(The following story by Maggie O’Brien appeared on the Omaha World-Herald website on November 7.)
OMAHA, Neb. — A malfunction in the Union Pacific Railroad’s computer-aided dispatch system delayed trains in seven states — including Nebraska — for about an hour Thursday evening, company officials said.
The malfunction caused the most problems for Chicago commuters heading home from work.
The system, run out of Omaha and similar to a large-scale computer server, dispatches trains in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. It went down about 5:45 p.m. and was back online about an hour later, said Mark Davis, a Union Pacific spokesman.
In the meantime, trains were manually dispatched, delaying an unknown number of freight trains in those states.
In the Chicago area, delays ranged anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.
“You have so many trains running back-to-back,” Davis said. “There may be a train every five minutes. Freight trains would not have been as impacted.”
Davis said the railroad’s information technology department was looking into what caused the problem.
“We take it very seriously,” he said. “We want to find out why the computer control unit went down.”