Candlemass157 wrote:Yes BNSF Railway did so some decentralization awhile back.
They took the dispatchers that work all the former Santa Fe track in California and put them in a new facility that is also used by Union Pacific dispatchers as well as the dispatcher for the Alameda Corridor. They also opened up 2 similar centers. One in Spring Texas[a Houston suburb] for working the lines in South & Central Texas. The other is in Kansas City KS that controls some both former BN & ATSF lines in the Kansas City area to the Northwest, West & South. Interestingly the main line from Kansas City Eastward to Chicago[former ATSF] is still handled from Fort Worth though they did relocate those desks to the KC center for awhile then moved them back.
I got the impression that these decentralizations were actually a form of centralization.
In certain terminal areas it's more important to coordinate with the other railroads in the same area than with the other tracks owned by the same company. This is clearly true in the KC area where operations must be coordinated with Kansas City Terminal, UP, and KCS. Likewise, in the West, vital bottlenecks are actually UP/BNSF shared (Alameda Corridor, Tehachapi, Stockon-Keddie, Klamath Falls, OR - Chemult, OR) and until Colton Crossing is grade-separated the entire BNSF scheduling in the LA area depends on UP. Houston has similar problems: UP controls practically all the track in the area and so a lot of BNSF trains are going to be running on UP trackage rights.
St. Louis has the same problem, but practically all the track which one would want to have handled in the same office is controlled by the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis, so perhaps that serves the function already.
Minneapolis-St. Paul does not have (much of) the same problem. The BNSF and CP tracks are largely independent (with only one important shared section) and mostly grade-separated from each other. UP is terminating and doesn't cross the other mainlines before doing so.
Chicago does, and needs a single Chicago dispatching center, but BNSF has fairly untroubled lines there, probably the least handoff-ridden of all the railroads. (Metra, Amtrak, CP, CN, and UP, on the other hand, could really benefit from such a center.) Construction plans in CREATE would largely untangle the problems for Metra and NS, but beyond that there are plans for a coordinated dispatch system so that all the Chicago-area dispatchers could see all the trains on everyone's tracks on their boards, and talk to each other more easily than now, even if physically located far apart.
