How One Man SILENCED 10,000 Locomotives

Описание: How One Man SILENCED 10,000 Locomotives

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In December 2017, Hunter Harrison was carried out of CSX headquarters on a stretcher. Within 48 hours, he was gone. But the philosophy he left behind would reshape every major railroad in North America and create the largest graveyard of working locomotives the continent has ever seen.
Harrison started in 1963 as a carman-oiler, the lowest job on the railroad, greasing wheel bearings in Memphis. Fifty years later, he was worth half a billion dollars and had transformed four different railroads with one simple idea: get rid of everything you don't absolutely need.
At Illinois Central, he cut the operating ratio from 98% to 62%. At Canadian National, he removed 35% of the locomotive fleet within sixteen months. At Canadian Pacific, he parked 600 locomotives. At CSX, he sidelined over 900 locomotives in just eight months and announced plans to cut the workforce by a third.
The shareholders loved it. Stock prices soared. Operating ratios dropped to levels nobody thought possible. Wall Street called him a genius.
But the workers told a different story. So did the shippers waiting for trains that never came. So did the residents of East Palestine, Ohio, when a 9,300-foot Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials derailed in February 2023, forcing thousands to evacuate.
Between 2017 and 2020, Class I railroads parked over 3,000 locomotives and laid off 45,000 workers. The trains that remained grew longer, heavier, and harder to stop. And the man who started it all never had to answer for any of it.
This is the story of Precision Scheduled Railroading, the philosophy that silenced 10,000 locomotives and changed American freight forever.