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Mechanical and transportation department teams are helping BNSF Railway Co. reduce locomotive dwell times and boost on-time departures by improving motive power management processes, according to the “BNSF News” Web site.

Workers at terminals in Kansas City, Kan., Galesburg, Ill., and Northtown, Minn., have been working with a service excellence team to improve locomotive planning, servicing and motive power movement.

To improve planning, workers and team members have focused on clarifying plans and making them more consistent, ensuring all service track locations can update or change the motive power plan to accommodate exceptions or certain terminal opportunities, and developing a terminal-specific locomotive planning guide. In addition, service track supervisors are being trained to help manage locomotives more effectively.

In terms of motive power movement, team members and workers helped develop LOCOTERM, a new program in BNSF’s TSS Xpress that’s designed to manage locomotives in a terminal by monitoring all locomotive functions, including locations, status and hostler assignments.

Finally, to improve locomotive servicing, team members and workers have tweaked standard yard-turn processes, which can save up to four hours of dwell time. They also sought ways to cut train arrival-to-locomotive shop, shop release-to-consist build and consist build-to-train departure times. Non-shop locomotive dwell time has decreased by more than one hour at the Kansas City and Galesburg terminals. In addition, originating train on-time performance has risen to more than 90 percent.