Union Pacific Outlines Plan to Ease Rail Line ‘Traffic Jam’

Abandoning a plan to use a ship to move freight from Los Angeles to the East Coast, Union Pacific Railroad on Wednesday said it will release business to other railroads and take other steps to unclog its congested rail lines.

The railroad filed a plan with the Surface Transportation Board spelling out measures to move as many as 40,000 cars off the railroad.

“Really what we’re talking about here is the railroad equivalent of a traffic jam,” said Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley.

The Omaha-based railroad plans to divert traffic to other railroads’ tracks temporarily. It will also transfer trains to lightly used lines, reroute trains around congested terminals, suspend some coal trains and reduce the number of locomotives on some trains. Bromley said the most congested areas are in Southern California and Texas.

Union Pacific is experiencing growing pains in its year-old merger with Southern Pacific, which created the country’s biggest railroad, with 35,000 miles of track spreading west out of Chicago. Cobbling together computer systems, labor agreements and dispatching duties has slowed the integration of the two railroads.

“Everyone at our company is working hard on restoring service to levels that will satisfy our customers,” said Dick Davidson, chairman of the railroad parent company, Union Pacific Corp. “We feel strongly that the major actions outlined in our recovery plan will allow this to happen.”

The company said the service recovery effort is expected to hurt Union Pacific’s financial performance for the rest of the year and possibly for the first quarter of 1998.

Faced with mounting complaints about service from shippers on the West Coast and Texas, Union Pacific looked earlier this week at an unconventional way of easing congestion in the Los Angeles area: leasing a ship to move goods through the Panama Canal to Georgia. The railroad abandoned the plan Tuesday, saying shippers hoped Union Pacific would be able to transport their goods more quickly than the expected 12-day journey by sea.

Still, with about 3,000 truck-sized containers backed up and holding consumer items such as television sets, tennis shoes and appliances, Union Pacific could not guarantee quick delivery by rail.

Union Pacific shares rose 63 cents to close at $63.25 on the New York Stock Exchange.