As of Monday, November 21st, 2022, the prospects of averting a nationwide rail strike appear to be grim. The Federal government intervened in September, avoiding a strike at that time. But there was a sense that this was just "kicking…
Tension between railroad management and workers is high. Attendance policies associated with grueling work schedules and safety concerns related to Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) are at the top of the list of complaints voiced by labor unions. Government regulators have…
After three decades of steady decreases, the rate of highway/rail accidents bottomed out in 2012. But it has been trending upward ever since. The graph shows that in 2012 the incident rate reached its all-time low of 2.72 incidents per…
Here is a fun little illustration depicting some of the work we at First Analytics have done in the rail industry. It's patterned after Richard Scarry's classic children's illustrated book, "What do People Do All Day?" Several of these stories…
With supply chain issues topping recent news, the railroad industry is under scrutiny for how well they operate their networks. As a follow-up to our previous post about railroad industry operating ratio, we here consider how analytics and machine learning…
There has never been a more challenging time for the trucking industry. From driver retention and recruiting, to safety, maintenance, and fuel savings, leading companies are now beginning to use a data analytics approach to improve their operations and financial…
It may be said that predictive maintenance is the poster child for the "analytics of things." Preventing down time and reducing maintenance costs has been a successful use of data science for a long time. But sometimes there is…
Much attention has been heaped upon the data science profession for about a decade now, including by our own chairman, Tom Davenport, who called it "the sexiest job of the 21st Century". Well-known hierarchies of types of analytics generally show…
As a heavy industry, railroads seek to appeal to the finance community by focusing on metrics that speak to the company’s efficient utilization of its assets. A key metric is Operating Ratio, which is defined as operating expenses as a…
Year-over-year comparisons can attribute too much of a volume decline to COVID-19. That is what we showed at the beginning of the pandemic, with predictive analytics applied to railroad car loadings data from the American Association of Railroads (AAR). The…