When work and home mix

[plonq]

(By the way, I friggin' love this song!)

I knew that it was only a matter of time before the shit would hit the fan closer to home after a railroad (who shall remain unnamed) let an unattended train of tank cars roll down the hill and blow up a town in Quebec a bit.

Today, when the full realization sunk in of how much it would cost them to rebuilt a town and compensate the families of a few dozen people they vaporized, the railroad predictably declared bankruptcy.

I had long since logged out for the day, and expected my most pressing decision for the evening to be whether I should have a pre-dinner beer. atara had just returned from work, and was sitting across from me checking her various CSS feeds of jaeger smut news and stuff when the phone rang. Usually the only people who call at that time of the evening are telemarketers, so when she glanced at the phone and quizzically said, "It's a 403 area code...?" I grabbed it before it could bounce to voice mail.

As I suspected, it was my boss. I had sent him an email about the current state of the project I am on right before I logged out, and I assumed he was calling to give me kudos or grief for the state of the project. Instead, he said, "The top just blew off the shit pot and it's hitting all the wrong fans. We need stuff! Now! Yesterday! But you don't have to do it tonight since you're off work..."¹

Ugh. Sometimes it sucks being one of the few people left in the company who knows how to get things done very quickly. When I pressed him on it, he admitted that he would be stuck there for as long as it took to produce the figures our VP was after, so I remoted back into my machine at work and spent the next 30 minutes building something to tide them over. They will probably be breathing down our necks tomorrow, but I think we provided them enough to keep our lawyers happy for the evening.

¹ (I may be paraphrasing here a bit.)

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

Was it the amount of the liabilities or the fact that they declared bankruptcy that blew the top off of the shit pot?

If it was the latter then I am puzzled as to why they would be so untopped-shitpot-frenzied that a competitor went belly up. I mean, I would have thought that a competitor suddenly disappearing would cause champagne bottles to lose their tops, not shit pots.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Actually, they are more of an industry partner than a competitor. It's complicated.

For the most part, a short line like the one who blows up towns in Quebec don't really have customers of their own, they are paid by Class 1 roads like mine to switch, spot and pull customers that are, at the end of the day, effectively our customers. Some bean counter figured out that it was cheaper to just ditch our trains at Montreal and pay somebody else to handle them from there.

Cheaper, it seems, because they tend to cut corners and dispense with niceties like safety.

Anyway, the shitstorm of concern is partly because they have a lot of our assets tied up on their lines at the moment (rail cars that we have given them for delivery to the customers, or cars that are supposed to come back to us). I'd make a ballpark guess of ~800 of our cars being tied up over there.

I believe we might still own the land and tracks as well - often we only lease them to a short line like that, rather than selling them outright.

So the short answer is that we are not their competition, but to some extent, one of their creditors.

[amarafox.livejournal.com]

That was such a tragedy in Quebec. Seeing the photos of the town - obliterated - made my skin crawl. Also the fact that they had to get freaking forensic anthropologists in to find human remains and say 'Yup - bone' or 'nope - brick'

Shudder.

[fuzzytoedcollie.livejournal.com]

It's a shame they didn't have the sub-grade sidings like I see around here in NC that keep cars in the sidings from rolling out onto the main line when uncoupled (or loss of brakes occurs). Sad....

[plonq.livejournal.com]

A large part of the problem is that they did not park the train in a siding - they parked it on the mainline. Since they are a shortline, there were no other trains running anyway, so they just left it on their main track.

There are a lot of things that would have prevented this tragedy: If they had not left it unattended on a slope on their mainline, or tied on more handbrakes, or put it in a siding with a derail then this would not have happened.

At the moment people are pointing the finger at their one-man crews as being one of the root causes. That is certainly a contributing factor, but not the main one here in this instance. Even if they'd had a two-man crew, it sounds like the company itself promoted a culture of very lax safety.