LA is on the hot seat again. Apparently train delays due to last minute engineer defects. So Mechanical in Omaha sent a team to find out the problem. Today the word on the streets of Compton is that a senior mechanical manager from Omaha just arrived this morning at LAX. It’s on like donkey Kong! This is what happens when you cut too deep. Nothing gets done on time.
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I know that the fleet is in really bad shape. Lack of maintenance and under powering trains has caught up with them because the seasoned employees who know how to do the work got cut and didn’t take the recall. Now you have a lot of expensive locomotives that have serious problems and there isn’t adequate trained personnel or tools to get them back on the road. We’re returning all of the sd70m’s that are in need of overhaul to cover for locomotives that will pull twice the freight. It’s all a losing game for vena who told the hedge funds he could make them a lot of money and keep it operating. Executives are even telling him that it can’t go on and so far they’ve just been fired. Love them or hate them they ran the railroad before all of this and had loads more experience in what worked and what didn’t before this destructive cancer took over. I just watch and laugh. I have enough security to make it and whether or not up survives someone will still need to operate a railroad. They need us worse than we need the locomotives to be yellow.
That's why it takes us 8 to 10 hours to run from the ports to West Colton to change crews or the fools try to run us to Yuma. Imbeciles
Thank you! Standard Work! Also thank you Criticals! They wonder why everything is slow in LA Basin.
Unless that “team of experts” has truckloads of tools and parts, and they know how to use em, they are not going to fix anything. Its been said before, even if someone has unlimited classroom education if they have never done that exact task in that exact set of circumstances they do not know how long it will take nor how much it will truly cost.
I think that anytime Omaha spends money to send an investigation team on a plane or any vehicle and pays their meals and housing for a week or more is considered a big deal. This team has been there for a couple of days already. Now we have a senior manager from mechanical in Omaha that arrived today. So I think that Vena is making it a big deal because now he is paying all these people for a weeks stay. More than likely the customer got fed up with delays and made a complaint to someone.
@1epp state and federal legislators should be forced to read your statement. Everything wrong w/ UP is lower managements fault for never, ever, ever reporting the truth. UP is severely understaffed. The one craft least affected by cuts was the one where cuts would have made the least impact safety and production wise, TE&Y. It would have been far better to go to one man crews (even though the conductor shouldnt be cut from any train) and leave the staffing levels of engineering and mechanical crafts where they were. Since the public would react negatively to the largest rail union losing most of their jobs it was mechanical and engineering where the cuts were made. There are still 2 man crews for every thru freight train. There's just far fewer signal guys, track guys, car guys, locomotive guys, for every train. They left the number of guys who move the freight the same (minus longer / fewer trains) they just reduced the headcount of those who keep up all the equipment needed to MOVE the freight. I can't wait to here how this Omaha "expert" avoids mentioning the obvious #1 cause of this problem, which is being severely understaffed.
So they sent someone who works in Omaha, to go to California to figure out what the delays are in an area they know very little about. Then someone posts "it's on like donkey kong", when in reality it's not. The management team is absolutely going to make this go away quietly. The lower management knows dam well the equipment the UP has is substandard at best, but not a single one of them will stand up to the executive team by voicing their opinions about it. When you have a spineless management team that can't make a rational decision on their own without the executive teams' prior approval first, then force the management team to implement decisions made by the executives who most likely can't do the work to begin with. This is what you get when you put a desktop railroader in charge of making the decisons at the ground level. So in short, all they're doing is sending someone to attempt to scare people into getting the answers they want. Absolutely NOTHING will change! The power will still be substandard, and will continue on without defects being corrected.
Who cares, not me.
Oh well.. The id--ts in Omaha created this