All together now: OOOPS!
As I have mentioned in earlier posts, recent flooding in many areas of the midwest caused a lot of inconvenience to the freight railroads as well as to Amtrak.
On June 16th, because the normal route was under water, the Canadian Pacific rerouted a doublestack* freight train through the tunnel connecting Detroit, Michigan, with Windsor, Ontario.
Small problem: someone didn’t double check clearances.
A Canadian Pacific spokesperson said, “It’s an inconvenience. It’s part of doing business.”
Whaddaya bet comments behind closed doors at CP were, shall we say, a bit more pithy?
* Flatcars with low beds are used to accommodate two standard shipping containers, stacked one on top of another.
I would be willing to bet that the root cause of this problem is the downsizing of the railway’s white-collar workforce. Reducing the workforce, increasing the workload and slashing the training budget leads inevitably to this outcome.
Ugly. There’s a project that Norfolk Southern is leading over here in eastern Virginia called the Heartland Corridor. A major piece of that is raising the roofs of the Appalachian tunnels to accommodate double stack freight trains.
More at:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/PPP/heartland.htm
Don’t know that this will do anything for pax rail, but it’s interesting.