Canadian Pacific Railway Development
This article was about the Canadian Pacific Railway. For over 100 years, the railway has practiced a tonnage based shipping model. Trains were to wait in their yards until there were enough shipments to justify a train journey from one point to another. The result of this method was that very few trains traveled, and that the trains that did travel were never on a regular schedule. This resulted in much inefficiency for the company. Some of the issues were trains were sitting in yards with half full loads for days, yard workers having inconsistent shifts and sometimes sitting around in case a train might leave that day, and most importantly, customers were uncertain of delivery times for their goods. The "efficient" movement model resulted in poor customer satisfaction and a rather large set of excess equipment such as train cars, locomotives, and workers. As a result, the profit of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was very low and the company decided it was time for a new model.
CPR hired MultiModal Applied Systems to help them formulate a solution. This solution was to have the guiding goals of more consistent train schedules, and higher customer service. The new approach was based on a small stepladder of models, which built off each other to form the final product. The first model was the block approach. A block was a group of cars with the same departure point and destination. The model worked to find how blocks of cars could be easily combined and separated in yards so that the most blocks possible, were moving at all times towards their final destination. Previously, trains had stopped at many or all yard ...