CHICAGO — Canadian National executives on Wednesday dissected the long-train strategy that the railway has cast aside in favor of an operating plan where sticking to schedule is gospel.
“The plan is sacred” was a phrase CN officials used multiple times during the railway’s investor day presentations.
“You have this phrase around here … ‘the plan is sacred.’ And in this railroad in the past number of years we moved away from this kind of a plan and we moved more toward a long train strategy in the search of what I’m told is a different kind of efficiency,” CEO Tracy Robinson says. “My belief is a scheduled plan is the right one for us. Let me tell you why.”
Robinson, who became CEO on Feb. 28, 2022, then launched into an explanation of the differences between the old and new operating plans:
“CN is a single-line network. Imagine that you’re an operations manager and you’re in a yard. You’re about to depart a train, say it’s 7,000 feet, it’s going to depart at two o’clock, 1400. If you’re in a long-train model, you’re looking at your inbound lineup, and you may see two, three thousand feet coming into that yard over the next number of hours that could go on that outbound train. And you want the longest train possible. So what you’re going to do is delay that departure, you’re going to wait until that traffic comes in, you’re going to marshal it up and you’re going to send out a 10,000-foot train,” she says.
The problem with holding for tonnage?
“No one knows when that train is leaving across the network. No one knows when it’s going to get to the next yard. What you’ve just done is you’ve optimized for that terminal, for your yard, and for that train,” Robinson explains. “If you’re running a scheduled operating model, that train departs at two o’clock, 1400, at 7,000 feet. It does that because that power is expected in the next terminal to be turned and put on another train. And those cars are planned for connections so they can get to the customer. And what you’re doing in that model is you’re running a much more consistent level of customer service and you’re optimizing not to the yard but you’re optimizing to the network. And so you’re going to get more asset velocity, more consistent utilization of power and crews, and more predictable service.”
On-time train departures improved to 87% for the year to date, up from 79% last year, while on-time arrivals are 73% this year, up from 61% last year. The goal now is to shrink the gap between origin and destination performance.
“Yesterday we launched trains at 94% on time. We landed trains at 86% on time,” says Derek Taylor, senior vice president of transportation. “Our goal in that process of launch versus land is to squeeze that delta as tight as we possibly can so that we are landing as close to what we launched as possible, getting trains across the railroad.”
Average train speed is up 8% for the year to date compared to 2019, while terminal dwell has improved by 10%. The local service commitment plan, which measures delivery of the right cars to a customer during the specified time window, is 88% so far this year compared to 80% last year.
“A critical component of the turnaround was the focus on speed and velocity versus train load and train length,” says Patrick Whitehead, senior vice president of network operations. “Accumulating inventory to run big trains in our terminals was delaying traffic and gave us the appearance that we were short of people and in some cases locomotives in certain corridors. The slower network train speed was driving that perceived shortage. We just needed to speed the network up. As we sped the network up and stuck to the disciplined scheduled operating plan, we could more accurately predict the actual resources we need and plan accordingly.”
Last year, as part of the scheduled plan it began implementing on April 1, CN also ended the practice of running trains over siding length. In Western Canada, CN’s sidings are built to handle 12,000-foot trains.
“We started with ‘Just start the trains on time. Please,’” Chief Operating Officer Ed Harris says. “That was the first step. And don’t run anything longer than siding length. You go out there and run long trains and you don’t fit in the siding, what happens? You start holding trains back 10, 12, 15 miles waiting for a meet. Can’t do that. Every stopped train costs this company money, costs us in customer service, costs us in our relationships with our customers.”
Just don’t call this Precision Scheduled Railroading.
“Tracy and I never talk about PSR. That’s not in our vocabulary. I don’t even acknowledge PSR,” Harris says. “What we do is run a scheduled operation based on the car, with a strong level of safety and a strong level of commitment to our customers. The car is the driving mechanism. The velocity of that operation is what makes this thing hum.
“I don’t talk about precision scheduled anything,” Harris adds. “I talk about car velocity. I talk about train speed. I talk about customer service. I talk about the spotting plan. I talk about the scheduled service. I talk about how we take the bulk trains and feed ’em in between the scheduled trains out of Edmonton going to the ports. It’s all part of the plan.”
To accommodate anticipated growth over the next three years, CN has planned siding extensions and new stretches of double track west of Edmonton, Alberta, where the railway funnels traffic to and from the ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert, British Columbia. CN also will add a new siding on the Montreal-Halifax, Nova Scotia, corridor, where CN last year added a second intermodal train pair to handle record container volumes from the port of Halifax.
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