MrAnderson wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 9:02 pm
Saturnalia wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 6:27 pm
Everybody who signs up for railroading knows that unpredictable working hours and forced overtime are part of the gig. As has been pointed out before, you trade your time for a pile of cash. It has literally always been that way - and essentially has to be that way given the 24/7 nature of the industry. Similar skill jobs with predictable work schedules pay far less. That's just how it works.
It hasn't and doesn't have to always be that way. You can do this magical thing called scheduling.
Scheduling works great in theory. The problem is that in the real world scheduling doesn't work for operations like railroads or air travel? Why? When there is an issue in one area, it impacts the entire system.
As an example. You have X railcars which are set to be transported from point A to point B to be interchanged to another railroad and have to arrive in 48 hours. Train A is scheduled to leave the origin location at 0:00. It gets 2 hours out from the origin yard and gets stuck because Train B went into emergency with a broken air hose on a single track section of the railroad. Now after a 2 hour delay, the trains are back moving again. Later in the trip it gets delayed due to a weather related signal outage and is delayed another 2 hours. Even without any additional delays, the 48 hours is 52 hours and the connecting railroad has to either delay the train 4 hours (of which with scheduled railroading means paying people 4 hours for doing northing), or they run the train minus the cars in question. The cars in question now get delayed an additional 20 hours and won't leave on the second railroad until 24 hours after they should have.
Lets also consider something else. Some contracts require a train to be loaded and returned to the hauling railroad within a set time period, often 48 hours. If the train is supposed to arrive at 12:00, and you have your crew ready at 12:00 but the inbound cars don't arrive until 18:00, you have wasted 6 hours of time with the crew doing northing. Now, that also means that you may have a crew run out of hours while transporting the cars to the customer for loading, meaning those cars either sit in transport until the crew can transport them again, meaning a huge amount of lost time and potential fines to the customer / railroad as per the contract, or you have to bring out a second crew to finish the job.
If you think the second situation doesn't happen, you are wrong. The contract for CSX grain trains to the elevators on the GLC have such a window of time meaning the AA, GLC and the loading locationall have to work together to transport those cars from CSX in Toledo, to Osmer to the customer to be loaded, then back to Osmer and back to Toledo.
Air travel is the same way. One issue in one area can cause backups across the system which take days to clear up, thus the reason the "schedules" airlines use often have delayed or cancelled next to the flight number.