he would Mr. Hestes what I said. Never
> had more problems after that.

Oh can I relate to that.

TAW

Seems like yesterday, but must have been back in 77 or maybe 78: I was working third trick at A Yard Jct in Memphis for the "then" ICG Railroad. A lot of us operators, yard masters, and clerks on ALL of the rail lines in Memphis used to talk on the phone with each other not only about business of the day (and night), but the ills and glories of the time. The "General YM"at South Yard called to say he heard the Friisco had absolutely lost their minds. He claimed they took a car knocker and promoted him to an Asst. TM job. None of us could even fathom it. Some young punk by the name of Harrison, a white kid with a little on the ball. Next thing ya know he made Full TM status and moved up the ladder rather quickly. Most of us lost track (no pun intended) of the cat when BN gobbled up the SLSF. The rest is history and not all of it is good, but not terrible, either. After BN got rid of him and he came to the IC in high management ranks.. HE was directly responsible for the IC buying four of the ex BN commuter E9's and putting together a nice little four car business train. Only two of the E units were actually rebuilt and are still in the CN stable today, repainted from two-tone IC gray and black to CN colors. Enough said, but I enjoyed TAW's tales as well.

TAW Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have always
> found it to be interesting that the railroad
> industry typically values the people who count the
> money much more than the people who make the
> money.

This seems to be characteristic of American business as a whole--maybe because the people who count the money are much more like the people who run the business than are the people who make the money.

I wonder what RR industry writer Larry Kauffman has to say about BN management in his book, "Leaders Count" which I believe is about the leadup to the BNSF merger.

From what I hear from T&E on the CP, EHH is up to his old tricks there and driving away plenty of business.

Pisser Bill, what a piece of work. Bill Brotherton tells a funny story about him in his book Burlington Northern Adventures: Railroading in the Days of the Caboose.

Thanks for the good reading Tom. I've been going through some of this with a new manager myself. At the initial meeting we were all accused of goofing off and wasting time. Now that this new manager has been on the front lines, his view has radically changed from that initial meeting.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

This is probably one of the most interesting posts on Trainorders. It reveals a lot about the way things often seem to operate.

Refreshing to read about someone who has a set of balls.  If we had more people with balls this country in general and railroad industry in particular we'd  would be in a better spot. Instead many worry about him/his/her/she/its pronouns and stay glued to smartphones like lemmings over a cliff while we are bent over by China and a politician who can't remember his name.  Tip of the glass to you.   Instead,  the rail industry hires diversity candidates who demand respect without "time in grade" ,  practical experience,  or even a willingness to listen (I'd take even that at this point) who couldn't run a train around a Christmas tree on time. 

Burt 

 

It was rough for you Tom. But maybe you'll agree that at the same time it seasoned you and made you a better railroader?

Victor Baird

 

wabash2800 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It was rough for you Tom. But maybe you'll agree
> that at the same time it seasoned you and made you
> a better railroader?
>

For sure it did.

TAW