Freight railroads generally have operated the same way for more than a century: They wait for cargo and leave when customers are ready. Now railroads want to run more like commercial airlines, where departure times are set. Factories, farms, mines or mills need to be ready or miss their trips.
Called "precision-scheduled railroading," or PSR, this new concept is cascading through the industry. Under pressure from Wall Street to improve performance, Norfolk Southern and other large U.S. freight carriers, including Union Pacific Corp. and Kansas City Southern, are trying to revamp their networks to use fewer trains and hold them to tighter schedules. The moves have sparked a stock rally that has added tens of billions of dollars to railroad values in the past six months as investors anticipate lower costs and higher profits.
Calling all Railroad Tycoons...
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday April 05 2019, @10:48PM (2 children)
I don't think you understood my comment; I was responding to an AC mega-troll. I try to never respond to them unless they're positive and contributing to the discussion.
I agree with Runaway, JoeMerchant, and others here. AC was making inane comments about F = MA, etc. I'm an EE, which means I've completed many physics courses and qualify as a junior physicist. As an EE I'm inherently practical, and my point was that a train hitting a car would make an almost immeasurable change to the train's kinetic energy. In fact, I don't even see any practical reason to try to measure it. On to better things!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @12:25AM
Look again at what you said:
> a train hitting a car would make an almost immeasurable change to the train's kinetic energy. In fact, I don't even see any practical reason to try to measure it. On to better things!
And this is in the context of cow catchers. Do you realize cow catchers are there not to spare the cow, but to spare the train? Do you realize that cars weigh more than cows, that the change to the train's KE is going to correlate to damage at the front-end, which can practically have huge impact (yuk yuk a pun)?
What you said is kinda dumb.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 06 2019, @01:28AM
True brilliance, calling a technical correction "mega troll". Typical conservative, triggered by people explaining reality.