by wdburt1
The further the dispatcher or call center is from the territory, the more difficult it is to maintain familiarity with formal and informal place names. If you have differences in accent and phrases that people use locally, that adds another layer of difficulty. It isn't just Jacksonville. Illinois Central had this problem, too--dispatchers based in Chicago trying to understand callers from Mississippi.
In theory, centralized dispatching might work better if the dispatchers made regular familiarization trips or had once worked the territory. What seems to happen, though, is that travel budgets make a tempting target for cost-cutters, and/or the turnover is such that there are a lot of green people on the desk at any given time. Notice that Conrail and NS did not go to centralized dispatching.
There are other subtleties. When the Southern Tier Line train dispatchers were based in Hornell, it was common for some dispatchers to step out on the veranda at the depot, wave at the crew and give the train a rollby. At least they would do that with the trains that were getting good treatment. In other cases they would probably be "busy" when the train went by. That little bit of human interaction, the topic of conversation for 30 minutes before Hornell ("Do you think she will dare to show her face after what she did to us at Linden?") was lost when the dispatchers moved to Selkirk.
So the answer is to create a centralized state-run call center? Hardly. All that would accomplish would be to introduce another entity into the process--an entity whose job is done when it notifies the railroad that the railroad has a problem, and which has no obligation and no incentive to determine whether the call it received is legitimate or identified the right crossing; an entity that will inevitably be given the power to require railroads to report back to it (duplicating a reporting process already in place to the Federal Railroad Administration) so it can close each "case," including all the bogus ones.
The agenda of the politician promoting this idea is obvious. He wants to "enlist" the public to report malfunctioning warning devices. This assumes that malfunctions are going unreported and/or that the reports are not being acted upon--two propositions that are far from proven. He wants even more hysteria than already exists.
And yes, the railroad industry will be expected to pay for this. We already pay a special tax each year for New York State Department of Transportation inspections that largely duplicate what the FRA does. Predictably, this tax would be increased to cover the proposed call center.
WDB
In theory, centralized dispatching might work better if the dispatchers made regular familiarization trips or had once worked the territory. What seems to happen, though, is that travel budgets make a tempting target for cost-cutters, and/or the turnover is such that there are a lot of green people on the desk at any given time. Notice that Conrail and NS did not go to centralized dispatching.
There are other subtleties. When the Southern Tier Line train dispatchers were based in Hornell, it was common for some dispatchers to step out on the veranda at the depot, wave at the crew and give the train a rollby. At least they would do that with the trains that were getting good treatment. In other cases they would probably be "busy" when the train went by. That little bit of human interaction, the topic of conversation for 30 minutes before Hornell ("Do you think she will dare to show her face after what she did to us at Linden?") was lost when the dispatchers moved to Selkirk.
So the answer is to create a centralized state-run call center? Hardly. All that would accomplish would be to introduce another entity into the process--an entity whose job is done when it notifies the railroad that the railroad has a problem, and which has no obligation and no incentive to determine whether the call it received is legitimate or identified the right crossing; an entity that will inevitably be given the power to require railroads to report back to it (duplicating a reporting process already in place to the Federal Railroad Administration) so it can close each "case," including all the bogus ones.
The agenda of the politician promoting this idea is obvious. He wants to "enlist" the public to report malfunctioning warning devices. This assumes that malfunctions are going unreported and/or that the reports are not being acted upon--two propositions that are far from proven. He wants even more hysteria than already exists.
And yes, the railroad industry will be expected to pay for this. We already pay a special tax each year for New York State Department of Transportation inspections that largely duplicate what the FRA does. Predictably, this tax would be increased to cover the proposed call center.
WDB
