Eastern Railroad Discussion > CSX Dispatch Center Part 1

Some Shots from inside CSX never center

These are of the Break Room

Nice touch with the lighting desgin..to bad most of the people working here haven't
noticed or don't care

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That's really neat.....thanks for sharing....

There is a short video but having issues loading

This is of the Baltimore Side

as seen from the Chiefs desk
directly in front is the ACNO desk to his left is the power desk for the Northeast region
and on the lowest level are the dispatching desks
back row are BA BB BF(to the left of steps)
front row closest to wall
BD BC BE

The Florence division is to the left of the Baltimore side and the Albany Division will be to the right
closest to the Break room

the Northeast region crew management rep will be to the left of the power manager and directly behind photographer
is the STO office for the region

as of next Wednesday all centers except Indy Selkirk and Chicago will be here.. Indy starts to arrive on the 8th.

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Seldom seen shots of Mission Control. Thanks!

Great pictures, thank you.

In some other DS centers, there's relatively low light, and large screens of operations, weather issues, etc on the wall. I wonder if they'll go in that direction, eventually?

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
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> Great pictures, thank you.
>
> In some other DS centers, there's relatively low
> light, and large screens of operations, weather
> issues, etc on the wall. I wonder if they'll go
> in that direction, eventually?

Years ago I worked in a CAD design room with low light. It was supposed to enhance your attention to the details on the screens, but frankly 4 or so hours twice a day like that builds rather than reduces stress. It felt like 5pm in late November every day!

“CSX never center”. NEVER center??? I think you meant NERVE center. Though “never” center may work as well.

CG


deeck Wrote:
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> Some Shots from inside CSX never center
>
> These are of the Break Room
>
> Nice touch with the lighting desgin..to bad most
> of the people working here haven't
> noticed or don't care

So that's how tomorrow moves...

Posted from Android

After the trouble most of the dispatchers went through to get there, those snacks and soft drinks should be free!

Posted from Android

That first photo catches a detail I and many could overlook. Pole line insulators used to be ubiquitous. Now they're getting hard to find still in service. Nice touch for whoever had the idea of using them as light fixtures. Good eye bringing it to our attention. Thanks.

Posted from Android

We were in the old dispatch center in Jacksonville many years ago. At that time the CI and CJ dispatchers for Grafton were not even down with the rest of the dispatchers. They were up in the top in a little almost closet with no fancy computer screen. All they had was a map taped on the wall.

Randy

njmidland Wrote:
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> Years ago I worked in a CAD design room with low
> light. It was supposed to enhance your attention
> to the details on the screens, but frankly 4 or so
> hours twice a day like that builds rather than
> reduces stress.

It had the opposite effect on me. Maybe it was because of working towers and telegraph offices for years on nights. We kept the lights off except the desk lamp so we could see outside (and in Chicago so we wouldn't present such a good target). In the BN Seattle dispatchers office, each district had a separate office with individually controlled lighting and glass doors that could be closed. I kept my office dark, no lights except the light over the trainsheet and the door closed to avoid distractions and to avoid the adjacent chief job from being blasted by the constant noise I was being subjected to. Various managers would open the door and turn the lights on bright. They said that it was necessary because I might be sleeping. Let's see...I'm handling 70ish trains in 8 hours on a job that was 8 hours of terror and they were telling me that I might be sleeping? Before I went back to the trick jobs, working Chief was brutal. There were four districts in a big common office that was lighted so brightly that it could be used for interrogations. I'd get horrible eye strain headaches. I started wearing shades to work...and a card dealer visor (because I couldn't find an old time telegrapher visor). That was after the failed attempt by some of us in the office to make the lighting tolerable by turning half of the fluorescent tubes so they would not light. That practice ended when some sort of management above the Chief told the B&B to fix the lighting. When the first fixture cover was removed, two tubes fell out and became smithereened on the floor.

Even now, I work in my office at home with only a desk lamp.

TAW

What makes you think that? Are railfans an elite society who are the only people to know what glass insulators are?

deeck Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Some Shots from inside CSX never center
>
> These are of the Break Room
>
> Nice touch with the lighting desgin..to bad most
> of the people working here haven't
> noticed or don't care

Posted from iPhone

deeck Wrote:
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> Some Shots from inside CSX never center
>
> These are of the Break Room

Pressure, junk food, and sitting a lot makes coronaries and other health problems an occupational hazard.

I really like the modified repurposed old railroad glass insulators idea for the lights! They're very nice would look well in just about any office, business, or even residence.

Is all of that in the round building on Warrington Street in Jacksonville?

Interesting, and thanks for posting. But I see four desks next to the wall,; which is the fourth, and more important to me, which one is the BE desk? Are these cubicles well enough designed that in a high pressure job like dispatching you cannot hear radios and conversation from adjacent or nearby desks? In other words, can these important task be done without a lot of sound intrusion? I do hear the BE dispatchers saying I have to check behind or go to a higher authority; I presume that is the upper desks nearest to the camera. From what I hear in my area, it seems dispatchers too often have to defer to higher authority, and do not have the latitude to make their own decisions since they should know their territory best.

Thanks for posting. I was able to visit the central dispatch center a couple ot times, once in the late '80s and again in the early '90s, thanks to power control assistant Jim Garner and my good friend Forrest Beckum.. That was during the first years of the centralized dispatch center.

The building was large and round with large floor to ceiling, rear projected, screens roughly 10' tall around the whole perimeter walls showing the various divisions of CSX. Dispatchers were on three levels of flooring, each level a foot or so higher than the other with the chiefs on the upper level. Each dispatcher also had big computer screens on their desk.

One thing that stood out to me was that a large number of the dispatchers had binoculars on their desks to help see the wall screen.

I believe it was at West Jacksonville, where the business train is parked. I remember there was also a greasey spoon very close by that we ate at, I believe it was called the Wagon Wheel or Chuck Wagon. At the former shop, now demolished, the local NRHS chapter had a SCL GP7 or 9 parked. Those were some fun trips.

Jay

JLinDE Wrote:
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> Interesting, and thanks for posting. But I see
> four desks next to the wall,; which is the fourth,
> and more important to me, which one is the BE
> desk? Are these cubicles well enough designed that
> in a high pressure job like dispatching you cannot
> hear radios and conversation from adjacent or
> nearby desks? In other words, can these important
> task be done without a lot of sound intrusion? I
> do hear the BE dispatchers saying I have to check
> behind or go to a higher authority; I presume that
> is the upper desks nearest to the camera. From
> what I hear in my area, it seems dispatchers too
> often have to defer to higher authority, and do
> not have the latitude to make their own decisions
> since they should know their territory best.

They wear headsets, it's not like there are radios blasting all around the room.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/04/18 04:57 by RFandPFan.

njmidland and TAW,
As a CAD designer since 1986 I've worked in various lighting conditions. The best was where each designer had dimmers for their individual cubicles. Bright lighting was awful and most offices had bright lights. Usually it was a flourescent and a Godsend when a tube or two would quit. Building maintenance people or a manager would walk in and tell us they would get an electrician in ASAP to fix it. We would argue that please leave it the way it is. And usually within a week there would be new tubes, ballast or fixtures installed. Our fix then was to turn off the lights altogether or in my current office the lights over my desk until you really needed more light for non-Computer purposes. The absolute worse is flickering fixtures, that really induces eyestrain.
Gonut