Doug MacDonald, CN’s vice president of bulk products, told attendees of the Midwest Association of Rail Shippers’ summer meeting in Lake Geneva Tuesday to expect a change of direction.
“I think we’re going to introduce a brand new operating plan this fall because we’ve gotten away from some of our roots, I’ll be very candid about that,” MacDonald said in response to a question on operating ratios and scheduled railroading. “We are not the scheduled railway we used to be and a lot of that is because of the infrastructure issues we have.”
He referred to the traffic boost shippers gave CN starting in 2015, which led to record volume increases, but also service failures in 2017. This year, CN railroaders report train back-ups on the U.S. side of the border for lack of crews to run trains to their destinations.
CN is hiring crews throughout its network, and MacDonald says the railroad has hired 1,000 new people in Wisconsin and Minnesota alone. Despite that hiring pace, MacDonald says about 30 percent of new hires leave training in the first year — meaning that the railroad expects to continue hiring. This is in addition to tens of millions of dollars in new double-track and longer sidings the railroad is investing throughout its network.
“If you can’t run at the speed you need to, to provide the service you need to on your main line you’re going to have a harder time meeting your customer requirements to service them,” he says. “So we will come out with a new operating plan that will address a lot of that and get us back to doing what we say we’ll do. And that’s really all we want.”
MacDonald let out a few details about the plan, including that CN will begin tracking carloads from origin to destination. It’s something already done in MacDonald’s bulk products division. He says the railroad will also revamp its customer service organization with a focus on the supply chain for shippers. He says he expects it will improve customer service overall.
“Precision Railroading” is not working?
Returning to double track will help lift the average train speed and reduce dwell time. Mr. Harrison ripped out track on what was a high speed run in central Illinois. This was short sighted and produced short term profits and long term problems.
Thirty percent of new hires leave within one year!!
It sounds as if the romance of the rails dissipates the closer you are to the rails.
The number of hours spent at a task, any task, is less relevant than productivity. It stikes me that a two person train crew hauling hundreds of containers is seen as a disadvantage compared to OTR, which is one-person, one container for the most part.
Just out of curiosity, could anyone say the average number of hours an operating employee puts in on Canadian National or other Class 1 railroads?
“CN will begin tracking carloads from origin to destination”.
I am amazed they are not doing this already.
Since CN went public and thereby divested itself of POLITICAL INTERFERENCE ,
CN is no doubt NORTH AMERICAS’ BEST RAILROAD ~!
Earl, go back to your room, light a candle again and kneel and worship in front of the portrait of EHH you have on your wall.
You are correct. Why listen to the comments by the “evil, rotting corpse ( to quote another individual), union workers that may comment here? I mean we know nothing. We are only the crews that see stuff from the windshield day in and day out, the track crews and signal guys that see things from the ground day in and day out, and are the ones who have to deal with the crap when the railroads melt down.
Your idol was interested in nothing more than the dollar sign. If CN is so great right now, why are 30 percent of the new hires leaving? Perhaps another question should be what percentage, if any, of the 30 percent were let go for trivial rules stuff while on their probationary period? And CN is not the only one having this issue getting or even holding on to people. Kind of makes one (not me, I already have a good idea) wonder, if we are all overpaid, overbenefitted, do nothings as some of you guys think in here, why arent people beating down the doors of every HR department trying to get hired for a job like that? Could it be the “hire them on day one and try to fire them on day two” management style out there that the industry seems to still have?
Featherbedding? Leave your 70’s terms in the closet Earl. I’ve been at this almost 25yrs now and a lot of that stuff was gone back then. So please, if you haven’t had any time in the field like those evil union guys who keep the railroad moving, please don’t tell us what we think.
When “North America’s Best Railroad”, to quote Earl’s claim, works so well that VIA had to add an extra night to the schedule of the trans-continental train, and it still ended up arriving at the terminal up to two DAYS late, I think I will discount his opinion. EHH was great at fine tuning current operations, but his planning for the future has proven to be very short sighted. Customers left all three railroads if they possibly could; many were captive and had no alternative so the companies survived his methods.
I forgot to mention that THE RAILROAD GENIUS HUNTER also cleaned HOUSE AT THETOP too !
Comments by UNIONISTS do not matter,they hated the genius HUNTER because he all but abolished feather bedding, EH 1
Note the irony here; CN is still repairing the residue of Hunter’s wrecking ball tactics in an effort to further improve customer service, while CSX (above) reports great “numbers”, but still obviously lacking in good customer service, which is the key to real earnings growth.
No, actually, CNR doesn’t want to return to its roots as an inefficient Crown Corporation with mandated services all over ten provinces, even PEI.