St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 42

economy ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH -61) July 9, 1978 MoPac Achievement: Freight Car Scheduling Enters New Era Today I5-' Lf: teJf 4v r. xn i If 1 "The system can provide at any point in time the complete trip plan for any car at a specific yard. Space reservations are created for cars on each train, similar to the type of reservation you get when you fly on a commercial airplane," he said. Hillebrandt said the reservation system will allow MoPac and presumably any other railroad which adopts the system to predict up to two and a half days in advance the loadings of yet-to-be-formed trains and the flow of traffic through switching yards.

"This transportation product will be one that is planned, predictable and reliable, able to be optimized universally between railroads. It will serve as a working model upon which we can test new ideas," he said in an interview. MoPac has a major interest in helping to improve all U.S. rail service beyond its own Midwestern and Southern territory because about half of its traffic interconnects with other railroads. Next month, the car scheduling program goes on-line for a pilot trial on the 550-mile Memphis to Fort Worth corridor.

MoPac expects the system to save a tremendous amount of switching time, have been working for 10 years to develop interlocking pieces of the Transportation Control System (TSC), which provides MoPac management with reports on the movement of trains and cars, handles car orders from shippers, instantly spits out advance switching instructions to rail yard personnel and even prints waybills and bills of lading. To handle the sheer mass of information, two IBM 370168 computers and related equipment inside the Missouri Pacific Building at 210 North Thirteenth Street hold more than 1,000 interrelated programs, making the control system more enormous than the information systems used on Apollo moon missions. Beginning this week, rail yard personnel at MoPac's Memphis terminal will enter into what is perhaps the most ambitious phase of the TCS to date. Automated car scheduling, according to William F. Hillebrandt, assistant to the vice president of operation at Missouri Pacific, will shake up the industry more than the advent of the diesel locomotive.

The system is expected to revolutionize railroading the way Henry Ford's assembly line revolutionized automobile production. By BRAD RIESENBERGER Of the Post-Dispatch Staff For generations, railroad men have dreamed of devising a system that would enable them to keep constant tabs on individual freight cars and their destinations. Controlling hundreds of freight cars in sprawling rail systems with their labyrinthine switching yards, thousands of miles of track and countless destinations has been the most elusive of railroad problems. But now, in what is being been called the largest commercial application of computer technology in the country, Missouri Pacific Railroad Co. will flip the switch today on an electronic communications network that most industry observers agree is the harbinger of the solution to the problem of rail car scheduling.

St. Louis-based Missouri Pacific said its new computerized car scheduling system is the most recent phase in a $45 million freight car control project it is developing with financial help from the Federal Railroad Administration. More than 300 computer specialists THE CAR SCHEDULING PROJECT is expected to speed movement in freight classification yards. speed the clerical attention needed to process car orders, cut substantially or eliminate delays in car deliveries, and "produce a happier customer" by reducing shipping times, according to Hillebrandt. "No car in the system will be on the rails aimlessly," he added.

it inclement, environment of railroad operation. You may begin to see fewer freight cars marked with the colored stripes. The ACI scanner systems have atrophied to the point that the Association of American Railroads, the industry's largest trade association, voted last November to end its requirement for the color-coded labeling. The industry seems more confident, however, about the success of the MoPac system, which does not rely on scanner-read labels. So confident, in fact, that one MoPac competitor has gone on record touting the program.

Burlington Northern Inc. said that to survive the railroad industry needs the type of national car-control system being developed by the Missouri Pacific. Hillebrandt couldn't say yet how the car scheduling project would be introduced on other MoPac routes after results are in from the Memphis-Fort Worth pilot run. He did say, however, that there was little doubt that this newest phase in the joint government-private sector Transportation Control System would allow the railroad to better" plan its operation. MoPac owns about 60,000 freight cars.

They cost $30,000 and up each, so a little arithmetic makes it apparent that substantial savings are realizable if the railroad could boost the efficiency with which it uses those cars by, say, 10 per-, cent. Hillebrandt said of the car scheduling sytem, "We have high hopes, not only for MoPac, but for the whole industry." The Federal Railroad Administration picked MoPac for a $5.5 million contract to develop a freight car scheduling system for the industry because it felt the railroad one of the largest of all St. Louis companies had the best foundation in place for precise scheduling of individual freight cars, loaded and empty, dock to dock. The system is so elaborate that it alerts yard and management personnel, via television-screen type computer terminals, to the location of cars carrying hazardous materials and displays full instructions as to what to do in case of fire or other emergencies. The system has been designed to provide reliable rail service to shippers with the maximum efficiency in railroad operations.

Car scheduling systems with similar goals have failed in the past. Starting in 1967, the rail industry invested an estimated $150 million to set up automatic car identification (ACI) systems using optical scanners to keep track of rolling stock. The systems used various combinations owner and serial number of each car. (You may have noticed, while stopped at railroad crossings, the colored stripes attached to the sides of many freight cars.) Although the systems had the potential for saving the nation's railroads several millions of dollars a year by enabling them to handle cars more efficiently, the ACIs failed, largely because of the difficulty carriers had in keeping the labels readable in the dusty, often 1 nMllteirMiatiilliaillnritiMiliiriilfilliiiilllw. W.

F. Hillebrandt FREIGHT CARS are traced from MoPac's service bureau here by John W. Holm. An Increasing Number Of Women Join The Pin-Striped Set one-third female a broader range of abilities and dedication seems likely, he Said. At the University of Missouri at Louis, the top master of business admin-' istration student in June was a female.

Her outstanding performance was hard -ly surprising, considering the general performance of other female business students, Robert Markland, associate dean and director of graduate studies said. Their motivation, according to' Markland, is economic. "A lot of women have got the word that a woman with an MBA will get a good job," he said. with Gudinas' assessment but fall short of saying women as a group will continue to outclass potential male bankers. John Wagner, dean of St.

Louis University's School of Business and Administration, noted, for example, that the present crop of women graduating from business schools across the nation represents the first wave of a generation of women deciding on a career in business and therefore tend to be the best, the brightest arid the most aggressive. With more and more women attending business schools St. Louis University's undergraduate business school is now By PAMELA MEYER Of the Post-Dispatch Staff If your conception of a bank executive is a man in a pin-striped suit puffing a fat cigar, think again. The pin-striped suit and perhaps even the fat cigar may remain, but the banker is increasingly likely to be a woman. At St.

Louis' big downtown banks, for example, equal opportunity for women has clearly become the order of the day. Although each bank defines contenders for the executive suite differently, each bank's contingent of likely candidates contains or will shortly contain a significant female representation. For instance, for the first time ever, more than 50 percent of the June graduates being groomed for executive responsibility at Mercantile Trust Co. are female. Its competitor, Boatmen's National Bank of St.

Louis, which defines any college graduate as a potential management candidate, has hired eight such persons this year. Five are female. As recently as 1974, only two women were among the nine college graduates hired by the bank. instances, they (women) get doors open that males can't," Poslosky observed. Without exception, St.

Louis bankers cite the quality of female management candidates now available as being the determining factor in their decisions to comply with the spirit, as well as the letter, of federal non-discrimination laws. "Some of the gals coming out of college are really sharp," said Richard Gudinas, executive vice president of Boatmen's. "They are really challenging," he added. Local business school deans agree Although women are not among the majority of potential executive candidates at First National Ban( of St. Louis, 36 of the 85 persons placed in the bank's officer training program over the past four years have been female.

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