Orders

by Steve Eshom on April 28, 2011

You never know where you’ll find orders.  Sunday the Vancouver yardmaster decided he didn’t have time to meet the Everett-Albina crew personally so he stuffed the Union Pacific orders into the handle on the signal box.   Since the rain had stopped this delivery method worked just fine.

Someday I’m betting paper orders will be a thing of the past.  A quick instant message, or radio call to the UP dispatcher will have the orders sent electronically right to the locomotive.  The crew can then pull them up on their standard display panel and be able to easily job brief on them.   Standard electronic data interchange (EDI) protocols will ensure that any railroad’s orders will arrive on any other railroad’s locomotives and will appear correctly.  A dream?  Not really.  The technology exists today it just hasn’t been applied yet.

I guess we have to get through PTC first though.

Tagged as: bnsf, photo, photography, railfan, railroad, train, train orders, union pacific

  • ian in hamburg

    Hi,
    Back in the 80s I worked summer relief as a train order operator for Canadian National and BC Rail. I’d always thought that train orders had died out at least two decades ago with the switch on most low-traffic lines to computer-assisted manual block. Do the orders left in your photo contain what we used to call Form 19 orders, ie ones that ordered the train where to meet others?
    Cheeers,
    Ian in Hamburg, Germany.

    A railroading post from my blog: http://bit.ly/jDfaXT

  • http://steveeshom.com/ Steve Eshom

    Ian, I wish they were Form 19s! Sadly they are much more modern and were more than likely Union Pacific bulletins and track warrants. The territory this train was going to cross is all CTC.

  • http://profiles.google.com/stevetraingeek Steve Boyko

    I think that train orders will continue in some form until PTC is fully implemented. Having the train crew read the order back to the dispatcher is the only way to confirm that they actually READ them.

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