Eastern Railroad Discussion > CSX Intermodals new symbol letter

As of today, it appears that CSX has changed intermodal symbols from Q0XX and Q1XX to I0XX and I1XX ("I" as in India). I can confirm this is the case with I198(18).

Why change them? 

I hear 003 and 007 were called I today and the Q158 came down the Riverline this AM and a few hours later i157  went up.  Maybe CSX is being sincere, if Q meant Quality maybe they realized they arent a Quality provider.

Subdividing the Q symbols.  Makes sense to me.

Eng.Shadetree

With as many intermodal trains as they used to have, would they really need the capacity for more?

Now a lot of folks are going to confuse the I with a 1.
Just saying.  Now no one will know where they are, or who they are.

I was always told and no idea if there is any truth to it that the airline industry would change flight #'s so the historical on-time performance stats can be made to look better since it was based on a flight #, not a city pair.

The letter “I” is thinner than “Q”. It therefore offers less wind resistance, which lowers drag. This should decrease fuel consumption and improve velocity. 😏

Posted from iPhone

DJ-12 Wrote:
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> The letter “I” is thinner than “Q”. It
> therefore offers less wind resistance, which
> lowers drag. This should decrease fuel consumption
> and improve velocity. 😏

I thought it was because while there is no "I" in "team," there are two of them in PRECISION.

The "quality" fad in business petered out 30 years ago, having been an import from supposed Japanese business practices.

Here in the USA, it basically amounted to sloganeering, amassing a lot of meaningless metrics, and endless time-wasting meetings that added up to nothing but baloney. ("Quality" even infected the way things were done in the Army during my final years of active duty.)

Getting rid of the "Q" is then, perhaps, at least a quarter of a century behind the death of the movement that spurred its use in the first place.

Art House

And I thought I was cynical about formal quality systems! https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-09-27

But to be fair, formal quality systems work quite well in certain situations. There are many other situations where they don't work at all. It's too bad that the formal quality movement got such a bad rap when people tried to apply formal quality to everything under the sun... or just talked about "quality" like it was the buzzword of the day. 

One can only hope that M for Manifests follow suit... maybe V for Automotive/Vehicle, etc...

JUTower Wrote:
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> One can only hope that M for Manifests follow
> suit... maybe V for Automotive/Vehicle, etc...
But then they would have to completely revamp the locals. M trains are currently Nashville division locals, so they would have to get a new letter. V trains are empty grain, what letter do they now get?

Intermodals are getting the I....manifests are staying with a Q everything else stays they same or not....nothing is off the table with regard to obfuscation. 

Setting up metrics for quality requires that the Board of Directors establishes metrics to be measured.  On which senior management bonuses, Wall Street financial reporting, etc will be based.

That will not happen...