Rising Stars 2023: Sean Fahey

Sean Fahey, 38
Deputy director of operations, planning and analysis
MTA Metro-North Railroad

Nominator’s quote: “Sean is an exemplary manager and has created a team-oriented atmosphere that encourages collaboration. His team members are flourishing due in part to his leadership qualities. Sean continually exceeds expectations and deeply cares about the railroad, our employees and our customers.” — Justin Vonashek, Metro-North Railroad, 2013 Rising Star

Education: My railroad education is continual. I have been around the railroad and railroaders my entire life. I received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Job responsibilities: Day of operations and production scheduling: All aspects of service planning, operating plan development and analysis. Annual and monthly track usage coordination: Ensuring that all major infrastructure plans that require track outage rights can be accommodated while minimizing impacts to customers. Intermodal operations and connecting services: Metro-North is unique in that we contract for two connecting ferry services across the Hudson River and local bus services in Bronx neighborhoods to extend our service reach.

Career path: At Metro-North, I started out maintaining schedule databases for customer-facing systems and assisting in public timetable production before moving to a train and equipment scheduling position in operations. Since joining scheduling in 2011, I’ve taken on a variety of roles to build my understanding of equipment and crew scheduling, outage planning, fleet management and track usage.

How did you get into the rail industry? I am from a railroad family. I graduated college during the last recession, which made finding jobs difficult. The railroad was the first to call with an offer and I jumped at the opportunity.

What is the best career advice you’ve received so far? Work for the smartest person on the railroad. Learning the railroad requires a very hands-on approach and on-the-job training. Working for someone who is very knowledgeable and willing to share knowledge has been the best career advice I have received.

What advice would you give to a new railroader? Don’t be afraid to ask questions. We don’t come into the industry knowing everything. Every question you ask is an opportunity to learn and grow.

What was your first job? On the railroad, my first position was in customer service as a technology specialist. The role involved managing the schedules on the customer-facing database systems.

Share a fun fact about yourself I coach my son’s lacrosse team.

If you could have dinner with anyone alive in the world, who would it be and why? Neil deGrasse Tyson. A funny and brilliant person. I love his podcast and I think it would be a blast.

Who has had the biggest influence on your career and why? I’ve been lucky to have many people aid my development, but the biggest influence came from Mel Corbett and Jim McCormack; combined, they had over 70 years of experience. Mel taught me the technical aspects of crew, equipment and train scheduling, and instilled a drive to find the best possible answer. Jim advised me on numerous occasions and guided my understanding of service planning policies. Early in my career, they both took the time to help me build a strong foundation. I wouldn’t be in this role today without it.

Describe a major obstacle in your career and how you surmounted it. For most of us in public transportation, I think COVID-19 dominates our thoughts regarding a major obstacle. The pandemic pushed us into hyperdrive to try and forecast ridership return, right-size schedules and monitor returning patterns.

During the pandemic, Metro-North went live, displaying car capacity data to the public. The amount of data that we were receiving and the ability to tabulate, analyze and make decisions in a very short term presented a challenge to the department. That challenge motivated me to learn programming languages and database management structures. In doing so, I was able to develop scripts using our data to recalibrate the estimated ridership figures to align with our direct observations. Leveraging a daily feed of car capacities for trains, we were able to make rapid adjustments to meet demand. This was just the beginning of advancing and automating our data analysis away from slower manual processes in Excel.