Railroaders' Nostalgia > Mad Dog Chronicle #307. 100 Years of Tradition.

I recall that several of the management trainees in the 1968 class used to say that the Southern Pacific could be characterized as a hundred years of tradition unimpeded by any progress.  This seemed appropriate to me since the SP would celebrate it's centineal in 1969.  However, the SP in the late 1960s. Was an innovative railroad,  in many cases the leader in railroad innovation.  The hydracusion box car,  the double stak car, the TOPS System, first real time operating system in the industry.   Just three of many new innovative ideas developed by the SP.  (JBW & JGF can add to this list)

JG(Jachque)Fuller along with Tom Schweich developed TMIS Terminal Management Information Systems at Eugene in 1969 by manipulating data from TOPS which was also first rolled out on the Oregon Division earlier in 1969.

My first assignment at Eugene was to write a procedure manual for the waybilling clerks as we implemented computerized waybilling.   A program developed in Eugene by a hump yard techie and a Station supervisor.  Pete Germany the IT VP did not want locally developed systems but WD Lamprict, the VPO overruled him in this case. (Cf: MDC #3)

Then there were the SPs attempts to influence, encourage, force, the US locomotive manufacturing industry to produce higher horsepower locomotives purchase of the 2400 hp FM Trainmasters and the KrausMaffe diesel-hydraulic locomotives

the longer that I think about this the longer the list seems to become.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 06:06 by mdo.

We're not the first non-railroad investments in the 1970s VERY successful making it easy to leave the railroad on the back burner for scarce resourses?

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

Re: SP innovations

MDO mentioned: The hydra-cushion box car,  the double stack car, the TOPS System (first real time operating system in the industry)

Sometimes innovations and great improvements are not outright inventions but nonetheless should be acknowledged as examples of daring and forward-thinking management. So I would add:

First network of dedicated intermodal trains among Western RRs (I would say Pennsy was the nationwide first in this department. The other Western roads were very skittish about intermodal, but DJR pushed it hard, both marketing and operations.)

First railroad to attain a mostly-welded-rail network (and not just the main lines. SP aggresively applied to it secondary lines like the Siskiyou and Tillamook branches, demonstrating that even there it lowered costs)

SP learned more about running big trains with helpers on tough mountain grades than anybody else, and was always ahead of the pack in successfully and consistently running big trains over mountain grades

The BSM was the world's fastest freight train for years. And it wasn't just out-on-the-road performance. Terminal handling at places like Pine Bluff was exemplary. Against all odds, SP kept East St. Louis and Memphis interchange of forwarders and other westbound hot traffic alive much longer than could be expected. (Look at it now.)

SP was the first big road to aggressively strive to kill off passenger service and to effectively cut costs of the passenger services the governments would not let it kill off. So its 1960s-1971 passenger deficit was much less of a problem than for some other big roads, and its cost of joining Amtrak could have been much worse than otherwise.

Best regards,

Rob L.

I think it is safe to say that in the 60's SP was pretty progressive on the operating/technical side.  We had a lot of focus of reducing costs.  I remember the day that Santa Fe ran their first Super C and we stood around in BTR wondering how they could afford to run such a high cost train.  But speaking of the management training program, how many of the folks who went through that program ended up in the Traffic department?  "100 years of tradition unimpeaded by progress", I remember that.  Do you remember the "forces of darkness and superstition?"  I think Hume Bryant came up with that one.

JBWX

jbwest Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think it is safe to say that in the 60's SP was
> pretty progressive on the operating/technical
> side.  We had a lot of focus of reducing costs.
>  I remember the day that Santa Fe ran their first
> Super C and we stood around in BTR wondering how
> they could afford to run such a high cost train.
>  But speaking of the management training program,
> how many of the folks who went through that
> program ended up in the Traffic department?  "100
> years of tradition unimpeaded by progress", I
> remember that.  Do you remember the "forces of
> darkness and superstition?"  I think Hume Bryant
> came up with that one.
>
> JBWX

A Hume Bryant sure.  Maybe that is why he became known as exhume.

You may remember from an earlier chronicles (MDC#44)  that until RDS told Krebs then Suprintendent of the Cotton Belt to set up a cost control system and establish a division budget that we had no way of monitoring costs on a current weekly or event monthly basis.  Krebs then assigned that task to me.  After a lot of work and with the help of several others we finally were able to accomplish this to RDKs satisfaction.  I became the first Division Budget Officer on the SP System.  Six months later every Division Superintendent had a PACE Officer.  PACE stands for planing and control of expenses.  The IT guys figured how to mostly automate what had been at first an all manual reporting system.   Talk about your green eye shade approach.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/08/16 09:54 by mdo.

mdo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I recall that several of the management trainees
> in the 1968 class used to say that the Southern
> Pacific could be characterized as a hundred years
> of tradition unimpeded by any progress.  

Yup, even on the electrical cabinet door of an SD9!  Jan 8, 1977

---

The phrase "We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much with so little for so long we are now qualified to do anything with nothing!" comes to mind here.

PHall Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The phrase "We the willing, led by the unknowing,
> are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
> We have done so much with so little for so long we
> are now qualified to do anything with nothing!"
> comes to mind here.

The mantra of everyone who ever worked for a large corporation!! :-). I also had my own saying about corporate
life, stolen from the great naturalist John Muir--"If you try to deal with one thing all by itself, you find it attached to everything else in the universe"
C

Carol Voss
Bakersfield, CA

> I recall that several of the management trainees in the 1968 class used to say...

Well Mike, the the bunch that I hired out with a decade later included six management trainees, and they were saying the same thing. They generally were cream of the crop guys, a couple from Harvard or Yale, I think. Four of them quit within a year. The fifth made it to Terminal Supt. before heading to an eastern shortline. While eating lunch one day with the new-hire class instructor and a couple of said management trainees, the instuctor looked at me and flatly asked if I thought that the sixth trainee was brain dead. He was a sour lump in class; talked, associated with nobody. He was the only one that went on to a long career with the company, ending up with a reasonably high rank. Over the years, I saw graffiti about him, and even to this day, I hear new, nasty stories about him from alumni.

I conclude that he must have held some talents that weren't evident to many of us, but the fact remains that he was reviled by the troops; not a leader of men. The leaders fled early.

Circumstantial and anecdotal evidence that I've seen on TO's from you and others over the years leads me to believe that the culture at the top encouraged people like the sixth man, and that indeed, some of them were the sixth man. But, having never known all but a couple of the key players, and having never set foot in the glass house except as a guest, I can only speculate about the mix of personalities and culture at the top as the railroad fell apart.

You've said that you feel compelled to adhere to old agreements by way of explaining your reluctance to do a "tell-all". Hell Mike, I'm reluctant to name the sixth man. In truth, it's constitutionally difficult to minutely air the personalities and performance even of SOB's by name in public, when they are unable to defend themselves, wouldn't you say?

So, what's more to be said by any of us, beyond the usual stories and fibs that sustain our "tradition" as a big, dysfunctional family? Not much, I guess. Hopefully though, you're scribbling away on your memoirs for posterity, Mike. If your associates fail to do the same, that's their problem. In the end, the playing field is level. The sad part of it all is that, once the last of family has passed, nobody is going to give a whit.

EO



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/16 11:30 by hogheaded.

MDO: Thanks for the plug! But truth to tell, Tom was the conceptor - I did programming, and was involved expanded the service from Eugene to Oakland and Los Angeles.

Another technical innovation that I believe was SP's, was the Teminal Control Computer system (TCC), that brought to the terminal the information capabilities of TOPS. Prior to TCC, TOPS essentially stopped at the head-in switch, providing only summary information about what happened inside the terminal. TCC changed all that, much for the better.

One Big Miss is SP technology was not implementing Car Scheduling. It can be contankerous to work with, but it imposes a discipline on operations that TOPS alone could not do. However, to implement the required discipline required resources [locomotives] beyond SP's ability to supply.
 

Mike,

Nobody has ever mentioned all the money that was spent to study electrifying the hill. Also, how close it came to actually being done.

Gordon Adams from 65 Market outlined it to me one day. I think Mack Gaddis was involved too. It was all very hush hush.. It was figured that if they did it, it would  take 4  diesel units to pull a said tonnage over the hill at 15 to 20 mph, working right at the edge of the red  line. The same train would only need 2 electric units, making 30 plus mph and it never got anywhere near the red line.

This was done right around when the SP got the German engines. Gordon & Mack were involved in that also.. I do remember Gordon saying they wouldn't last. Even when the original ones were falling apart, the SP ordered more and even purchased the ones D&RGW had. I think DJR was the one pushing both of these programs  and it turned out to be a real money pit.

Nudge

spnudge Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Mike,
>
> Nobody has ever mentioned all the money that was
> spent to study electrifying the hill. Also, how
> close it came to actually being done.
>
> Gordon Adams from 65 Market outlined it to me one
> day. I think Mack Gaddis was involved too. It was
> all very hush hush.. It was figured that if they
> did it, it would  take 4  diesel units to pull a
> said tonnage over the hill at 15 to 20 mph,
> working right at the edge of the red  line. The
> same train would only need 2 electric units,
> making 30 plus mph and it never got anywhere near
> the red line.
>
> This was done right around when the SP got the
> German engines. Gordon & Mack were involved in
> that also.. I do remember Gordon saying they
> wouldn't last. Even when the original ones were
> falling apart, the SP ordered more and even
> purchased the ones D&RGW had. I think DJR was the
> one pushing both of these programs  and it turned
> out to be a real money pit.
>
> Nudge

The study was on Beaumont Hill and onto El Paso and yes it almost became close to reality in 1970 with locomotives designed except BFB turned it down because when his commitee reviewed the work that Spence's people did, they found the numbers didn't take into coinsideration ther length to install the electrical work, changing all the signaling, shield ulititie's lines, protect the SP pipeline that ran along the right of way. It was way more costly than RDS was projecting. This turned out to be the first strike against RDS in BFB's mind. BFB told all the upper management to keep this project quiet and let it die and the backburner. BFB's project for these dollars was the Spear towers in SF.

Donner was talked and Kasier did a study at the end of WWII, but it was project to take 27 years to build and traffic base numbers couldn't be justified to support the project. DJR deem Donner in its present state was good enough for the SP.

The KM's was driven by DJR but at the end in 1968, some heads fell, both at SP and KM, because of the failure of the locomotive to live up to SP standards

I knew someone would have the straight dope. Thanks,

Nudge

In retrospect, SP's and other RRs decisions to not electrify have been confirmed by history. From all I've read, the only recent [post-WW2] electrification study that made any economic sense was GE's for the renewal of MILW's system - which already existsed.

The development of diesel power has further rendered electrification of less value. It's needed in situations where high acceleration is needed -- passenger operations - or legacy electrification that occurred for other reasons [Switzerland - lots of hydro power, and coal supplies cut off by WW1]. For general freight operations, AC diesels have all the advantages - and the start-up costs are minimal, compared with electrification. Just think of the additional locomotives that would be needed to operate any partial electrification, with diesels needed on both sides. Not economically justified, under most any conceivable scenario.

Do you recall if the management trainees were hired by William F. Settle?  
I interviewed with him in Tucson at the University of Arizona in 1972, and years later
met other fans who had interviewed with him at their colleges all over the country.
But none of us ever heard of anyone getting hired.  

Rich

Yes,  WF Settle interviewed me and hired me for the mgt training program out of UC Berkeley in 1968.  That same year he also interviewed and hired a classmate of mine DM Mohan.  for several years there after Settle did most of the interviews.  Later Krebs, Moore and I all got involved in the interview process.  other than Krebs , we did not make any hiring decissions.  We cerrtainly did niot recommend anyone whom we did not think was a good candidate.

For a number of years there were several factors that got a lot of positive weight.  Railroad work experience was a big pluss.  Vetrans were a plus,  MBA a very big plus.  Railfans were a minus.  Best strategy was not to mention this at all in the interview.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/11/16 11:06 by mdo.

I'm not worthy of joining this august body, having served merely as extra brakeman on the Western Division for less than a year in 1977, then in the Marketing Department 1978-82.  (I had been recommended by a UC Berkeley professor who testified in favor of cutting the Peninsula commute fleet.) 

But my experience at SP, and especially with the men (and a few women) of that time was one of the top adventures of my life.  I recognize, having met or worked with, nearly all of the officers cited in the Mad Dog Chron. 

And I was hired at West Oakland by William Settle. 

SRL