Good news is always good news but I've become ever skeptical (rubs off around here). This Yahoo article sounds good but I'm looking to you folks to knock some holes if they're there to knock. If not, good news.

My first thought was how much checking can they get done for a lousy 150 grand? Thanks.

-- Carlos (riffraff1@cybertime.net), October 18, 1999

Answers

Carlos,

This reads like a press release.

From what I read the conclusion that these railroads are Y2k ready makes no sense. Talk about disconnect.

[...] Moreover, with over 200 million lines of code from railroad-developed and off-the-shelf software, the railroads faced a significant Y2K remediation challenge.

CACI's assessment concluded that the four major railroads are ready for the Year 2000, noting that there should be no degradation of service caused by Y2K problems.

and then...

CACI's assessment methodology focused on Y2K processes that range from management and planning, to inventory, assessment, and remediation of code, telecommunications, data exchange, and supply chain operations, and testing, validation, and risk management/contingency planning. The assessment includes suggestions and recommendations for action when vulnerabilities are found, and enumeration of ``key positives'' and best practices.

The did an assessment which is the first part of the project. They have yet to do any remediation, testing, etc.

I think they're getting ready to FoF.

Mike

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-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), October 19, 1999.

I don't know how much this enters into the picture of the article, but my son works for Burlington-Northern and he and his co-worker's last 5 paychecks have been screwed up. The excuse they are getting is a new payroll computer glitch. Some were overpayed as much as $1,000, and payroll hasn't made the adjustment yet. Who knows, maybe they won't get a paycheck at all next time.

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), October 19, 1999.

"CACI's Y2K readiness evaluation focused on the four large American railroads, whose traffic accounts for over 86 percent of the revenue of the railroad industry. These are: CSX, of Jacksonville, Florida; Burlington Northern Santa Fe, of Fort Worth, Texas; Union Pacific, of Omaha, Nebraska; and Norfolk Southern, of Norfolk, Virginia. The evaluation also included an informal review of RAILINC, a Cary, North Carolina- based subsidiary of the American Association of Railroads that operates one of the world's largest electronic data interchange (EDI) networks in enabling the exchange of real- time operational data among the railroads."

All for $150,000? Less than the cost of five or six nice automobiles? This figure is very hard to take seriously. Look at the railroad entities involved, all recently involved in massive mergers and acquisitions(from http://www.ncbr.com/ju n1899/wy.rival.htm):

"Union Pacific is adding employees, investing in infrastructure and overcoming the systemwide congestion that stalled traffic after UP's historic merger with the Southern Pacific.

"Burlington Northern is on a similar investment roll after its merger with the Santa Fe, giving Wyoming, Colorado and the West improved infrastructure and spirited competition between the nation's two largest railroads.

"Union Pacific is the nation's largest railroad, with more than 36,000 miles of track across 23 states. It has 52,000 employees, 7,100 locomotives and more than 145,000 freight cars, and it boasts of one of the industry's most-diverse mixes of freight and commodities, including coal, chemicals, food, grain, automobile and intermodal containers for ships and trucks.

"BNSF is a close second, with 34,000 miles of track across 28 states and two Canadian provinces. It has 44,500 employees, 5,000 locomotives and more than 90,000 freight cars in service. It is the nation's largest transporter of law-sulfur coal, grain and aluminum."

Just this year Norfolk and Southern and CSX have, between them, absorbed the entire Conrail system. From http:// www.ttnews.com/members/printEdition/0001730.html:

"N S will grow to 21,600 miles of tracks in 22 states, as well as the District of Columbia, and the Canadian province of Ontario. It will own or lease 3,500 locomotives and 126,000 freight cars.

"CSX will grow to 22,700 route miles, serving 23 states, along with the District of Columbia, as well as Ontario and Montreal in Canada. It will own or lease 3,646 locomotives and 121,500 freight cars."

The immediate consequences of this acquisition are described in a trucking industry publication (from htt p://www.ttnews.com/members/features/conrail/conrail.html:"On June 1, railroad giants CSX and Norfolk Southern divided up Conrail, the conglomeration of six bankrupt rail companies put together by the federal government in 1976. It was billed as the most complex transaction in railroad history, valued at just over $10 billion.

"CSX and Norfolk Southern pitched the deal as a blessing for intermodal traffic, claiming their expanded service could help take as many as 1 million trucks off the nation's highways every year.

"Both sides remembered the 1996 Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger, which tied up rail lines all over the Midwest and West Coast and cost the U.S economy an estimated $4 billion. CSX and Norfolk Southern spent more than two years working out the details of their planned breakup of Conrail to avoid a similar fate.

"But from day one, the new arrangement was anything but blissful.

"Problems with computer software led to delays on the former Conrail's lines in the Upper Midwest and parts of the East. Rail cars that were full of freight were listed in Norfolk Southern's computers as empty. The cars were sent out to pick up freight only to return a short time later when the error was discovered, creating traffic jams at rail terminals. A lack of empty freight cars only made the problem worse.

"The delays are forcing more freight onto the highways, making shipping difficult for many companies. United Parcel Service has put as much as 50% of its rail freight back onto trucks because of the delays. Auto giant DaimlerChrysler was forced to divert some of its shipments to trucks. And Cerestar, a processor of grain products, had to refuse orders, saying it could get neither rail nor truck service.

"Trains idling at terminals created delays not only for freight shippers but also for passenger rail service. Amtrak reported delays for most of trains on its line from Grand Rapids, Mich., to Chicago. The passenger carrier even had to charter buses to ferry passengers around an idled freight train on Norfolk Southern rails in Indiana that could not be moved."

Good work gang. It's worse than I thought. A hundred fifty grand is about 6 months work for one mid level consultant from a firm like CACI. That's enough money to read a couple brochures, attend a meeting at each firm, and write a press release or two.

No one looked at any code, hardware, dumped data files, or observed any tests. It was all spent on donuts.

Of course the pollies will say that the fact that there were all those rail and shipping problems and the world hasn't ended proves that Y2K won't be a problem.

-- cory (kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net), October 19, 1999.

Interesting...we had CACI do an assessment that cost right at $150K. The methodology is to have the companies (subsidiaries) fill out exhaustive surveys and then respond to questions over the phone. No one visited at all, and they were auditing the METHODOLOGY used by the company, not the RESULTS. No code checks at all.

I am impressed, though. Our average score was was 64/100.

Don't even ask who. I won't tell.

-- Jim Smith (JDSmith1@hotmail.com), October 19, 1999.

I work for a company that bids government contracts, and I think this figure is also very low. If I estimate a 90-day contract, (it would at least had to take *some* time.) it would work out to be 720hrs per person. If they bid at least 8 people for 90 days it would be a total of 5,760 hours. This would turn out to be about $26 per person per hour. For technical people, this would probably be an average rate, but would not include the cost per hour for some kind of project manager. However, without any time frame or number of people working on the assessment, it is hard to tell. And really, 90 days, doesn't even seem like enough time to evaluate whether they are compliant or not. They probably just interviewed people and didn't really get into all the code. Either way, we will not know for sure until next year.

-- Darla (dnice@hgo.net), October 19, 1999.

"CACI Provides Independent Y2K Evaluation for Federal Railroad Administration, Department of Transportation"

The headline says "EVALUATION"

I wouldn't take this to mean that they actually did any fixing. They just looked at what was already done, and the result is "97.1 to 97.9, falling clearly within the very low risk category."

This would fall under IV&V, would it not?

-- J (jart5@bellsouth.net), October 19, 1999.

On the off chance y'all really want the information on this assessment, it can be downloaded at:

Year 2000 Readiness of the Four Major Freight Railroads - PDF FILE

-- Hoffmeister (hoff_meister@my-deja.com), October 19, 1999.

"On the off chance y'all really want the information on this assessment..."

From p. 6 of that CACI document:

"A three-person CACI team performed the process-oriented assessment of each railroad in a predetermined time (7-9 days). The assessment results depended entirely upon the information that the review team was able to gather from the railroad during the course of the review period through structured interviews using the CACI standard hecklist of questions and through review of the railroads Year 2000 program documentation, e.g., project plans, project status reports, contingency plans, test plans, test results, vendor product certification letters."

Tiptoeing through the tulips, as usual. Given the scale of the problem, self-reporting is probably all anyone can expect. But it seems naive to expect these large-cap stock enterprises to publish unfavorable information about their activities and prospects. It could never be in their own interest to do so.

And from p. 8, same document:

"At FRA's request, the two areas not covered, and thus outside the scope of this assessment, were a) Legal Implications, and b) Facilities and Embedded Technology."

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln...

Here's another bit of anecdotal evidence, so reprehensible, yet so fascinating. A friend of a friend of mine (sounds familiar, doesn't it!) is a systems programmer who worked on the UP-SP merger. As of last July, he said they were still having major problems getting the two management systems to work together.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), October 19, 1999.