What? It sounds like their IT department is run by idiots. Shameful.

That kind of suggests there's some deeper corporate issues within NS right now

Arrogance.

To keep things running smoothly in the event of an outage would require more people and telephone lines. And we all know the operating ratio won't tolerate that.

Those higher up Norfolks kicked themselves in the Southern by not listening to you. Hmmm.. 🤔 I wonder if they are wondering where you are yet.

@@stevenslouber4947 Probably in the "best" spirit of "Ingsoc" and "1984" the NS leadership has already forgotten the whole meeting. Ego isn't just one hell of a drug, it's also a lifestyle.

Cool story bro…

Why??? They will be made forever....and microscale as well as others make decals...

Umm, they’re not going anywhere any time soon

Yea they ain’t going anywhere lol

It's a former think 😂

Put your tinfoil hat back on. 😂

That is exactly correct.

Down with technology! Let's go back to using horses to move goods and people!

Yes, experienced people working on and around the trains represented by unions that are not in NS back pocket. Who the he** is the VENDOR? We need to wake up. Privatization got a strong foothold under President Ronnie Reagan. It was an excuse to get rid of unions. Who is watching this VENDOR? Does NS have any full time employees that know what the he** the VENDOR is doing? This really is a national security issue. Who the he** is this VENDOR that the NTSB won’t look into.

@@beeble2003That may be where we end up. Unfortunately this present generation wouldn’t know where to start. This present generation’s answer “Buy more ammo” Scary! And we sit back and watch while companies like NS lead us on to a dystopian future. NS are CRIMINALS. We are naive dupes.

Cool explanation... no one gives a damn

Pretty much everything that requires positioning info runs through gps. The whole “solar” thing doesn’t seem to matter that much these days.

@@colinwallace5286 well, that is something for you to pay attention to, then!

@@jamesalles139 We used to have large external antennas to run all that, and they have become either tiny or non-existent as the system improved. Those of us that live further north are used to sometimes continuing to use the larger antennas because they hold signal better, especially in a mobile application.

Thanks!

Its also Norfolk Southern. Probably some ancient POS system from the 90s.

Poor risk analysis.

I run intermodal out of Cincinnati 3 yards and 2 railroads. NS is 2 of those yards. I had a crappy 47 hr week last week. Cause of this. Darth Vader said it best as I paraphrase. This technology you think so highly of isn't so great.

This isnt the first time a company has had it systems go down that was not related to a hack Heck even big companies like Microsoft have had several times were services went down like the most recent one being outlook going down for half a day. Usually happens from server/computer maintenance gone wrong or a server fails

Remember the Rogers outage last year? It was a bad router update that killed their entire BGP ASN. No traffic from their entire network out to the world

@@tux_the_astronautYeah. This isn’t exactly something that is always a cybersecurity issue. Just look at the Southwest meltdown for an example.

@@tux_the_astronautI believe NS is considered a “big company.”

@@berserker406 Rather, never underestimate Murphy's Law. Any stupidity is just failing to have a sufficiently robust backup system, whatever bug caused it took down both the primary system and the main backup

I see what you did there.

Haha

"Disaster" is also an acceptable term.

It happens. Lol

It made a couple of the ones I saw

Larry, the news was being by the train.

UP or CSX would love to acquire them, no doubt

No more mergers.

​@@cjones3710it will happen eventually

Mergers won’t happen if the STB says no. They’ve said they will say no to big companies like that

@@andrewreynolds4949 doesn't mean they won't hold up to it

I am told it is supposed to be called ex-twitter.

Ain't ever gonna happen

Nah, just a change of management

@@andrewreynolds4949Yeah

Thanks!

@@v12productions enjoy your day until the next one cya!

If Southwest Airlines can “get back on its feet,” after a glitch of some sort shut it down during the busiest time of year for almost 2 days, pretty sure NS will be just fine.

unfortunately NS will be fine idk people can favorite railroads who destroy the economy and market and completely work against why i love trains so much but fairs enough@@Prolificposter

I can tell you operations are continuing we are not shut down and we continue to move freight. It may be a little behind but trust me we’re still working.

@@samantharokosh551 Oh that’s good

They're not on my good side. East Palestine is still toxic

Sounds like everyone was just given a stop order. Probably the only casualty would be fresh produce...

Won't happen ! When the merger took place they runoff all the people that knew what they was doing . They are so far removed from that it cant happen . it would be like waiting till all the 5 year olds reach military age and putting them on a battleship and say you guys make it work cause we don't know how . That's exactly what took place with the old southern RR.

Derailments are daily in my 21 years, the only reason why derailments are high on paper is the media is sticking their nose in it....I'm glad I'm out, but the public has some to do with this too....when a semi is on the tracks they call it a derailment as well even though the semi was at fault...

Out of curiosity ....could the dispatcher issue a track authority without the computer? I thought they'd need that just to issue block protection? Only asking because most of our territory it 251/261

@@bobwarblejr.2987 yes, we tone up dispatch to receive a track authority and we copy everything he says on our TA form and repeat it back after he gives us our limits. Everything is verbal

@wes. Well, Wes, perhaps you're an expect at dropping to your knees.

Thanks! Will do!

Lawyer talk

Exactly. They rely wayyy to much on computers

@@Jabba.Da.Hutt_ How else are they going to run their business? Before computers came along, they employed thousands of people with typewriters and teletypes.

@@beeble2003 well I mean you basically said the solution. Back in the day railroads operated just fine without so much technology. What companies need to do nowadays, especially the railroad is to “not” rely so heavily on computers/technology to the point that they cannot operate or function if something happens to it. It needs to be a 50/50 balance of computers and tech and good old fashion paper and pen. So if the computers fail it doesn’t 💯 cripple the railroad company like it did with NS were they couldn’t even build trains in the damn yard. Let alone having to tell all locomotives on the mainline and yard to immediately stop because they couldn’t do anything without the computers being up and working. Even now NS is “still” struggling with these computer bug issues that employees/ train crews are speaking out about it. It’s like these new cars, there is so much garbage tech/computers stuffed into these things that if “one” little thing or computer bug happens… the entire car is basically useless and can’t function correctly until the problem gets fixed. Compared to older cars, that if something happens it doesn’t completely take the vehicle out of action. To where you can still use it and it will function even if something else on the car has broke.

@@Jabba.Da.Hutt_ Let's get this in proportion. We're talking about a half-day outage. That outage affected let's say a quarter of the US rail network (which is an over-estimate). When did you last hear about an outage like this? I've not heard of any at all, so let's say it's the only one in the last ten years. That means that computers have provided reliable railroad dispatch in the US for 99.997% of the last decade. And you're proposing to throw half of them out and go back to people pushing paper? That's the most ridiculous over-reaction.

It sounds like there was a bug in the other company’s software that bricked a server or something. I doubt it was an intentional hack

@@andrewreynolds4949 Norfolk Southern would not admit to it being a hack job. They would not want other possible hackers to know that there systems is vulnerable. As they may try to get in to the system. That should make ones ears stand up on end. The big clue is that first they said it was hardware issues. Then they said it was software issues. I heard the Union Pacific had some issues as well. The other day I also heard on my scanner that CSX was having issues with GPS in the locomotives. Trains had to come to a full stop to restart the computers. It could have been a solar storm, but I also know that Russia is like beyond mad at us right now. To top of the cake here, Russia has been playing with Poland's railroads. Causing them to shut down by giving conflicting train order messages over the radios. Granted that was not as high of a tech level as hacking computers and all, but it sure did mess things up a bit.

@@SleeTheSloth If a software patch bricks your server, that definitely looks like a hardware problem until you figure out what caused it. I would prefer to go by actual evidence rather than speculation, but even if it was some sort of Russian-sponsored "inside job" it wouldn't have been NS that was hacked. The problem seems to have come from the software provider rather than the railroads. What I think is actually notable here is how much trouble NS has had trying to recover from this compared to the other Class 1s, likely symptomatic of deeper corporate issues. Edit: several software engineers here in the comments have said it doesn't sound like a hacking job, more like a software error and Murphy's Law gone really bad

Destruction

Unhappy customers

Greed

Not sure it was really that rushed. There have been lots of iterations improving on it since the original implementation, it's relatively well-developed by now.

Not so sure it was rushed at all....I'm no railway expert but I was out of the railway in 2009....I think they started installing it in 2011 and only have about 40 percent complete....

They pushed the off switch.

Indeed.

Big 3? There’s 4-6 “big ones” depending on how you count

Big 3??? There is about 5-6 Class 1’s in the US alone.

Well now the CEO's and the officers and the stockholders thinks you can't .

Glad to hear you got over it.

They were struck by Murphy's Law and caught unprepared

@@andrewreynolds4949 Did you trust them when they said "burning off the chemicals is safe"?

@@BlackMan614 Safer than letting it go off like a bomb, spewing the unburnt product everywhere, yeah

@@andrewreynolds4949 Says you. Residents of East Palestine disagree. NS is the modern Penn Central and should be liquidated for its broken assets - assuming it has anything of value.

@@BlackMan614 So you'd rather have a chemical bomb go off in the middle of your town?

@Anon... Indeed that is the pronunciation. As in "Knock knock. Who's there? NOC".

PTC, but it's similar to the British AWS system in some ways

The rail network today is substantially safer than in 1979, and FRA statistics strongly support that

Now that's a line of bullshit you know absolutely nothing about RR operations . you just proved it to me.