CSX Intermodal Vice President Dean Piacente explained how the Jacksonville, Fla.-based railroad came to suffer through the well-known service interruptions that plagued it during in the weeks and months leading up to Hurricane Irma.
A CSX vice president this week tried to assure customers that the troubled Class I railroad is now back on track after a series of challenges and setbacks, including ones related to system upgrades, personnel issues and natural disasters.
During a Sept. 18 panel discussion at the annual IANA Intermodal Expo in Long Beach, Calif., CSX Intermodal Vice President Dean Piacente explained how the Jacksonville, Fla.-based railroad came to suffer through the well-known service interruptions that plagued it during in the weeks and months leading up to Hurricane Irma.
“We went through an extensive process of train consolidation, train schedule changes. We probably changed 2,000-plus schedules,” Piacente told an audience of about two dozen industry insiders during a panel discussion. “And in the midst of doing that train consolidation, our company went through a process across all service products of making change,” he said, referring in part to the company’s “precision scheduled railroading” initiative, under which the railroad says it is looking to do five things: improve service, control costs, optimize its assets, operate safely and develop employees.
As part of the process, he said, the company closed specific railway yards – known as hump yards — at some of its freight train stations. Hump yards are used to separate railway cars onto different tracks.
“So we shut down quite a few hump yards on the merchandise side of our business and we also went through this train consolidation as well,” Piacente said. “We had some challenges in the Cincinnati area with a hump processor that manages flow of cargo flowing across the hump merchandise network. We were upgrading it and it did not work, and we took it out of service at that facility for several days, which caused a lot of congestion, and then we also had some challenges with the management team there, and they were changed out.”
Due to all the simultaneous changes, he said, CSX wound up with huge congestion for two-and-a-half to three months. But according to Piacente, that’s all in the past now.
“All our terminals today are back up,” he said. “We have [train] velocity coming back up – not quite where it was prior to June 1, but getting pretty darn close. We have a number of trains in our network across our northern tier that really didn’t suffer any [Hurricane Irma-related] performance issues – those are running well. In the center of the network, Kentucky, Ohio and southeastern network where we were suffering, those are coming back extremely well. Velocity has improved, we continue to edge back up. We’re pleased with the progression.”
CSX shut down its Tampa and central Florida terminals before Hurricane Irma tore through the state on Sept. 10. But when the terminals were reopened two days later, they were luckily found to have suffered no damage, Piacente said.
“The biggest challenge we face today is getting the [rail] cars back into synchronization from where they were prior to the hurricane,” Piacente remarked. “It’s been an interesting path here the past few weeks, but we’re seeing good progress, we’re happy with the changes that we made to our service schedules. Eighty percent of our lanes are now open seven days a week. That’s a pretty big deal; it’s going to be a real benefit to our customer base.”
CSX’s Piacente: ‘We’re happy with the changes that we made’
