A Message From SMART-TD Alternate Vice President and Active Yardmaster Chris Bartz
In Chicago, CSX’s move to farm out its switching operation to multiple short lines is quickly turning out to be a nightmare for all involved. But for the yardmasters at Barr Yard, this is not a new story. It is a story they lived through in 2017 and one they fear CSX is determined to repeat.
While much of the public focus has centered on furloughs and job losses, another group of railroaders finds itself at the center of this crisis: the yardmasters responsible for coordinating, directing, and managing freight movement through one of the most important rail hubs in North America. They know exactly what happens when Barr Yard is dismantled because they watched it happen before.
The Same Mistake, Nine Years Later
In 2017, under then-CEO Hunter Harrison, CSX pursued a nearly identical strategy. Operations were reduced, employees were furloughed, and traffic was diverted away from Barr Yard under the promise of greater efficiency. Instead, the result was congestion, service failures, customer frustration, and federal scrutiny.
The Surface Transportation Board eventually stepped in, and the plan ultimately had to be reversed. The railroad spent years recovering from the consequences. While operations eventually stabilized, many of the railroaders furloughed during that period never returned. Critical institutional knowledge was lost, staffing shortages lingered for years, and the railroad only recently rebuilt the workforce that had been depleted by those decisions.
Now, nine years later, CSX is once again following the same failed playbook. Traffic is being diverted to neighboring carriers, work historically performed at Barr Yard is being shifted elsewhere, and the railroads receiving that traffic are already showing signs of congestion. Delays are growing, bottlenecks are forming, and railroaders on the ground are watching management ignore lessons that were learned the hard way less than a decade ago.
Saw This Coming From the Tower
No one understands those consequences better than our SMART-TD Yardmasters. Their job is to identify problems before they become crises. They understand capacity, traffic flow, crew availability, and the practical realities of moving freight through the Chicago gateway. More importantly, they understand that railroading does not operate on spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, or executive talking points. It operates on physical infrastructure, qualified employees, available track space, and operational reality. Those realities defeated this strategy in 2017, and many railroaders believe they will do so again.
When Accountability Flows Downhill
The dilemma facing Barr Yard’s Yardmasters is both professional and personal. They are being asked to oversee the consequences of decisions they know have failed before. They are expected to make an increasingly strained operation function despite shrinking resources and mounting congestion. When transit times increase, terminals become overwhelmed, and service deteriorates, they know who will be left managing the fallout. It will not be the executives who approved the plan from corporate offices. It will be the railroaders working the property every day, attempting to keep freight moving despite circumstances they did not create. CSX is handing the Yardmasters some Vienna Sausages from a dollar store and demanding that they produce a Five-Star meal from it every shift.
The irony is difficult to ignore. CSX spent years recovering from the workforce shortages and service disruptions created by the 2017 reductions. Just as staffing levels finally began to stabilize, the company launched another round of cuts and traffic diversions that threaten to recreate the very problems it spent years trying to solve. That is why many railroaders and our union leadership are struggling to understand the logic behind the decision. This is not an untested strategy. The railroad already knows what happened the last time it tried it. How many times does a corporation the size of CSX need to burn themselves before they learn not to touch the stove?
As we all know in the railroad industry, blame for a failed plan has a way of flowing downhill. Right now, without any T&E crews to be told we are the problem, CSX management is trying to pin it on our Yardmasters. After all, all they do is manage the large scale efficiency of the entire switching operation in Chicago. The powers that be in Jacksonville conveniently remember that now as the idea is blowing up in their collective faces, but that was ignored when these same Yardmasters advised them that this whole plan was a bad idea that would be doomed from the start.
History Is Warning CSX Again
SMART-TD members are not opposing change simply because we dislike change. We are opposing a strategy because we have already seen the outcome. We witnessed the furloughs, the congestion, the customer dissatisfaction, and the years-long struggle to rebuild our workforce that never fully recovered. We watched the railroad reverse course only after substantial damage had already been done. The concern today is not based on speculation. It is based on lived experience.
The Yardmasters at Barr Yard do not have the luxury of ignoring history. They remember every delay, every overwhelmed terminal, every experienced railroader who left out of frustration and never returned, and every customer who lost confidence in the railroad’s service. They understand that repeating a failed strategy does not make it innovative. It simply makes the consequences predictable.
The question now is whether CSX is willing to learn from its own history. Because if the railroad continues down this path, the consequences will not be surprising. They are foreseeable, avoidable, and entirely self-inflicted. The Yardmasters of Barr Yard have already seen this movie before. They know how it ends, and they are warning everyone willing to listen before history repeats itself once again.
While SMART-TD and the shippers in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and the rest of the country that are being hurt by this decision wait on CSX to swallow their pride and re-re-re change their course, the managers of that railroad should find a new scapegoat. Our Yardmasters are doing everything in their power to untangle the mess the executives made here. If CSX expects our Yardmasters to pull a David Copperfield move to make this disaster look better on paper, SMART-TD would be more than happy to show the receipts from when these same brothers and sisters respectfully asked you not to make this mistake in the first place.
Chris Bartz
SMART-TD Alternate Vice President
Local 1976 (St. Paul, Minn.)
