Bulldoze the Humps?

William C. Vantuono photo.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés is said to have ordered his men in 1519, just before they undertook their conquest of the Aztec Empire, to burn their own ships anchored offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. This eccentric act was meant to motivate them with a “no-return” incentive to fight their hardest against fearful odds.

It may be Precision Scheduled Railroading heresy to say this, but a similar, no-going-back element of PSR has me perplexed. Perhaps I am misinformed or just unable to see wisdom that others readily grasp, but I also know from consulting with others that I am not alone in my concern. Has “burn the ships” now morphed into “bulldoze the humps” in 21st century railroading? When your vessels are all burnt to the waterline or your humps are now as level as classification tracks, there’s not much chance of going “back.”

I pondered this similarity after CSX publicly announced it was not just idling a trio of artificial hills that are the heart of automated hump freight car sorting, but grading them flat. This was not the first time earthmovers had nixed a CSX hump, and I am not averse to the overall notion of PSR. There were certain elements of it that my former employer, pre-1999 “Big Conrail,” had already successfully implemented and mastered, long before the PSR abbreviation became a familiar theme in the rail industry. But even Conrail re-opened certain formerly closed humps, and more recently, other major roads have also discovered reason to selectively do the same. In stark contrast, there is absolute finality to knocking a hump down and hauling it away.

In my professional career, I have spent uncounted hours on official business in dozens of hump yards and towers across the continent. From Selkirk, Clearing and Bailey to Waycross, DeButts and West Colton, I have watched a tremendous number of freight cars go over hump crests. Thus, as this one particular feature of PSR began developing a cult-like following—leveling humps across the fruited plain—I was flummoxed. I began wondering if it had been discovered that the compelling arguments for using automated hump classification to sort freight cars vs. flat switching were actually wrong.

Major roots of North America’s massive automated hump operations can be traced back more than a century to the 1912 text, “Freight Terminals and Trains,” by J.A. Droege (updated in 1925). A paper presented at the 2014 Proceedings of the Joint Rail Conference of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in Colorado Springs discussed “Advancing the Science of Yard Design and Operations with the CSX Hump Yard Simulation System” (HYSS). One of the co-authors was a CSX industrial/civil engineer. That paper referenced Mr. Droege’s above tome and predicted that the HYSS “… will allow the next generation of hump yards on CSX to be more efficient and cost effective than ever before.” How physics (or the state-of-the-art or carload patterns) must have changed, in ten years! Now, a mere decade later, the industry recipe is to instead remove humps and add new switching ladders “to improve operations.” This might cause one to yearn to see the daily production throughput comparison figures for HYSS-enhanced humping vs. updated flat switching. 

I watched the video CSX posted to its website, along with the press release heralding this heave-ho the humps development. Still, the claims that these “changes enable the CSX team to assemble trains on two automated tracks while simultaneously moving other cars” neither imparted clarity nor dispelled my concerns. The Pennsylvania, Penn Central and later Conrail did the same thing, spanning decades at Conway Yard near Pittsburgh. That arrangement also allowed those roads’ teams “to assemble trains on two automated tracks while simultaneously moving other cars.” It additionally employed, however, two adjacent “artificial hills” (east- and westbound humps) beneath those tracks … and steadily shoving cars in just one direction to sort the freight. Though one of the Conway humps is now closed, its work is being carried out by other hump yards closer to the East Coast.

It’ll be enlightening to see how the new CSX hump-less interpretation of that “two automated tracks” theme looks, both in track schematic and in computer modeling. Yards at Cumberland, Md., Hamlet, N.C. and Willard, Ohio that were converted to flat switching in 2017 are to receive the touted “capacity improvements,” so we shall see.

Marshalling freight cars with a yard job—even with a remote-controlled locomotive (RCL)—shoving into a level classification track, then retreating, pulling clear of a turnout, stopping, then reversing to shove into another track … adding cars, subtracting cars, rinse and repeat, over and over, ad nauseum, just doesn’t make intuitive sense as a worthy successor to the measured, mono-directional-shove hump. A century ago, the trend was in the other direction. The New York Central System figured the logic exactly 180 degrees opposite from today’s PSR. NYC, self-proclaimed as “The Road to The Future,” and other major and terminal railroads in the mid-twentieth century, actually justified the huge capital expenditures for building scores of massive hump yards based on their steady and efficient one-direction freight car sortation and resulting daily production capabilities. Aerial photographs of automated hump yards have been frequently featured for decades in public relations materials to help illustrate the modern freight rail industry. These yards have long stood as impressive monuments to updated technology, representing greater efficiency.

In their time, visionary New York Central President Alfred Perlman and his contemporaries were arguably at least as smart at efficient railroading as today’s PSR promotors. Yes, circumstances of freight traffic flows, population densities and operating technologies change, but when and how did the general, long-accepted economics of automated hump classification suddenly become “unfavorable,” relative to manual flat switching? There must be published papers highlighting this reversal.

Imagine the capital conversion costs for large consumer parcel sorting facilities or major motor vehicle manufacturer assembly lines if an efficiency proselytizer came along who convincingly argued, “Wait! Hold everything! Henry Ford had it all wrong, all along! You can instead actually get more units of production (or sortation) by operating your lines back-and-forth, pausing to reverse direction countless times each shift, and do it manually! ‘To and fro is king, and actually, always was!” 

Former Conrail Senior Vice President Operations Richard B. Hasselman, a one-time protégé of Al Perlman at NYC, had an effective method for eliciting answers from his managers in the field that sometimes combined sharp wit and a dose of sarcasm. One example in the early 1970s, during the depths of the Penn Central bankruptcy, arose after two of his Northern Region managers had reported opposing changes in local train routing—two years apart—that had led to claims of nearly identical $71,000 savings (1970s dollars) in two different measurements for doing exactly opposite things. This led to a classic “Hasselgram” memo that remains my absolute favorite piece of railroad correspondence of all time, and one that may underscore my PSR conundrum in 2024. Hasselman opined, “One of the nice things about the railroad business is that we can keep changing things back and forth and save money every time we do. I wish I could really believe that we have saved $142,000 by these two changes but find that difficult.” He then pointedly asked, “What do you suppose the facts really are?” 

So, is leveling humps (burning boats) as part of PSR planning potentially a Pretty Shortsighted Railroading trend? Or is it instead an irrevocable but wise corrective action that safeguards against falling back into old bad habits? If it is not just a fad, but instead an authoritatively answered question pointing in favor of de-humping major yards, so be it. (Steel processing reversing mills perform back-and-forth well, and they do work toward a profitable end.) But the rail carriers need to be certain before their last humps get bulldozed. Deleted humps will not be rebuilt, in an era where hedge fund accountants now often holding the purse strings appear to give less and less credence to seasoned rail operations and engineering managers. 

Nathan S. Clark is a transportation and industrial development consultant based in Greenville, Pa. He also is a certified Schnabel Car Operator on 20-, 22- and 36-axle railcars. A Western Pennsylvania native, he was born in Sharon and raised in Mercer County. His professional experience ranges from railroad freight operations and sales to motor carrier, air freight and marine transportation operations, plus industrial and transload facility location/expansion and passenger rail transit system development. From 1999 to 2003, he consulted at General Motors Production Control & Logistics headquarters in Michigan, where he was involved in rail service recovery and ride quality improvement. From 1985 through 1998, Nate worked for Consolidated Rail Corporation in Freight Sales and, later, as Conrail’s Area Manager – Economic Development for a 42-county territory in four Midwestern states. Between semesters in college and during several summers in the early 1980s, he earned tuition as a Rail Shipment Expediting Escort for L-E-P Expediting Service of Pittsburgh, for whom he accompanied more than $50 million worth of oversized, high-value and urgent rail shipments over 41,000 miles while riding aboard freight trains across the U.S. and in Canada. In 1980, he was a rail system planner for the Ohio Rail Transportation Authority in Columbus on a proposed high-speed passenger rail network to link the Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati “3-C Corridor.” Nate commenced his working career as a spiking machine operator on a Bessemer & Lake Erie production rail gang in the summer of 1978. He is a graduate of The Pennsylvania State University, with a B.S. in Business Logistics, and a Certified Member of the American Society of Transportation and Logistics. He received the 1992 Best Research Paper Award for his thesis written to complete the AST&L Professional Certification requirements.