he term Coventry, besides being a town that Winston sacrificed, is also a place you send someone to. It refers to the practice of deliberately ostracizing someone who won’t follow rules. You don’t speak to them. You don’t look at them. You freeze them out.

Recently it’s been a thought in my head. We have a member of our operations group who has a habit of berating dispatchers when he doesn’t see his “passenger” or “manifest” trains moving quickly enough. Yes, it’s nice to have all that railroady stuff when lines are under direct control (warrants and CTC) where “lessor” trains take sidings at let “elite” trains pass under direct dispatcher orders. All fine and good, but when you dispatch (and are trying to keep your head above water) it’s tough to look ahead, to spot such situations and to get trains clear. Unlike the 1:1 world, our club runs 10:1 since we want to have a session in 2.5 hours. So the dispatcher does his best and is doing air traffic control volume and suddenly this guy monopolizes the radio/phone lines, complaining incessantly and burning bandwidth.

Of course, he’s never taken the hot seat himself. But to him, it must look damn easy.

Worse, if he can’t get his way or get his priority, he sometimes runs without any dispatcher approval, just leaving a station or taking a track not assigned to him. It is blatant and frustrating to people who find him occupying single track. Then we have to untangle the mess.

The true problem is the discipline – on a home layout, it’s up to the owner to tell him he can’t come back (and most are trying to keep their head count up). And at the club, we don’t want to banish a member if we can avoid it. But he doesn’t listen to reasoning from friends – he just loses his temper and shoves off on his own permission.

So what to do?

I was talking to a young dispatcher who’d been berated by this engineer (and then suffered him running ahead and further disrupting service). The owner didn’t seem too concerned (again, headcount, and nobody wants to come down like a Tartar in what is technically an interesting multiplayer game).

And it’s going to be in my lap some day, since I run the back office more than I run trains. But Forewarned is Forearmed. I wanted  to come up with a solution so I’m not over- or under-reacting when it does happen.

If it happens to me again (it happened once and I was so surprised I let it go), I’ll put him in Coventry. Essentially I’ll tell him that he gets no more orders, no more instructions. Just run your train through the division to your end point. I’ll also call overhead and warn all the other crews about this Flying Dutchman. In essence, he will be just running a train while operations go on around him. If he tries to run another train, I’ll simply tell him to do what he wants to do. But I will not safeguard him and will not control him. He’s on his own. And I’ll let all the other area dispatchers and owners know to do likewise.

And, of course, I’ll blog the crap out of him.

But if you don’t want to play by the rules, we won’t play with you.

It’s all I can do from the corner I’ve been painted into. But it’s better than arguing away my bandwidth with a loose cannon.

So we’ll see.

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