Network Service Follow Up from Beth Whited, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer
Announcement Number: CN2018-6
Categories: General Announcements
Posted Date: March 15, 2018
To Our Customers,
As you likely know, our network is experiencing service challenges. We fully understand Union Pacific is an integral part of your supply chain, and we want you to know we are working hard to resolve these issues.
Since our last network service update, which included developments across our network and in each of our regions, we have implemented additional changes to continue to address our service challenges.
Resources
Problem solving and execution requires people and power. Union Pacific is deploying additional human resources and locomotives across our network to ensure we have the resources to make improvements.
- Train, Engine and Yard (TE&Y) Employees: We have called all previously furloughed employees back to service. The training pipeline has increased through 2017, and we have 1,250 crew members in training now, with plans to graduate approximately 200 trainees per month between March and July. We are also adding more TE&Y employees and are offering signing bonuses to make these roles more attractive in tight labor markets.
- Locomotives: We have reactivated approximately 500 high-horsepower locomotives since mid-2017, including 100 high-horsepower locomotives since early February. We will continue to return several hundred stored locomotives back into service to support carload growth and increased rail car inventory.
Rail Car Inventory
Elevated rail car inventory actively running on the network has created additional congestion at rail yards, terminals and sidings. We are working on multiple fronts to improve fluidity.
- Reducing Congestion: We are acutely focused on reducing congestion caused by increased online rail car inventory in order to restore velocity as quickly as possible. Rail cars with excessive dwell are being actively reviewed and assigned an action.
- Customer Collaboration: We are collaborating with customers to more tightly manage rail car flows and right-size rail car fleets.
Service Planning and Continuous Improvement
From a planning perspective, we are keeping a close watch on day-to-day operations while also developing plans for continued improvement. As described in more detail below, this includes adding train starts where resources are available and where it enables us to improve operational fluidity.
- Local Service: We continue to increase local train frequency to ensure we are spotting cars in a timely manner once they reach the serving yard and pulling cars from industry once they are released. We have also continued to add jobs to support yard and terminal fluidity.
- Transportation Plan: We are focused on trip plan discipline, running the train plan as scheduled, which helps ensure locomotive and crew balance. We continue to adjust transportation plans to route around congested areas. We are revisiting blocking agreements with our Class I interchange partners to improve interchange fluidity. In addition, we are beginning to disconnect certain aspects of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Northern California pilot. The final PNW train plan adjustments, including the new Cold Connect schedule, become effective mid-March. We will also maintain positive adjustments that we implemented during the PNW pilot plan, including more seven-day-per-week manifest thru trains running on the network.
- Positive Train Control (PTC) Team Supplements: We have moved employees to the PTC Team to accelerate problem solving aimed at locations experiencing an elevated number of braking events.
- Operating Execution: Our Continuous Improvement Team has formed seek and solve teams to visit each operating region and implement operational execution initiatives at both the terminal and local levels.
Customer Notifications
We continue to develop technological enhancements aimed at providing our customers with proactive notifications.
- We are launching a new proactive notification process to provide improved “Bad Order Notifications” to let you know when your rail car will return to service.
- We’re currently piloting "You Are Next" notifications to provide customers guidance on the timing of local service, with plans to fully roll out the program in the coming months.
- We will be rolling out a new "Being Prepared for Service" communication in the near future to provide clear guidelines on operational readiness.
- As a reminder, all customers have the ability to sign up for "Local Service Scheduled Today" notifications.
We appreciate your patience as we work through our service challenges. We remain committed to providing the excellent service you have come to expect from us and will continue to provide updates as additional information becomes available. As always, thank you for your business.
Sincerely,
Beth Whited
Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer