To: All Railroad Embargo and Permit officers
Date/Time: Thursday August 28, 2008 / 15:00 Eastern
With the impending landfall of Hurricane Gustav in the central gulf coast region in the next several days it is of great importance that all roads operating in, or via, that area be prepared for the consequences. This storm has the potential to become a major hurricane. Past history has shown the rail industry that major hurricanes in this part of the country can cause widespread damage to track, structures and our ability to serve customers in the impacted area.
Advance planning for this storm has the Railinc Embargo team prepared for the potential of having embargos issued that cover widespread geographic areas. Team members will be monitoring the situation during the holiday weekend. We request that roads with the potential to issue embargos as a result of the hurricane review their embargo processes and make sure that the embargo officers have access to the AAR Embargo and OPLS Permit System. Please verify your Embargo Officer access to the application and notify Railinc of any problems encountered or assistance that may be needed. In order to respond adequately the Railinc Embargo team would like any queries for information on issuing embargos or any problems with application access to be submitted by 5:00 pm Eastern time Friday August 29. 2008. Please send your requests via e-mail to embargo@railinc.com or contact Tracy Brewer during normal business hours at 919-651-5204: during non-business hours your queries can be directed to the Railinc Customer Support Center at 1-800-544-7245.
Be aware that there are also temporary procedures that are place when issuing an embargo where a combination of a station AND a junction point are to be included in the embargo. Those temporary instructions follow this notice.

Railinc Embargo Team

During the Mid-west flooding it came to Railinc’s attention that roads receiving XML Embargo messages are feeding these messages directly into their billing systems. As a result, they are unable to recognize when the AND condition has been applied to an Embargo. After further discussions with the roads receiving XML, Railinc will start putting the following verbiage at the beginning of the Cause Detail field upon approval of an Embargo where the AND condition has been requested.
FSACANDJUNCTION
The roads receiving XML can look for this string starting in position 1 of the Cause Detail to identify Embargoes where the AND condition has been applied.
Railinc will begin this process EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY. Until code changes have been put in place by the roads to recognize this in the XML, this verbiage in the Cause Detail field will continue to be recognized as informational.
Note: to have inclusive use of the stations and the “via” junction (the AND condition) please place the text “AND” in the comment field indicating your request for the combination of station and junction to be used when issuing the embargo. This will trigger the process to apply the embargo only to stations where traffic moves via the identified station. Exclusion of the “AND” comment will cause traffic moving to the indicated stations “OR” via the identified junctions to be embargoed independent of each other.

All Permit Officers:

When creating and/or approving Embargo Permits and when specific STC Code(s) are indicated on the Permit Input Screen; Permit Officers should note that if the STC Code(s) on the waybill (417) are different than what is indicated in the Permit Screen input, then a Tier II 'match' will NOT occur. The result is that the equipment is most likely to be placed in Embargo Hold status. This will occur even if the Embargo has been approved for all commodities. If the permit is to be approved for all commodities the STC Code field should be left blank.

Any questions please email Railinc Embargo Support at embargo_project@railinc.com.