20.1 INTRODUCTION
CANAC is the consulting arm of Canadian National.
It was originally set up in partnership with Air Canada sometime in the
1960's. While Air Canada has since retired from its part in CANAC the Railway
has retained the original name. It has established the policy (in addition
to taking active people on leave of absence as was my case in going to
Argentina in 1968) of offering consulting work to retirees having the skills
needed for specific projects. Retirees like myself could be offered a guarantee
of $10,000 to let their name stand for work in the coming year. If
no work showed up you would still collect the guarantee and if you did
go on a job it would be part of your fees earned. So after retiring in
February, 1984 and enjoying a couple of games of golf in the spring and
wistfully watching the passage of my morning commuter train without me
on it there came a call for a look at the signal problems on the so called
Family Lines of Jacksonville, Florida, (formerly the Florida East Coast
R.R. and the Seaboard R.R.).
20.2 SIGNALS AND LIGHTNING IN FLORIDA
Thinking that lolling about in a motel pool
wouldn't be that bad I yielded to temptation and said I would go. Because
it was basically signalling problems the Chief of the team was our retired
Chief Signals Engineer, Don Green; my job was to work with him and bring
to bear any of my transportation and economics knowledge that would be
helpful. The problem was that Florida has more thunderstorms than any other
place in North America and lightning was knocking out their signal sytems
every time there was a storm. This, of course caused large aounts of train
delay. It was so bad that the Vice President of Operations was saying
they should drop the Centralized Traffic Control and related signal systems
and substitute the newly developed radio block system which was similar
to old standard written train order systrems except that orders could be
radioed direct to the train and engine crews rather than through a wayside
station tranfer of the written orders.
Although CN itself was already using the new
radio block systems, we had limited them to branch and secondary lines
as they could prove cumbersome for lines with more than about 16 trains
per day. Also they did not detect broken rails or obstructions on the track
as rail based signal systems do. The density of traffic where the Family
Lines had modern CTC was well over 20 trains per day and some of them were
important passenger services operated by AMTRAK.
At this point my experience with the Manitoba
Power Commission enabled me to feel that the lightning was causing trouble
in Florida because of inadequate grounding and Don Green of course knew
that signal systems had to be grounded to avoid the lighning strokes simply
running along the rails and getting into the control relays and blowing
fuses etc., thus shutting down the normal railway operation. Sure enough,
the testing and inspection we organized showed that their grounding was
very poor and that they had no program of regularly inspecting and testing
ground rods etc.. Our recommendation to them was to hire some trucks and
establish regular grounding repair crews so that lighning would not
run along the rails, but would go to ground as near as possible to where
it struck! The CTC system was fairly modern and our recommendations were
less costly than setting up a radio system would have been, so at the final
formal meeting our group had with theirs, the President agreed they should
go ahead and establish the necessary testing program. I thought it interesting
insofar as my own contribution went that I pulled up electrical power company
experience from my MPC days in the 1940's to solve a problem in the railway
field in the 1980's, and it made me feel good.
Insofar as the enjoyment of our leisure time
there we did get to loll about in the motel swimming pool thus enjoying
the tropical climate. Happily, Fran was able to visit during part of our
stay and so she also could relax in the pool. We usually enjoyed a drink
and a swim after work and the would eat out in one of the fine restaurants
in Jacksonville. The local Holiday Inn had a happy hour every Friday evening
which offered free canapes with your drinks.
Also, one of our team members saw the firey
streak of a moon shot made from Cape Canaveral. He said it was quite visible
from our motel, but Fran and I had already gone to bed and so missed
seeing at the glowing trajectory of one of the scientific and historical
developments of our own time.
On the humor side we ran into something relating
to Florida' policy of protecting its alligator species. Some men who were
in the motel and played golf every day used to talk about seeing an alligator
hanging about around one of the water pond hazards on the course. They
had gotten quite close to the beast who they considered to be quite tame
and they had named him "George". Then one day they were all excited because
George had agressively chased one of their membes. It turned out that George
should more properly be called "Georgette" as "she" had laid some
eggs near the pond and was intent on protecting them! Anyway, the upshot
was that the wildlife conservation authorities had to transfer her and
the eggs to more isolated territory!
20.3 RAILROADING IN BRAZIL
This was another consulting job with CANAC.
This one came up through Charlie Armstrong, who like me had retired from
CN's regular staff. The Brazilian Railways were hauling a lot of iron ore
from their interior and exporting it through Rio de Janeiro to overseas
countries who needed it. The part we studied was how to increase capacity
on the line in general and a specific problem of getting heavy trains over
a heavy grade through a tunnel leading to the port.
The latter problem was the most interesting
to me. Even though the trains were diesel hauled it was found that putting
several units on the head end to haul the train up the heavy gradient would
result in insufficient air in the tunnel to supply the diesels' needs for
combustion resulting in the train's stalling. We suggested they use pusher
engines on the rear over this section through the tunnel. These were far
enough back so that the reduction in diesels on the head end would not
choke and would be over the summit while the rear diesel was still pushing.
Incidental to this visit we did travel to
the interior and enjoyed meeting people at the ore mining and loading area
who gave us a taste of eating Brazilian style. This mainly consisted
of the waiter bringing parrt of the barbecued animal to the table and cutting
off various pieces that we indicated would suit our tastes.
Another part of their transport problem which
surfaced was that with the growth of Rio the passenger commuter service
was taking all the available track time which was forcing the freight to
be handle only at night. Solving this would need more line capacity or
perhaps diversion to another port outaside of Rio.
It was interesting for us to see that in some
ways they were more efficient than we in Canada because their engine crews
could throw switches and pick up or set out cars or loco units withou
restriction by union rules. Also, their wages were much less than ours
in Canada. For example, their bulldozer operators at the mine were only
paid about $3.00 per hour as compared with about $15 per hour in Canada.
This enabled us to realize why they were gettting more export ore business
than we in Canada; simply put, they were doing it cheaper! In a broad sense
we could question why we as Canadian railroaders should be helping them
to become still more efficient!
CHAPTER 21, TRACS TAKES "A PASSAGE TO INDIA"
21.1, INTRODUCTION
Life is sometimes stranger than fiction,
and who would have thought when I entered the railway that I would ever
be involved in doing something in India, yet it happened and was one of
the greatest experiences of my life. As I start this account I must first
warn that as I write it is the year 2002 and memory of names and details
is starting to slip in dealing with an adventure that occurred in the 1980's.
It is such a memorable story that I could write a whole book about it,
but instead my object here is to do it in a more condensed way so as not
to lose the interest of those who may in future read it.
I will deal first with the work related part
of the assignment and then later with the personal side of it as experienced
by Fran and I and other members of the work team. Once TRACS got going
on CN (together with its predecessor TOPS sytem on Southern Pacific) it
piqued the interest of railways around the world. Like us, they all had
the problem of keeping up to the minute track of all their rolling stock
by location, loaded or empty status and whether under repair. So before
I had even retired in 1984 CN got news that the Indian Railways were interested
in getting a system and so they were invited to visit CN in Canada take
a look at it. They also knew about TOPS on Southern Pacific and a version
of TOPS which British Rail installed about the tinme we completed TRACS
in 1975.
They asked for negotiations and a formal proposal
from us and SP and British Rail, but only CN and Brtish Rail reponded.
Work on this proposal started while I was still active in my job as Chief
of Management Services. After being passed over for promotion (as already
related), I felt the need of an alternative challenge. Like most old lifelong
war horses I wasn't yet ready to lay down and just go to grass. Consequently,
the Indian request stirred my interest and I spent qite a bit of time in
the preparation of our proposal, which was to be handled throguh CN's consulting
arm, known as CANAC. It ended up with me working directly with the
Indian officers and after my retirement in l984 I was attached to CANAC
as an Executive Consultant to work full time on the preparation of our
proposal and resulting negotiation with the Indian Railways.
21.2 NEGOTIATIONS, WE GET AN AGENT AND A CONRACT
The negotiations took up a good deal of time
and I believe I made about five round trips by air to New Delhi in connection
with getting the contract. I was of course accompanied by various other
officers such as from our computer group, from communications (CN Telecom)
and our legal department. One of the things we found out about doing business
in a foreign country it was desirable or even necessary to have a local
representative to see to it that you got to visit with the right people
who might have some say as to who would get the contract. We were fortunate
to get a referral through the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi to
a well connected Indian business man named Chandrakant Desai. He was the
operator of a company called Premium Tyres which did about $100 Million
worth of business a year and he was able to get us an audience with various
important people. This ultimately included the Minister of Transport who
indicated his respect for Mr. Desai by saying to me, "listen to him, he's
my boy". When it came down to deciding between us and British Rail
it was Chandrakant who (playing upon some lingering dislike of the British
Raj) said, "why would you want to give the contract to those people"?
The agreement we had with Mr. Desai was that
he would get a payment equal to 5% of the total main contract with CANAC.
This would amount to $500,000 as the main contract was $20 Million. I felt
throughout that it was money well spent; he was a splendid representative
who kept in close touch with us and did a great deal to smoothe the way
for the work and for our team members. I could cite numerous examples of
his actions on our behalf. These included such things as inviting
our group, (including wives) to various dinners at his business club, the
Chambers, and inviting us to travel to Bombay to meet all of his family.
He had three sons and one daughter and his wife was very kind to us too.
It was an interesting experience to have dinner with them in their home
overlooking the Asiatic sea shore and the string of lights along the shore
boulevard called the " Queen's Necklace". It could be a very warm muggy
evening but they hads their windows lined up so that the lovliest breeze
from the sea swept right through the premises from front to back, eliminating
any needs for modern air conditioning! All of our CANAC people would say
on many occasions that Desai was one of the most remarkable people we had
ever met! I will likely be citing other references to him before this chapter
is done.
21.3 WORK IS STARTED BUT PROGRESS SLOW
Once we got the contract we set up a team
of five people to go and live and work in India. They consisted of
Wally ? & Jim ? as programming experts, Don Mathews as Communications
expert and Charlie Krukowski as field training expert with myself as Transportation
expert amd Chief Consultant. The team was set up in a separate building
away from the main railway headquarters and a number of Indian Railways
men assigned to work with us. However, because of the size and complexity
of the project and the fact that we were working in a different industrial
mileu than that of North America, it went somewhat slowly.
For example, the Indians decided that a full-fledged
descriptive planning report shold first be made rather than using existing
material which we already had. This took up most of the first year and
as the draft English was bad I spent hours and days sim;ply editing and
discussing this report which ended up about 4 inches thick! Also the Railways
and the govermment Science Ministry considered they should be second guessing
all decisions and were opposed to using IBM computers unless IBM agreed
to setting up a company branch with 51% Indian control. The science gurus
(some with PHDs) wasted time trying to figure out how to use mini computers
teamed up to do the job and were very shocked when I pointed out that Tracs
cosisted of 2 million lines of code! Whereas it had taken just 6 weeks
for us to decide and then to order the requisite size of IBM 360 system
main frame computer, it took us a whole year to get that done in India.
They built a separate new building to house the computer but would not
let us bring over CN's expert on water cooling, air conditioning, backup
power supply and other environmental needs to properly design these
features for the new building. The result was that when the main frame
was delivered they couldn't run it until IBM experts came from elsewhere
to tell them what had to be done.
Another major problem lay in the relatively
poor conditon of the Indian Railways communication network. The communications
links to the field input terminals are just as vital as the computer itself
in a real time on-line system such as TRACS. The communication lines wich
they had were hardly able to transmit the contents of one punch card without
error. They then decided to get a separate German firm associated with
Siemens to help with the communications. This at a time when all that the
Germans had doen at home was to computerize the information system for
a single yard! For the needed long distance links they had not even learned
that you can serve from six to twelve yard office input-output terminals
on a single communications circuit. The result of this plus their designing
a system to correct all of the Railways' communication problems was estimated
to cost about $1.1 Billion which the hierarchy in the Railway thought should
be all charged to the TRACS project!
21.4 PROBLEMS OF CULTURE
Though Indian Railways was doing a damn fine job
in running perhaps the largest most heavily used railway system in the
world it was running largely on a culture inherited from the days of the
British Raj. They operated on a very hierarchical mindset which said
that the boss was to make decisions on all things without much concept
of having planning and decision sessions with his staff. Computer System
design and implemntation had to allow for a good deal of discussion of
technical matters and the real decisions had to have this major technical
input. Instead, when a decision was needed they would look to the Project
Manager to make it and he, poor man, would respond with a decision which
the staff would feel obligated to follow whether right or wrong.
When you couple this approach with the fact
that their system of promotion in a rough sense gave every manager a chance
to start at the bottom and be promoted up the heiarchy every two years.
This, coupled with early retirement at as low as 57 meant that senior managers
worked only two years in their final assignmet before moving out to retirement.
This ws unfortunately going on with our project which had Project Managers
Gupta, Rana and Krishnawamy in just a littel over two years. This has to
be conrasted with my own experience on TRACS where I served as Project
Manager for five years.
Also, in the field, culture was not technically
well developed as in North America. Most of the yard office staffs did
not even use typewriters, being limited mainly to pencil and paper for
their data handling. This meant that the training required in India because
of size of the railway staff and its technical illiteracy was immense.
Whereas we at CN had a simple puch card yard sysem long before TRACS, Indian
Railways had no such thing and we were asking them to make a tremendous
leap. Lack of the managements awareness of this field problem led them
to think that their system could be put in by the technical group alone
so the operations people largely ignored it. I got a chance to speak before
a class of what we would call operation trainees; I was dismayed by the
lack of interest showed by these relatively young men.We found on CN that
our TRACS system would never have gotten off the ground if our operating
people led by the likes of Charlie Armstrong and Ross Walker hads
not taken it on as "their" system! Coupled with this, Eric Stephenson,
then our Vice-President of Cybernetic Services was insightful enough to
advise me not to try to control all the field activities. Fortunately,
I'll give myself credit for seeing the wisdom of his advice and for instance
having the General Superintendents of Transportation for each region
chair the "war room" meetings and deal with their own people in the field
duing the implemnntation process. Myself and our people sat in on these
meetings only to give technical advice as required.
21.5, IT BECOMES A LONG-TERM PROJECT
After two years on the job living in India
I decided it was best for Fran and I to return to Canada. It was obvious
to me that the project could take as long as ten years which was beyonds
my reach as I was alreay 67 years old. My family had mostly moved to the
west dolust of B.C. where my mother had lived for some time and as both
she and Fran's parents were failing we felt we should be back home. So
in February, 1988 we left and took a tourist's dream trip home. At this
point the IBM Main Frame was being shipped and Jim ? took over as Chief
consultant.
Indian Railways indeed have taken 10 years
or more to get the system operating. They were great at eamining technical
details, but as in the case of delaying the decision to order the IBM computer
they did not see that delayihng the decision to order it for about a year
while they satisfied themselves re all the internal operationg details
they lost getting months of savings from having the system operational
that much sooner. Wally was the last to leave, he stayed for four years.
Later they asked for Don to come back to help with the communication problems
they were having but he took ill shortly after arrival and had to return
home.
As I now write, it is March 2002 and when
I last talked to Al Pozniak in July the Indian Railways only had the system
up and running on their Northern Region. To be fair, the TRACS system was
designed to handle data by individual cars whereas Indian Railways were
mainly handling bulk traffic such as coal which moves in groups of cars
they call rakes. TRACS could be modified to handle such groups but it sounds
to me as if they failed to develop this adquately. Undoubtedly, there are
benefits they are getting from such a great leap forward in hands on experience
with modern computer and communication capabilities, but I feel badly that
we were not able to help them more and that their operating people were
not sufficiently in volved! I would say now that I should have been more
forceful in demanding what the System needed for success rather than going
along with the philosophy that they were smart enough to see it for themselves!