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[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

Monday December 13 6:03 PM ET

U.S. Railroads Plan Y2K Pause As a Precaution

By Tim Dobbyn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Major freight railroads and the Amtrak passenger service said on Monday they will temporarily halt operations just before midnight this New Year's Eve as a precaution against Year 2000 computer problems.

Although millions of dollars have been spent on avoiding the computer glitch, the railroads and many city subway systems are reliant on outside supplies of electricity and telecommunications and have decided to take no chances.

``We are going to take a short pause to take everything down and bring it up and make sure it all functions,'' said Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. (NYSE:BNI - news) spokesman Richard Russack.

In the nation's capital, where thousands of revelers are expected to use the Metro to come downtown for ``America's Millennium Gala,'' the trains will stop at stations with their doors open for about 10 minutes starting five minute before midnight, a spokeswoman said.

The Chicago Transit Authority plans a similar exercise just in case of problems relating to the old programming habit of allocation two digits for the year in dates. ``It's just a precaution,'' said a spokesman.

Delays on the national passenger railroad, Amtrak, may last anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour on some routes through less-populated portions of the United States, a spokesman said.

``We will stop at the biggest station along each route so that if, God forbid, anything goes wrong, we can get those people off if necessary,'' Amtrak spokesman John Wolf said.

Although Amtrak maintains its own tracks in parts of the Northeast, it is mostly reliant on right of way agreements with freight railroads such as Burlington Northern, Union Pacific Corp. (NYSE:UNP - news), CSX Corp. (NYSE:CSX - news) and Norfolk Southern Corp. (NYSE:NSC - news).

Freight traffic is traditionally light or absent on any New Year's Eve so the pause around midnight is not expected to be terribly disruptive to freight operations.

``We run very little business over the New Year's holiday anyway so we give most our employees the time off,'' said Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley.

Norfolk Southern issued advice to customers Monday that it would begin suspending operations on the afternoon of Dec. 31 and restart operations beginning with selected trains early on Jan. 1. Normal operation would resume Jan. 2.

CSX spokesman Robert Gould said the company would coordinate a brief stoppage of about 19 Amtrak trains through its system near midnight on Dec. 31. Freight operations would be unaffected.

URL:

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-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999

Answers

http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/991213/bag.html

-- LOON (blooney@aol.com), December 13, 1999.

URL: http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/9912/11/en.00.html

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), December 13, 1999.

Snooze, if the railroads had done a thorough assesment of their Y2k problems, they would not have to consider a shutdown. They obviously have not. They obviously don't KNOW where the hell they stand, and like so many other bullshitters, they will walk into the tunnel with a canary and a book of matches and see what happens. God help us.

-- doktorbob (downsouth@dixie.com), December 13, 1999.

I thought this was a 72-hour stand down.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), December 13, 1999.

This is really going to screw things up.

Shutting down computers and bringing them back up is not always the easy job it would seem. We try desperatly to keep our servers up because rebooting always seems to inject some new problem into the system. Like when someone forgets to turn off or reboot a terminal or hub.

If the power stays on it's ill concieved ideas like this that will screw us. I'm convinced that no one knows how any of this really works.

The more I learn the more ignorant I become.

-- (computer ignorant)LM (latemarch@usa.net), December 13, 1999.

LM, I'm betting that a lot, an awful lot, of sysadmins will (regardless of what they say today) take their systems down "just in case". We'll see.

-- Servant (public_service@yahoo.com), December 14, 1999.