2012 MATC Fall Lecture Series: David Connell

Larissa Sazama Author

11/08/2017 Added

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2012 MATC Fall Lecture Series

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[00:00:02.175]Thank you all for coming to both
[00:00:04.148]the University of Nebraska Lincoln and at the remote sites.
[00:00:07.733]It's my pleasure to introduce David Connell
[00:00:11.822]who's regional vice president of operations
[00:00:13.828]for the northern region of Union Pacific.
[00:00:17.018]He's worked in the railway industry for about 30 years
[00:00:19.215]at a variety of jobs including
[00:00:21.569]vice president for engineering,
[00:00:23.340]assistant vice president for construction,
[00:00:25.032]chief engineer of maintenance.
[00:00:26.599]So a great wealth of experience.
[00:00:29.103]He has a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering,
[00:00:31.822]the crafty engineering degree
[00:00:33.831]from North Carolina State University
[00:00:36.320]and has attended Harvard Business School.
[00:00:38.563]He serves on a number of committees.
[00:00:40.002]Chair of the Association of American Railways,
[00:00:41.730]head of the Axle Committee.
[00:00:43.430]A member of the Railway Technology Working Committee
[00:00:45.201]of Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo.
[00:00:48.190]He's a governor in the American Railway,
[00:00:50.007]Engineering and Maintenance Association or REMA.
[00:00:52.329]And I know a lot of the students and faculty
[00:00:53.921]have gone to that meeting in the past couple years.
[00:00:56.492]And from our perspective most importantly
[00:00:58.761]he's part of our Master Advisors Board.
[00:01:00.686]We appreciate his service on that.
[00:01:03.016]He's married to his wife Barbara
[00:01:04.398]and they have three grown children.
[00:01:05.948]So David we're looking forward to your talk and thank you.
[00:01:08.859]Well very good, thanks.
[00:01:10.917]Thanks, Larry and Valerie.
[00:01:13.495]Good to be with everybody today.
[00:01:14.492]I'm gonna talk to you about a subject today
[00:01:16.832]that I don't spend a lot of time talking about,
[00:01:19.433]'cause it's not really part of our core business.
[00:01:21.807]But it is a topic that it is a lot of interest I think
[00:01:25.843]to the folks in the room here as well as online.
[00:01:28.733]And that is the high speed project that Union Pacific
[00:01:31.338]has been participating with,
[00:01:33.664]with the Illinois DOT And FRA,
[00:01:39.102]through the stimulus funds that the administration
[00:01:42.223]released several years ago to support high speed rail.
[00:01:47.613]What I want to talk about to you today,
[00:01:50.169]I'm gonna talk a little bit about
[00:01:51.002]US passenger train history.
[00:01:53.525]Obviously,
[00:01:55.554]many of you probably on the phone have never
[00:01:57.343]ridden a passenger train, but that surely wouldn't
[00:01:59.240]have been the case
[00:02:00.884]if you had grown up 40 or 50 years ago.
[00:02:05.289]Gonna talk about the high speed rail stimulus,
[00:02:08.075]just to get everybody grounded on how that came to be.
[00:02:11.814]And then we'll get into quite a bit of detail
[00:02:13.288]on the Illinois high speed rail project,
[00:02:16.223]how we designed it, how we've built it,
[00:02:18.925]what the status is and how we're gonna be moving forward.
[00:02:25.136]All right, so when did people travel by train?
[00:02:27.066]When you look back in the heydays
[00:02:28.497]of passenger travel by rail back in the 1910s to
[00:02:35.080]really the late 1940s.
[00:02:37.730]It surely is a different layout today,
[00:02:39.819]but in 1940, close to 67% of all travel was by rail,
[00:02:46.196]of inner city travel.
[00:02:47.627]You can see in World War II the railroads
[00:02:49.377]played a huge part in moving troops.
[00:02:51.899]Nearly all troops moved by rail to get from
[00:02:54.889]hometown America to training camps, to port facilities.
[00:03:01.498]But when you look from 1944 to where we are today,
[00:03:05.771]most of those passenger miles have gone away.
[00:03:10.213]And what's really caused that?
[00:03:11.576]It's really three things.
[00:03:12.574]Number one, it's the Eisenhower interstate system
[00:03:15.340]that came into being
[00:03:18.225]in the '50s through the '70s.
[00:03:22.446]The US love affair coming out of World War II
[00:03:24.585]with the automobile,
[00:03:26.657]surely took people off the rails.
[00:03:29.748]And,
[00:03:31.464]the railroads lost the US Mail contract
[00:03:35.699]in the late '60s that really took a lot of revenue
[00:03:40.024]off of these passenger trains.
[00:03:43.094]And that was really the beginning of the end at that point.
[00:03:47.555]So, then came along Amtrak.
[00:03:50.215]So like I said throughout the 1960s the railroads were,
[00:03:56.371]wanted out of the passenger business just because
[00:03:59.104]it was not lucrative for,
[00:04:01.256]for their operations any longer.
[00:04:03.732]And came along Amtrak with the
[00:04:06.170]Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970.
[00:04:10.465]The freight railroads as I said wanted to get out
[00:04:13.159]of the passenger business, donated most all
[00:04:16.195]of their passenger equipment
[00:04:19.046]to the newly formed Amtrak
[00:04:24.089]branch of the government.
[00:04:28.199]And the freight railroads at that time were required
[00:04:30.869]to grant Amtrak access to their tracks.
[00:04:34.945]And
[00:04:36.259]actually give them priority over their own trains,
[00:04:38.918]and that continues today.
[00:04:41.367]So today's Amtrak you see the route structure here.
[00:04:44.627]Big inner city passenger lines across the north,
[00:04:48.078]two across the mid-part of the country,
[00:04:49.727]and across the sunset route and of course
[00:04:53.815]what you hear most about with Amtrak
[00:04:55.447]is the Northeast quarter from Boston down to Washington
[00:04:58.325]that they actually own, operate and maintain.
[00:05:01.998]And then there's several lines
[00:05:04.763]that crisscross the East Coast, north south as well.
[00:05:08.494]22, 000 miles of route structure for Amtrak,
[00:05:12.670]but most all of that as you can see
[00:05:14.801]is on the freight rail roads' lines.
[00:05:20.449]But Union Pacific is really no stranger to passenger service
[00:05:24.809]before this project that we're doing in Illinois.
[00:05:28.257]We handle about
[00:05:30.820]650,000 passengers a week
[00:05:36.541]along
[00:05:38.569]various commuter services that use our tracks,
[00:05:43.951]around the system.
[00:05:44.808]Chicago being the biggest over a half a million
[00:05:47.828]riders a week,
[00:05:49.428]commute to and from the suburbs into the city
[00:05:52.559]on one of three Union Pacific lines.
[00:05:55.758]That is on our route structure,
[00:05:58.089]that is operated by our crews,
[00:06:01.499]with Metra equipment.
[00:06:03.711]The other three big commuter opportunities
[00:06:05.638]that Union Pacific plays in,
[00:06:09.477]are in California, there's two in the bay area,
[00:06:13.173]Capital Quarter as well as ACE.
[00:06:16.395]And then Metrolink usages our trackage down
[00:06:18.972]in the Los Angeles basin.
[00:06:21.095]So overall you see Amtrak hauls about
[00:06:23.765]90,000 passengers a week on us.
[00:06:26.656]And when you couple that to our commuter business
[00:06:29.335]it's close to 3/4 of a million routers a week
[00:06:32.560]that UP's handling.
[00:06:33.515]So we're really no stranger to passenger rail.
[00:06:35.544]It's a different, very much different
[00:06:37.034]business than freight rail.
[00:06:40.794]But we do fairly well at it.
[00:06:44.605]All right, so we're gonna talk about high speed rail
[00:06:46.695]and you saw the name of the presentation
[00:06:48.854]was really higher speed rail,
[00:06:50.535]because for those of us who have traveled to Asia
[00:06:52.996]and traveled to Europe, you've really experienced
[00:06:54.863]real high speed rail.
[00:06:55.821]And it's much faster than 110 miles per hour.
[00:06:59.733]But Amtrack today, for the most part in this country,
[00:07:01.695]runs as fast as class four speeds allow them to run,
[00:07:05.814]which is 79 miles per hour.
[00:07:09.456]But when you compare that to what they can run
[00:07:11.160]in the Northeast Quarter,
[00:07:13.154]at 150 miles per high with their Acela service.
[00:07:16.466]And then with the various
[00:07:20.015]high speed trains in Europe and Asia
[00:07:22.935]that are for the most part around 200 miles per hour.
[00:07:27.695]Although the speed record is much higher than that
[00:07:30.136]with the TGV that was accomplished here
[00:07:33.765]recently at 357 miles per hour.
[00:07:36.319]So 110 and 357,
[00:07:39.776]didn't really seem right to call that high speed.
[00:07:42.606]But it's definitely, it will make a difference.
[00:07:46.245]And it does require us to build a railroad
[00:07:48.370]much differently even for 110.
[00:07:51.355]The big difference in these operations
[00:07:55.287]greater than 110,
[00:07:57.876]the railroads we really believe that you got to have
[00:08:00.229]a dedicated quarter to do that for many reasons,
[00:08:03.727]namely for
[00:08:05.653]neighbor safety, trespasser safety,
[00:08:08.684]as well as train to train safety.
[00:08:10.610]When you get faster than 110, we don't believe that
[00:08:14.652]those two traffics mix very efficiently
[00:08:17.833]or safely with one another.
[00:08:21.313]All right, so.
[00:08:22.640]Let's go on and move onto the really the creation
[00:08:25.644]of the High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program.
[00:08:29.187]This was President Obama's
[00:08:32.741]American, or part of President Obama's
[00:08:35.042]American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
[00:08:37.664]Otherwise known as the Stimulus.
[00:08:41.052]High speed rail
[00:08:43.024]received eight billion dollars,
[00:08:45.810]back in 2009 I believe.
[00:08:49.794]And it was created to address the nation's
[00:08:51.734]transportation challenges by making strategic investments
[00:08:54.648]and a vision network of passenger rail quarters
[00:08:56.778]that connect communities across the country.
[00:09:00.172]You see the map, the map are those quarters
[00:09:02.892]that have some plans against them,
[00:09:05.391]some much further along than the other.
[00:09:08.192]We're gonna be talking about Chicago to St. Louis today
[00:09:11.097]in much more detail.
[00:09:14.588]But there's also quarters underway
[00:09:18.478]in North Carolina, there's quarters underway
[00:09:22.242]in California that, its really much more like
[00:09:25.128]true high speed rail.
[00:09:29.119]If that project gets off the ground.
[00:09:33.082]Okay, so now we're gonna kind of drill in
[00:09:34.627]into the Illinois High Speed Rail Project.
[00:09:37.344]Talk a little bit about what it's about and why.
[00:09:41.463]We were approached by the
[00:09:42.418]Illinois Department of Transportation back in mid-2009
[00:09:46.963]about whether we would be interested in cooperating
[00:09:49.590]with their project of running 110 mile an hour traffic
[00:09:53.540]between Chicago and St. Louis.
[00:09:56.185]That is a quarter that we have operated
[00:09:58.582]since our merger, it was a former,
[00:10:01.554]former Illinois central line
[00:10:04.117]that went short line that became a part
[00:10:06.241]of the Southern Pacific network.
[00:10:08.258]And then we acquired it with our merger
[00:10:09.773]with the Southern Pacific back in 1996.
[00:10:13.541]The purpose of the project was to,
[00:10:15.251]or is to enhance the passenger transportation
[00:10:17.014]obviously between those two cities.
[00:10:19.352]The immediate benefit was the job creation
[00:10:21.528]of over 1,200 jobs.
[00:10:23.960]Of passenger trains running 110 it's important
[00:10:26.189]for me to mention here that the Union Pacific
[00:10:28.928]will continue to operate our freight trains
[00:10:31.449]at the existing speed which is at 60 miles per hour.
[00:10:36.000]But the faster trains, the more reliable infrastructure
[00:10:38.981]should drive increased ridership.
[00:10:40.599]Their forecast is close to 70% increase in ridership.
[00:10:44.298]Should drive travel time between the two cities
[00:10:46.530]down between 45 and about 55 minutes.
[00:10:50.060]Should take a few cars off Route 66 and the Interstate 55.
[00:10:55.559]There's a lot of benefit to,
[00:10:58.520]all the communities along the line,
[00:11:01.242]all of their great crossings were upgraded
[00:11:03.840]as part of this project.
[00:11:05.010]That's pretty much been done now.
[00:11:07.651]And they'll be a side benefit of a better passenger
[00:11:10.989]experience with new rolling stock on these train sets.
[00:11:14.812]Overall the project is right now funded
[00:11:16.971]at 1.5 billion dollars.
[00:11:19.348]And we spent somewhere around 1/4 of a million,
[00:11:22.680]1/4 of a billion to date
[00:11:25.220]on the upgrades that we've done.
[00:11:26.450]And I'll tell you about what those include.
[00:11:31.001]All right, so status quo on this line between
[00:11:33.534]Chicago and St. Louis,
[00:11:36.216]we call the SPSL which was
[00:11:39.057]from its original heritage of the Southern Pacific
[00:11:42.111]and the Short Line name.
[00:11:44.281]But the status quo is that it currently operates
[00:11:47.264]four, state supported train pairs at 79 miles per hour
[00:11:51.155]that run completely between Chicago and St. Louis
[00:11:54.335]at different times during the day.
[00:11:55.761]And it supports the Texas Eagle Amtrack train
[00:11:59.415]that runs between Chicago and San Antonio
[00:12:02.158]on this route as well, and it runs 79 miles per hour.
[00:12:08.197]When this project is done
[00:12:10.310]three of the four trains will be running
[00:12:11.965]at 110 miles per hour, one will continue at 79,
[00:12:15.767]and the Texas Eagle will continue at 79 miles per hour.
[00:12:23.050]All right, so let's get into a little bit more detail
[00:12:24.520]all about how the project lines out.
[00:12:27.909]What you see in the top right is downtown Chicago.
[00:12:31.855]This route between Chicago and St. Louis
[00:12:34.675]runs over the Canadian National Railroad
[00:12:36.923]for about 35 miles between downtown Chicago
[00:12:40.118]and Joliet, to where it then
[00:12:42.726]transitions over to Union Pacific ownership.
[00:12:46.253]And our ownership precedes
[00:12:48.338]all the way down to really the river crossing
[00:12:51.168]at St. Louis for the most part.
[00:12:55.395]Overall it's 847 million dollars of investment
[00:12:59.770]that will happening on UP to facilitate class six track
[00:13:02.742]and 110 mile per hour operation.
[00:13:07.076]It involves 266 miles of track rehab,
[00:13:09.550]you can see where we're gonna be rebuilding 15 sidings
[00:13:12.395]at proper spacing,
[00:13:14.394]we'll build 36 miles of second main track
[00:13:16.886]to give us the additional capacity needed
[00:13:19.350]to allow these faster train sets
[00:13:22.431]and not interfere with our freight operation.
[00:13:25.596]Multiple bridges will have to be rebuilt,
[00:13:27.807]nearly all the bridges will be rebuilt along this line.
[00:13:31.334]And we're gonna be installing PTC
[00:13:33.781]that will be a requirement for operating anything faster
[00:13:36.414]than 90 mile per hour, although there is another way
[00:13:38.503]we're doing that short term that I'll talk about
[00:13:40.171]with you in just a minute.
[00:13:42.411]So what have we done to date?
[00:13:43.244]217 track miles of new rail's already been installed,
[00:13:46.289]50 new turn outs have been put in,
[00:13:48.922]27 bridge structures have been replaced,
[00:13:51.023]235 new road crossings.
[00:13:53.388]And like I said close to a 1/4 of billion dollars
[00:13:55.656]invested through this year.
[00:13:57.631]You see the schematic as to what we have already completed.
[00:14:02.011]Pretty much the track has been rehabilitated.
[00:14:04.531]The single main track, the existing single main track
[00:14:07.217]has been rehabilitated, all the way from Joliet
[00:14:10.524]all the way down to Bloomington, Bloomington, Normal.
[00:14:14.077]A big ridership
[00:14:16.218]location for Amtrack with the university there at Normal.
[00:14:20.587]And then everything down from Bloomington
[00:14:21.919]through Springfield,
[00:14:24.246]all the way down to,
[00:14:26.627]really to the bridge at St. Louis.
[00:14:28.208]Now there is a portion in here around the KCS,
[00:14:32.866]we jointly operate the railroad,
[00:14:35.275]the double track railroad between want and St. Louis
[00:14:38.012]with the Kansas City Southern railroad.
[00:14:40.334]And negotiations are still ongoing with the KCS
[00:14:44.025]and the state of Illinois on
[00:14:47.226]working out an agreement for high speed rail
[00:14:49.575]over their route between those two places.
[00:14:54.313]Okay, so that's kind of a high level look
[00:14:56.016]at the project, where we are with it, the scope.
[00:15:00.255]Let's talk a little bit about track design.
[00:15:03.757]This is a corridor that lends itself very nicely
[00:15:07.832]to high speed rail for the most part,
[00:15:10.169]it's a straight as an arrow railroad.
[00:15:12.558]215 miles are tangent,
[00:15:14.090]there's 29 miles of curve, most of it's on the south end.
[00:15:18.297]So how do we deal with the curves?
[00:15:21.468]Obviously curve speed is set by degree of curve
[00:15:24.105]and set by elevation.
[00:15:26.722]And at the risk of talking beneath some of you,
[00:15:29.159]I'm gonna tell you a little bit about
[00:15:30.028]how we elevate railroad curves.
[00:15:32.706]It's not exactly how we elevate highway curves.
[00:15:38.008]We actually superelevate curves somewhere between
[00:15:41.137]zero and about five inches,
[00:15:43.280]we don't typically like to go anymore than five inches
[00:15:45.436]because when you get much more than five
[00:15:49.215]and the train goes under speed there's so much weight
[00:15:51.553]thrown on the low rail it can make
[00:15:53.580]for an instable situation.
[00:15:56.785]So for the most part we don't want to go above five,
[00:15:59.488]we really don't want to go above four in lots of cases.
[00:16:02.510]But we will on exception.
[00:16:07.042]For the most part highways are elevated to equilibrium.
[00:16:11.205]So at a balanced speed on the rails,
[00:16:13.976]we very seldom elevate a freight railroad to equilibrium,
[00:16:17.823]just because there's so much variation and speed
[00:16:20.400]that would produce way too many over balance situations
[00:16:24.952]to where there's too much weight riding on the low rail.
[00:16:30.346]For the most part our standard at UP is that
[00:16:32.336]we'll elevate track to two inches,
[00:16:34.615]less elevation, then equilibrium.
[00:16:39.138]The federal government allows us to go up to three inches
[00:16:42.385]on a freight equipment set.
[00:16:44.640]But with passenger sets we can sometimes go
[00:16:47.566]as much as five inches.
[00:16:49.509]That equipment can handle five inches
[00:16:51.776]with a waiver from the FRA.
[00:16:54.083]We pretty much have,
[00:16:56.825]currently UP has a way of where four inches,
[00:16:59.459]pretty much for all Amtrack equipment now.
[00:17:02.158]So how we've elevated this railroad,
[00:17:04.652]we've elevated freight for equilibrium
[00:17:07.245]which is gonna cause us some risk with under speed trains.
[00:17:10.993]And we hope with the reliability of this infrastructure
[00:17:12.941]and the signal system that we won't see
[00:17:14.398]too many under speed trains.
[00:17:15.686]We'll power them up sufficiently.
[00:17:18.907]We're gonna elevate for 110 mile per hour
[00:17:21.371]at four inches in balance.
[00:17:23.238]So there's four inches less elevation
[00:17:26.922]than equilibrium and that will dictate
[00:17:29.971]the passenger speed.
[00:17:31.894]For the most part
[00:17:35.910]I think 20,
[00:17:38.198]about 20 miles of that 29 miles
[00:17:40.575]will be still at 110 miles per hour, all right?
[00:17:45.418]Okay.
[00:17:46.426]So let's move on to a little bit about what we're
[00:17:48.401]building this railroad out of.
[00:17:51.720]Obviously you've seen that we're gonna built it
[00:17:53.973]out of concrete track.
[00:17:55.289]We believe at UP that concrete track
[00:17:57.027]will consistently hold the integrity of these line
[00:17:59.423]much better than it would over the long term.
[00:18:03.722]The entire route will be constructed with concrete ties.
[00:18:08.236]Elastic fasteners, for those people that aren't
[00:18:10.417]that familiar with rails,
[00:18:12.293]these are these curly Q clips that actually put
[00:18:14.675]a spring load down on the base of the rail
[00:18:17.335]that pushes on the rail seat that actually holds the rail
[00:18:20.810]laterally as well as that friction holds
[00:18:23.732]the rail longitudinally.
[00:18:26.053]136 pound rail, that's 136 pounds every yard,
[00:18:30.103]every three feet.
[00:18:30.936]This is a cross section of 136 pound rail.
[00:18:34.380]We separate our signal system circuits
[00:18:36.685]with glued, mechanical insulated joints,
[00:18:39.574]that is a picture of one here
[00:18:41.295]in the bottom left of your screen.
[00:18:44.249]And what you see is one of the great crossings
[00:18:46.842]after the upgrading that the public enjoy
[00:18:51.225]because it is a fairly smooth transition
[00:18:53.835]from highway to highway.
[00:18:58.139]So turn outs.
[00:18:59.039]How do we get the train from one track to the other?
[00:19:01.124]We are using a different type turnout there
[00:19:03.534]that is made for enhanced ride quality.
[00:19:06.682]These are number 24, which is a 24 to one ratio
[00:19:10.124]on the frog angle, that's what a number 24 turnout,
[00:19:12.587]or what any number turnout means.
[00:19:15.135]It is a semi-tangential design,
[00:19:17.586]which means it has very long, thin switch points that
[00:19:22.349]sometimes are tough to maintain
[00:19:24.736]with the various kinds of wheel profiles that we have
[00:19:27.207]in the freight environment, but we think
[00:19:28.816]we're gonna be successful here in maintaining those
[00:19:31.903]long, thin switch points,
[00:19:34.114]so the coffee doesn't spill when they take the turnout.
[00:19:37.948]We'll primarily use these at all of our siding
[00:19:40.079]and double track locations,
[00:19:42.221]we'll use smaller turnouts in all of our other
[00:19:43.956]industry operations that break off the main track.
[00:19:48.820]And this is,
[00:19:50.875]center, middle bottom of the slide is what we call
[00:19:54.612]in-tie switch rodding.
[00:19:56.923]So this is a switch machine.
[00:19:59.050]This is actually what throws the switch points out here
[00:20:02.325]and moves them from one track to the other.
[00:20:05.239]And for the most part, they usually fall in this crib.
[00:20:09.425]The crib is the area of ballast in between two ties.
[00:20:13.761]We at UP on high tonnage turnouts have a design here
[00:20:17.442]to where these rods are actually embedded
[00:20:19.558]in a trough-like steel tie.
[00:20:23.662]And what that allows us to do is when our
[00:20:26.063]tampers come through in raising and leveling
[00:20:28.400]and lining the track, that they can span this tie here
[00:20:32.827]and tamp it just like any other tie.
[00:20:34.909]And we can have
[00:20:36.575]improved track support in this critical area of a switch.
[00:20:41.837]This is not unique to this line,
[00:20:43.922]it is unique pretty much to Union Pacific in
[00:20:46.927]pretty much all our turnouts that carry over,
[00:20:50.367]I think it's 50 million gross tons a year,
[00:20:52.937]use this design.
[00:20:56.551]All right, so how did we built it?
[00:20:58.022]We just talked about what we built it with,
[00:20:59.659]this is how we did it.
[00:21:01.667]Well first of all let me say,
[00:21:02.966]this is how we're dividing up who's doing what
[00:21:04.770]as far as the project.
[00:21:05.962]UP responsible for,
[00:21:07.924]for all the infrastructure other than,
[00:21:10.652]basically stations and platforms.
[00:21:13.116]All the track, all the bridges, all the signal systems.
[00:21:16.698]We're proud that back in,
[00:21:19.497]back in 2010 when we got the green light
[00:21:21.720]from Illinois to proceed with the work,
[00:21:24.996]that within six weeks from the ink on that page
[00:21:27.146]we were out actually installing and rehabbing track
[00:21:31.933]with our forces.
[00:21:35.495]First stimulus related high speed rail project
[00:21:37.218]to go to construction anywhere in the country.
[00:21:39.851]It has also benefited
[00:21:41.913]from various states like Florida and Wisconsin
[00:21:44.758]pulling out of the high speed arena.
[00:21:46.415]And this project has grown in scope because of that.
[00:21:50.018]You can see in 2010, 76 miles, 120 miles in 2011
[00:21:54.560]and close to 50 miles so far this year
[00:21:57.681]have been upgraded with what we call
[00:22:00.481]the TRT 909 machine and I'll tell you a little bit
[00:22:02.469]more about it here in the next slide.
[00:22:06.713]So.
[00:22:08.348]TRT, Track Renewal Train.
[00:22:10.590]The Track Renewal Train converts wood tie track
[00:22:12.902]to concrete tie track at a rate of about two miles a day.
[00:22:17.165]So far that machine has done over 237 miles
[00:22:20.413]of wood track converted to concrete track,
[00:22:23.611]installed north of 600,000 concrete ties with that,
[00:22:27.041]over a million tons of ballast, 234 road crossings
[00:22:29.686]and I've already talked about the switches.
[00:22:33.339]Do you want to play that again?
[00:22:34.475]Yeah.
[00:22:36.901]We're gonna run through this video one more time
[00:22:38.790]for the benefit of the folks online.
[00:22:41.855]Again this is our TRT 909 machine
[00:22:43.953]that hopefully comes to life here
[00:22:46.139]in a second in the bottom right hand corner.
[00:22:51.671]This si the machine that takes out wood tie track
[00:22:54.833]on one end and leaves concrete track behind it,
[00:22:57.535]dropping one tie at a time,
[00:22:59.355]laying the rails in place on the rail seat,
[00:23:01.689]installing the clips after the rail is heated
[00:23:04.093]to the proper temperature.
[00:23:05.420]So on hot summer days we don't have issues in Illinois.
[00:23:09.257]Top left is the finished product.
[00:23:10.645]We're very proud of it.
[00:23:11.826]It's some of the best track in the country.
[00:23:18.238]This is a little shot of before and after.
[00:23:20.522]Top left is what the class four railroad looked like,
[00:23:23.451]good for 60 mile per hour.
[00:23:25.424]For freight trains, good for 79 mile per hour
[00:23:28.262]for passenger trains.
[00:23:30.479]And the bottom left is the finished product.
[00:23:32.523]That's a class six railroad,
[00:23:34.566]good for 110 mile per hour passenger trains,
[00:23:38.157]but still we're only running
[00:23:43.793]60 mile an hour freight trains.
[00:23:45.814]One thing to note here is that UP takes on
[00:23:47.522]the maintenance responsibility
[00:23:48.630]with this upgraded track for class six,
[00:23:51.053]with all the enhanced signaling,
[00:23:52.945]without really realizing any substantial operating
[00:23:55.587]benefit to our core business which is freight.
[00:24:01.098]All right I'm gonna talk a little bit about now,
[00:24:02.498]about the signal infrastructure.
[00:24:03.995]It's very different on this project,
[00:24:05.102]especially when it comes to road crossings.
[00:24:08.294]The signal portion of this project
[00:24:13.475]included overlaying the existing signal system
[00:24:15.787]which was a CTC, centralized traffic control,
[00:24:20.095]dispatched, sidings every 12, 15 miles,
[00:24:24.146]controlled by a dispatcher in Omaha.
[00:24:26.362]Which is where all of our dispatching happens.
[00:24:30.475]Install necessary great crossing warning devices,
[00:24:32.728]that's flashing lights, gates,
[00:24:34.814]on the over 200 public crossings,
[00:24:37.527]and 25 field to field and 14 private,
[00:24:40.261]which are usually driveway
[00:24:42.125]going to business type scenarios.
[00:24:45.967]So there are gates on all private field crossings,
[00:24:48.396]what you see here, this is a corn field
[00:24:50.188]or a bean field this was about three weeks ago.
[00:24:53.228]There's not too many bean fields on our railroad
[00:24:54.920]that we actually have crossing warning devices,
[00:24:56.951]so the tractor doesn't run out in front of the train,
[00:24:59.038]but we will do it on this line
[00:25:00.294]because of the high speed train sets.
[00:25:03.736]On all public crossings what you see here
[00:25:05.798]are what we call four quad gates.
[00:25:07.618]And these are gates that actually come down on both sides,
[00:25:09.775]that actually block any egress into the crossing
[00:25:13.703]when a train approach is detected.
[00:25:17.973]And you can see there are signs posted here
[00:25:20.302]that try to warn the public
[00:25:22.678]that there's a really fast train coming,
[00:25:24.521]you need to respect the situation.
[00:25:28.062]So let me tall you a little bit how that technology works.
[00:25:32.122]This is what we call,
[00:25:34.448]ITCS, I think that's called intermediate
[00:25:36.295]train control system.
[00:25:37.608]It was first used up on Michigan.
[00:25:40.298]But this is the four quad gates here
[00:25:42.133]that protect all access into the crossing.
[00:25:45.214]Conventionally, that's usually a quarter mile away,
[00:25:48.196]is how long that track circuit goes to provide the public
[00:25:50.784]20 seconds warning time before the train arrives.
[00:25:54.873]Because of these high speeds,
[00:25:57.591]the state of Illinois and the
[00:26:00.263]Public Utility Commission there,
[00:26:02.609]wanted much longer warning time.
[00:26:05.191]And what that set out is that 80 seconds warning time
[00:26:08.535]and 2.4 miles out when this crossing first learns
[00:26:12.475]that there's a train approaching.
[00:26:14.849]Now that's problematic,
[00:26:16.307]because a track, we did not want to have
[00:26:18.251]to go in and put track circuit in that long.
[00:26:21.278]There's a frequency that rides on both rails today
[00:26:23.335]in modern great crossings,
[00:26:25.394]as soon as that track circuit is shunted
[00:26:27.717]it actually looks at it, predicts the speed of the train,
[00:26:30.266]and knows when to lower the gates.
[00:26:32.663]There's lots of things that can go wrong
[00:26:34.037]on a track circuit as long as 2.4 miles,
[00:26:36.024]there'd have to be lots of repeaters.
[00:26:37.608]So how this technology works
[00:26:39.441]is there, with GPS there is a radio signal that is sent
[00:26:43.289]at that GPS location to the crossing,
[00:26:46.450]that an equipped train, which is one that's running
[00:26:49.567]faster than 80 mile per hour,
[00:26:51.067]hopefully somewhere around 105, 110,
[00:26:53.516]that I am approaching you
[00:26:56.253]start to activate.
[00:26:57.570]At that point the crossing activates,
[00:27:00.004]provided that there's no vehicle in the area.
[00:27:03.951]And it will beam back to the locomotive,
[00:27:07.887]electronically via radio, that the crossing is activated,
[00:27:11.148]there's no vehicle inside of it,
[00:27:12.982]everything looks healthy, come on at full speed.
[00:27:16.063]If there is something wrong with a gate that's hung up,
[00:27:19.410]a broken gate, a gate that's,
[00:27:22.978]that is not completely down,
[00:27:24.669]or there's a vehicle backed up on the crossing,
[00:27:26.965]because a lot of this railroad is next to Route 66.
[00:27:31.789]That it will send a signal to the train
[00:27:34.219]and actually have it start to slow down
[00:27:36.247]to where it can approach the crossing prepared to stop.
[00:27:38.981]This is much different technology
[00:27:40.883]that we use in the rest of the railroad
[00:27:42.817]as far as
[00:27:44.329]outside the normal 1/4 mile 20 second warning time.
[00:27:49.648]All right Positive Train Control.
[00:27:51.803]You've probably heard a lot about that,
[00:27:54.171]we call it affectionately PTC.
[00:27:56.057]It's the unfunded mandate that we got
[00:27:58.085]from the Rail Safety Act that all came from,
[00:28:00.957]or the straw that broke the camel's back was a collision,
[00:28:05.357]back in 2006, I believe it was, in Chatsworth, California.
[00:28:10.561]To where an engineer on a Metrolink commuter train
[00:28:15.268]was texting when he left the station to a friend,
[00:28:18.978]completely missed the wayside signal,
[00:28:22.393]and collided with one of our Union Pacific freight trains
[00:28:25.444]coming around the curve at great loss of life.
[00:28:29.951]So we've been mandated to install positive train control
[00:28:32.290]over the majority of our network now.
[00:28:34.030]By the end of 2015.
[00:28:37.214]It does rely on GIS as well as the existing signal system.
[00:28:42.166]So there will be
[00:28:43.849]all of our locomotives that at least
[00:28:45.784]the lead locomotive on the train
[00:28:47.198]will be equipped with special technology.
[00:28:49.350]When the process of equipment our wayside signals,
[00:28:52.697]with radios and different equipment that can radio
[00:28:55.918]and be in constant communication with the train.
[00:28:58.132]This signal aspect will be radioed back to the cab.
[00:29:02.626]And a proper breaking curve and a warning curve
[00:29:05.970]will be calculated to prevent this train,
[00:29:08.506]engineer willing or not,
[00:29:09.960]will not be able to go by this signal with PTC.
[00:29:14.747]This is gonna be required, and I think you're gonna
[00:29:16.431]have a followup presentation on this subject
[00:29:18.865]in much more detail later on in this lecture series.
[00:29:23.346]But we will have to use PTC over all of this line
[00:29:27.538]for all trains operating on this line.
[00:29:29.931]But you may have noticed on a previous slide I said
[00:29:32.480]we're gonna be using cab signals.
[00:29:34.653]Cab signals is an older technology
[00:29:36.514]that does allow the rails,
[00:29:38.883]railroads to run faster than 90 mile per hour today.
[00:29:43.381]And that is actually there's a circuit running
[00:29:45.931]in the rails.
[00:29:47.317]There's pick up devices on the locomotive
[00:29:49.576]that actually give this signal
[00:29:51.969]and the current signal in the block
[00:29:54.025]a display in the cab of the locomotive.
[00:29:55.832]So we're gonna be installing cab signals
[00:29:57.762]on the pilot project, which I'm gonna get into now
[00:30:02.446]on this high speed line.
[00:30:05.022]So the first Hi-Speed Segment's going in between
[00:30:07.051]Dwight and Pontiac, Illinois.
[00:30:09.194]It's around a little bit north of 15 miles
[00:30:11.079]this is the demonstration segment.
[00:30:13.603]It is set to cut over within a couple of weeks.
[00:30:17.161]We did run a VIP train about three weeks ago now,
[00:30:22.500]on October 19th,
[00:30:25.219]with the secretary of transportation,
[00:30:27.689]the governor, the
[00:30:28.838]FRA administrator as well as many other folks
[00:30:31.214]that were stakeholders in this project.
[00:30:34.506]And it was a successful trip
[00:30:37.763]over this 15 miles at 110 miles per hour.
[00:30:41.674]What we had to do to get ready for this,
[00:30:43.134]there was 14 great crossings in this 15 miles,
[00:30:45.582]we had to put
[00:30:46.545]various right of way fencings up in the small towns
[00:30:48.787]to keep folks from casually walking across the tracks.
[00:30:51.307]We want to funnel them into these pedestrian crossings here
[00:30:54.806]that actually have gates for the sidewalk itself.
[00:31:00.348]And,
[00:31:01.181]extensive coordination we've done along this project
[00:31:03.457]with IDOT, with local municipalities,
[00:31:06.755]with the ICC in Illinois.
[00:31:08.282]I can't say how great a partner IDOT has been with us
[00:31:11.183]in this project,
[00:31:12.780]and the FRA's worked very well to make this happen,
[00:31:15.569]very, very quickly when you think a project
[00:31:17.119]this magnitude, how fast it's happening.
[00:31:22.288]Okay, so what we've done today here for this,
[00:31:24.637]these 15 miles, all 15 miles are good for class six now,
[00:31:28.166]110 miles per hour.
[00:31:29.243]We've rebuilt the siding at Odell for 2.7 miles long,
[00:31:32.295]which is the entire piece of the little double track
[00:31:34.489]there is good for 50 mile per hour.
[00:31:36.330]It's all built on 20 foot track centers
[00:31:38.723]and that is really for worker safety to where
[00:31:40.779]people working on one track don't casually
[00:31:43.696]get into
[00:31:45.780]the foul of a track that could be running
[00:31:47.571]as fast as 110 mile per hour.
[00:31:50.177]We did that with 24 turnouts
[00:31:51.579]and all the bridges and culverts.
[00:31:54.052]So this is kind of what the product looks like,
[00:31:56.098]this is in Odell, Illinois and this is
[00:31:57.911]110 mile an hour passenger train.
[00:32:03.784](train horn blaring in distance)
[00:32:13.037]You notice that was a push, pull operation.
[00:32:15.082]You might want to do that one more time.
[00:32:17.314]All right we're gonna try to play this one more time for
[00:32:20.126]hopefully you people that are on the line
[00:32:22.570]can see this.
[00:32:26.291](train horn blaring)
[00:32:35.868]We've got sound on this end and it sounded
[00:32:37.156]like it was going fast, too. (chuckles)
[00:32:42.675]All right, so what's going forward here,
[00:32:44.391]what work we still got left to do?
[00:32:46.629]There's various tiers of project.
[00:32:48.219]We just talked about tier one between
[00:32:50.053]Dwight and Pontiac.
[00:32:53.767]I'm not gonna get into these in detail, but we're,
[00:32:57.465]these are tiered projects with
[00:33:00.749]prospective start dates,
[00:33:02.082]really based on environmental NEPA permitting.
[00:33:05.198]Is when we expect we're gonna be able
[00:33:06.430]to get a green light to move forward
[00:33:08.000]with these various projects.
[00:33:10.029]And this is for the second main track.
[00:33:12.577]What you see here, is there's really four sections
[00:33:14.666]of second main track,
[00:33:15.993]there's one coming out of Joliet for about five miles.
[00:33:20.901]And then there's some between Lincoln and Elkhart here,
[00:33:24.287]just south of Springfield around Girad.
[00:33:26.810]We've got a section, a double track
[00:33:28.170]and then down between Godfrey and Shipman.
[00:33:30.336](man mumbles)
[00:33:32.091]Again,
[00:33:33.700]five tier, or six tier project here
[00:33:35.435]based on environment permitting.
[00:33:38.320]What you see here is our project that
[00:33:41.079]we've already completed.
[00:33:42.871]And then the four double track sections
[00:33:44.730]are where most of the environment footprint
[00:33:47.324]permission needs to happen.
[00:33:49.158]And we're well underway in
[00:33:51.399]progressing those permits.
[00:33:57.862]Okay, I'm gonna transition real quickly
[00:34:02.331]to a little bit about our company.
[00:34:04.169]I don't want to, there's probably nothing more
[00:34:06.091]than I like more than
[00:34:07.508]talking to people who are interested in our industry.
[00:34:09.974]And if they're students who are looking for employment
[00:34:13.583]that are interested in our industry I really like that.
[00:34:16.277]So basically we're a large railroad,
[00:34:19.148]we're a freight hauling railroad,
[00:34:21.079]45,000 folks,
[00:34:22.705]Fortune
[00:34:24.160]140 company near about.
[00:34:26.443]And we're a West Coast railroad,
[00:34:28.065]pretty much Mississippi River west.
[00:34:30.943]We're very diverse, probably one of the most diverse
[00:34:32.105]railroads there are as far as what we haul.
[00:34:34.587]Lots of energy, coal, lots of crude these days,
[00:34:37.442]frack sand in relation to the crude.
[00:34:39.682]Industrial products,
[00:34:42.021]lots of grain.
[00:34:43.893]Intermodal is growing everyday.
[00:34:45.474]We're one of the largest
[00:34:47.226]transporters of automobiles
[00:34:49.693]and we are the largest transporter of chemicals,
[00:34:52.051]primarily because of our footprint
[00:34:53.182]down on the Gulf Coast.
[00:34:55.356]We're large, 32,000 miles, I'm not gonna go through this.
[00:34:59.522]It's a big operation that really translates
[00:35:02.160]to lots of opportunity.
[00:35:05.225]The message I wanted to leave you with is that
[00:35:08.734]the freight rail industry is vibrant and it's growing.
[00:35:12.644]Most folks don't understand that
[00:35:16.223]we're down from 254,000 miles in 1916,
[00:35:20.263]to 138,000 miles today.
[00:35:23.091]But we're hauling more than we've ever hauled
[00:35:26.187]on a lot less track.
[00:35:28.312]And it's a great value proposition for our customers.
[00:35:31.100]And you look back when this industry got deregulated,
[00:35:34.014]this is all railroads, this is not just Union Pacific.
[00:35:36.125]When this industry got deregulated
[00:35:37.721]with the Staggers Act back in 1980,
[00:35:40.198]our productivity has gone up, rates have,
[00:35:43.531]have actually gone down,
[00:35:46.811]and volume has gone way up.
[00:35:48.067]It's been a great new story.
[00:35:49.832]Which again operates, or translates into
[00:35:51.922]a great opportunity for lots of folks
[00:35:53.526]who want to get plugged into this industry going forward.
[00:35:56.308]We look for bright people we look for leaders.
[00:35:58.786]We like civils, Larry,
[00:36:00.368]we like construction management folks, electricals,
[00:36:02.289]electronic, industrial, structurals and mechanical.
[00:36:06.097]And that concludes my presentation.
[00:36:07.466]I'll be happy to take any questions.
[00:36:10.695](audience applauds)
[00:36:15.637]Thank you, folks who are joining online
[00:36:17.742]please enter your questions in the chat box.
[00:36:23.320]All right, so does anybody have any questions
[00:36:25.314]while they're typing in, Steven?
[00:36:34.761]What is the maximum speed that you think
[00:36:36.922]it can go,
[00:36:38.098]in case of any emergencies?
[00:36:40.645]Okay, what's the maximum speed the train can?
[00:36:44.207]Your train can pull?
[00:36:46.505]Train goes pretty icy, on any emergency case?
[00:36:50.467]Say you need this for--
[00:36:52.648]We don't think of too many emergencies
[00:36:54.215]that calls the train to speed up.
[00:36:56.141]Normally emergencies we call the train
[00:36:57.751]to slow down and stop, all right.
[00:37:00.322]So.
[00:37:01.861]You know I can give you some stories of how much
[00:37:03.760]trains have gone over speed that I'm not gonna
[00:37:05.498]get into today,
[00:37:06.331]that they shouldn't have. (everyone laughs)
[00:37:09.368]But that railroad you saw that's good for 110 mile per hour,
[00:37:12.966]it can probably take a train running a little bit faster
[00:37:15.120]than that and nothing bad happen, all right?
[00:37:19.244]Other questions?
[00:37:26.780]David you mentioned a lot of
[00:37:28.749]road crossing work and the concrete pads
[00:37:30.818]at the crossings for the highway.
[00:37:33.009]Did you do anything special to transition
[00:37:34.386]either the new bridges or the
[00:37:36.695]crossings
[00:37:38.418]We did. train.
[00:37:39.427]We did.
[00:37:41.135]Especially when you're, oop, I'm sorry.
[00:37:42.978]It works. Am I good now?
[00:37:44.368]Okay, good, yeah. All right.
[00:37:48.983]Dr. Farager asked about
[00:37:51.167]transitioning between crossings in bridges.
[00:37:54.904]For those of you who understand rails,
[00:37:57.877]a tremendous amount of mass, a lot of energy,
[00:38:00.524]especially in this case it's going fast,
[00:38:02.878]we don't have a lot of experience in UP with
[00:38:06.427]what kind of problems we may see from
[00:38:08.595]a fast train
[00:38:12.938]approaching a crossing.
[00:38:15.152]So there's always, we try to manage
[00:38:18.765]the stiffness, we try to manage the modulus.
[00:38:21.752]And with concrete ties it's much different track
[00:38:24.029]than wood track.
[00:38:25.315]When you put a concrete crossing board on the top of it
[00:38:27.636]that has inherent mass in itself, it makes it even stiffer.
[00:38:32.257]So we were concerned.
[00:38:33.890]And we spent a lot of energy and resources
[00:38:37.294]on our freight operations in
[00:38:41.746]right on the edges of road crossings.
[00:38:43.776]Because they're,
[00:38:45.274]they go down and settle at,
[00:38:48.277]because they're exposed to higher loading
[00:38:50.293]then lots over open track.
[00:38:52.980]So long story short.
[00:38:56.868]What we did was,
[00:38:58.530]in trying to transition from a tie spacing of every two feet
[00:39:03.736]to, we wanted to go in and...
[00:39:07.998]We did not want the crossings to settle.
[00:39:10.252]So we actually went in to actually tighter
[00:39:12.664]tie spacing within the crossings.
[00:39:14.227]Which in itself make even higher modulus.
[00:39:17.034]And then we transition over
[00:39:20.344]what, 50 feet or so, maybe 25 feet,
[00:39:23.000]I forget exactly what that answer is.
[00:39:25.040]But there is a transitional zone outside the crossings
[00:39:27.265]to where we went go from two foot tie spacing,
[00:39:29.343]Dwight, so you remember
[00:39:30.176]what the tie spacing is? Down from,
[00:39:31.560]Two foot down to 17 inches.
[00:39:33.681]17 inches.
[00:39:34.514]So we go from 24 to 17 inches over a transition
[00:39:37.309]of about probably 25 feet or something like that.
[00:39:40.749]Do the same for bridges.
[00:39:44.510]Because track is so,
[00:39:45.915]because concrete track is so stiff actually
[00:39:47.792]on what we call ballasted bridges
[00:39:50.474]where we actually have ballasted track on top of
[00:39:52.809]concrete panned bridges.
[00:39:54.915]We actually
[00:39:56.443]install a thin layer of elastimaric rubber
[00:40:00.166]on the bottom of a concrete tie,
[00:40:02.249]to where there's not this huge stress area sandwich,
[00:40:06.254]where the ballast is sandwiched in
[00:40:08.087]between concrete and concrete and it degrades too fast.
[00:40:10.637]So we learned over the hard way,
[00:40:12.357]over the long haul that we invest in a rubber pad
[00:40:15.542]and these bridges will have that as well.
[00:40:18.854]Got a question from the online audience
[00:40:21.013]stating, what is the timeline for high speed rail
[00:40:23.848]on the route to Chicago, Denver?
[00:40:27.067]Well I'm not sure I'm in
[00:40:28.105]the position to answer that.
[00:40:30.358]It was on the map.
[00:40:33.487]That's all gonna be subject to funding.
[00:40:39.538]That's a particular route that I haven't heard much about.
[00:40:46.739]Union Pacific is in any negotiations with anybody
[00:40:48.823]about that route.
[00:40:51.489]Another question from the University of Iowa.
[00:40:54.104]What are you not designing,
[00:40:55.776]why are you not designing for 200 or 250 miles per hour?
[00:41:01.238]Good question.
[00:41:06.076]We're a freight railroad, this is a freight quarter
[00:41:09.051]between Chicago and St. Louis.
[00:41:13.491]As I mentioned earlier in the presentation
[00:41:15.956]we believe at Union Pacific that it is
[00:41:21.821]irresponsible to try to mix
[00:41:25.614]freight traffic that could be moving as slow as
[00:41:28.438]25, 30 miles per hour
[00:41:31.364]with very, very high speed train sets.
[00:41:34.601]So the industry's pretty much taken a tact in this country
[00:41:38.230]that anything faster than 110, and some might say even 90,
[00:41:42.449]needs to be on a dedicated quarter.
[00:41:44.379]At Union Pacific we're willing to entertain
[00:41:45.964]110 miles per hour because this was predominantly
[00:41:49.971]a passenger quarter at the time.
[00:41:52.786]Although it could grow in freight business.
[00:41:55.236]Again when you're dealing with speeds
[00:41:57.275]like 200, 250 miles per hour
[00:41:59.532]you're talking about a dedicated right of way.
[00:42:02.863]You're talking about a dedicated operation completely.
[00:42:06.152]And we surely weren't willing to donate our railroad,
[00:42:08.925]that's the core of our business to that dedicated operation.
[00:42:12.936]So we got the speed up as fast,
[00:42:16.475]as we thought was prudent.
[00:42:20.156]And that's kind of where we are.
[00:42:22.283]David when you say
[00:42:23.355]dedicated right of way,
[00:42:24.563]can it be next to each other?
[00:42:26.212]Get a microphone.
[00:42:28.206]Can they be 25 feet on centers
[00:42:29.434]when you say dedicated right of way?
[00:42:30.727]Or do they have to be separate, separate?
[00:42:35.030]They have to be separate, separate,
[00:42:36.118]but they could be parallel.
[00:42:38.959]But there is a separation threshold
[00:42:41.969]that I'm not sure I could tell you right now what we've
[00:42:44.493]have set at UP.
[00:42:46.153]But there is a,
[00:42:47.941]threshold of separation,
[00:42:49.919]but it is off our right of way for the most part.
[00:42:52.334]Our right of way is pretty much
[00:42:54.918]100 foot wide with a track down the enter of it.
[00:42:58.328]For the most part.
[00:43:03.838]So I guess my first question.
[00:43:05.314]So the freight rail, freight trains
[00:43:08.099]use this track as well?
[00:43:09.425]Is that correct, okay? They do.
[00:43:10.505]So I'm just wondering,
[00:43:11.338]do you do anything different maintenance wise
[00:43:13.620]as far as the wheels, the bearings, et cetera
[00:43:16.276]for the freight trains that are on this track that you
[00:43:19.135]maybe wouldn't do otherwise?
[00:43:22.753]Well.
[00:43:23.586]The freight trains that are on this track
[00:43:24.552]are on every other track in the country,
[00:43:27.001]three days prior to being on this track.
[00:43:29.491]So the answer is no.
[00:43:31.003]But you have to realize and many of you in this room
[00:43:33.205]and online know that the industry
[00:43:35.971]has a much better handle on, due to technology,
[00:43:41.198]due to freight car condition that it's ever had.
[00:43:44.622]Whether that's a bearing,
[00:43:45.788]whether that's a wheel profile,
[00:43:47.847]whether that's a super structure of the car.
[00:43:50.952]We've got much better visibility to it.
[00:43:53.108]But still there is a risk.
[00:43:55.254]That's one of our biggest risk in this operation
[00:43:56.755]is there's a catastrophic failure on our rail car
[00:43:59.698]that goes down and takes out quite a bit of this line.
[00:44:02.620]And it's gonna take us awhile to get it back.
[00:44:05.285]That's one of the largest risks.
[00:44:06.686]We're not sure we know exactly it's gonna do,
[00:44:09.019]how much maintenance it's gonna take
[00:44:10.708]to keep it running at class six, because UP
[00:44:12.943]unlike Amtrack, doesn't have a lot of experience
[00:44:14.905]with class six railroad.
[00:44:15.789]We're pretty good at class four and class five.
[00:44:19.472]So this is gonna be a little bit of a learning.
[00:44:22.098]We're gonna start maintaining the whole line
[00:44:24.104]of class six here pretty much now,
[00:44:25.951]to kind of get a good feel,
[00:44:27.354]so we do go to revenue service on a broad footprint.
[00:44:30.439]It should be pretty seamless.
[00:44:36.085]You mentioned earlier that
[00:44:37.919]the United States and the president start
[00:44:40.451]recondition of the train line, about 50% of it.
[00:44:44.709](voice fades)
[00:44:48.083]Is there a main track that could be dedicated
[00:44:51.070]to high speed rails and a fleet by the train companies?
[00:44:54.007](voice fades)
[00:44:55.446]Well that's a good question.
[00:44:59.174]There's lots of rails to trails,
[00:45:03.204]right of way, you know,
[00:45:05.532]all of us in the infrastructure world know
[00:45:07.614]that right of way's the precious thing here.
[00:45:12.000]And quite frankly that's
[00:45:14.761]why this operation is on a freight rail is
[00:45:18.858]trying to forge through corn fields in Illinois
[00:45:21.772]and take private land owners land,
[00:45:24.004]you just don't get re-elected at that.
[00:45:26.507]All right?
[00:45:27.813]So.
[00:45:29.922]But having enough rails to trails that would
[00:45:33.066]in an efficient way
[00:45:34.580]get from point A to point B to where high speed rail
[00:45:36.513]would actually get there a whole lot faster,
[00:45:39.083]they're far and few between.
[00:45:40.494]But that could happen in some cases
[00:45:41.810]to where there was a long between city line
[00:45:44.470]and during mergers.
[00:45:46.226]One railroad was completely abandoned
[00:45:47.563]and all the traffic put on the other one,
[00:45:49.141]that could happen in some cases.
[00:45:51.087]But it's rare.
[00:45:52.330]A good question.
[00:45:55.265]Are there other questions online
[00:45:57.105]or in the live audience?
[00:46:00.300]On some of your photos
[00:46:02.372]it looked like there's trees next to the tracks.
[00:46:05.404]Is there a certain clear zone?
[00:46:07.304]If there is, do you have to clear trees of certain heights
[00:46:09.911]so they don't fall on the tracks?
[00:46:11.042]How do you deal with that?
[00:46:13.695]Well, good question.
[00:46:15.085]If you noticed a couple before and afters,
[00:46:17.153]hopefully you noticed that the trees look like
[00:46:19.047]to be a little further apart.
[00:46:20.484](man laughs) It wasn't just one
[00:46:21.375]was spring or one was fall or winter.
[00:46:24.464]So we did go in and clear brush back.
[00:46:26.201]But that is a risk.
[00:46:29.636]For the most of this rail line
[00:46:33.053]it's a six foot cornstalk that'd come get us.
[00:46:35.735]But there's probably about 15 miles of this alignment
[00:46:39.258]that does have tall trees.
[00:46:40.905]That was one of them that was shown here.
[00:46:42.693]It is a risk in ice storms.
[00:46:45.180]We are talking to IDOT about maybe going in
[00:46:49.281]and clearing that back to where we don't have
[00:46:50.950]that risk for the operation.
[00:46:51.948]But good question.
[00:46:54.450]There's some questions
[00:46:55.444]from the University of Iowa.
[00:46:57.027]How much would a dedicated high speed rail route cost?
[00:47:04.045]A lot.
[00:47:04.878]Yeah. (everyone laughs)
[00:47:05.826]Gonna write this one down. (David laughs)
[00:47:11.638]You know that's
[00:47:13.147]I wish I'd came prepared with those numbers.
[00:47:17.179]And I'm just not.
[00:47:18.616]I'll be happy to get back to them
[00:47:20.337]if I can find out who they are
[00:47:21.670]and have a conversation with them.
[00:47:25.256]It all depends on what you have to do.
[00:47:30.131]We see here that we spent about 1/4 of a billion dollars
[00:47:34.282]and we've done about 200 and
[00:47:37.189]17 miles, so you do that rough math,
[00:47:39.130]you kind of come up with that answer.
[00:47:40.624]But the signal piece is not on top of that yet.
[00:47:47.238]Another question is,
[00:47:48.663]what would it take for Union Pacific
[00:47:50.672]to get into passenger rail transportation?
[00:47:53.853]About a $400 ticket between
[00:47:56.566]Chicago and St. Louis.
[00:48:01.413]Most passenger rail in this country
[00:48:03.406]and most passenger rail in the world is subsidized.
[00:48:07.084]We're in the business of using our network
[00:48:09.926]to produce a positive net cash flow.
[00:48:15.353]And that's why we go out of it.
[00:48:17.267]And that's why we don't want to get back into it.
[00:48:19.554]But we are willing to talk to people about
[00:48:21.205]working out arrangements
[00:48:23.230]in certain cases to where we might be able
[00:48:25.461]to share our alignment if we can work out the proper,
[00:48:29.294]the proper relationship.
[00:48:32.143]A question from the audience here.
[00:48:36.101]You mentioned this corridor,
[00:48:39.000]on this corridor is running both freight and passenger.
[00:48:50.417]Do you think,
[00:48:55.982]is that two different systems for the train warning?
[00:49:01.339]Good question.
[00:49:02.242]For this corridor.
[00:49:03.487]All right, good question.
[00:49:05.000]So our core system,
[00:49:06.817]for train warning for road crossings
[00:49:08.437]or train warning, or
[00:49:10.971]train control to keep trains apart?
[00:49:13.448]The question is, you know we have our,
[00:49:15.809]our signal system that keeps trains
[00:49:18.419]a certain distance away from each other.
[00:49:21.260]And then you have the crossing warning devices
[00:49:23.102]that we showed with the gates that actually keep
[00:49:25.398]the public away from the approaching trains.
[00:49:29.576]Which were of the two were you asking?
[00:49:32.305]I mean how you (drowned out by coughing)
[00:49:34.181]how warning systems for freight and passenger trains?
[00:49:37.480]Okay, so train warning for the road crossing,
[00:49:40.476]train warning, so good question.
[00:49:44.754]The trains that are running
[00:49:48.307]high speed, higher speed,
[00:49:50.423]all those locomotives will be equipped with technology
[00:49:53.257]that bring those gates down much sooner.
[00:49:55.717]Our freight trains will not.
[00:49:57.802]And our freight trains will continue to work
[00:50:00.269]conventionally because they're running much slower.
[00:50:03.353]That answer the question?
[00:50:04.669]So you are using
[00:50:07.327]separate
[00:50:09.279]system for the freight trains warning?
[00:50:14.960]All of our freight trains
[00:50:16.610]will be equipped with positive train control
[00:50:19.806]in this quarter to run on this quarter.
[00:50:23.134]All right?
[00:50:24.679]So all of our trains, high speed passenger trains,
[00:50:28.178]as well as our slowest freight trains,
[00:50:30.386]will have positive train control
[00:50:31.586]on board the locomotives in due time.
[00:50:35.249]2015, after 2015, unless it gets extended.
[00:50:39.301]But those freight trains will not carry the technology
[00:50:41.857]that activate those road crossings any sooner,
[00:50:44.534]like the high speed trains will do.
[00:50:49.305]Do you think the highway road closings
[00:50:52.265]now in communication for
[00:50:55.400]high speed?
[00:50:58.443]The question is, the great crossing closure?
[00:51:01.413]Yeah.
[00:51:03.198]I mean if you want to
[00:51:05.595]increase the speed higher how do you can?
[00:51:12.108]Do you need (voice far from microphone)?
[00:51:15.404]In my opinion yes.
[00:51:16.623]When you look Asia, when you look at Europe
[00:51:18.796]there's very few trains that are running faster than
[00:51:21.975]you know 150 mile per hour especially
[00:51:24.837]that have to deal with a great crossing to where
[00:51:27.777]some guy or gal could
[00:51:30.839]be backed up on a road crossing
[00:51:31.876]with a 200 mile an hour train approaching.
[00:51:34.023]It just doesn't happen.
[00:51:34.856]That's the dedicated right of way,
[00:51:36.663]everything is straight separate in that case.
[00:51:42.441]All right I think we have time
[00:51:43.713]for one last question online.
[00:51:50.750]And this is, how does the integration of high speed rail
[00:51:53.775]affect intermodal traffic demand in the near future?
[00:52:01.109]Could you read that again, Valerie?
[00:52:03.627]So how does the integration
[00:52:04.590]of high speed rail affect intermodal
[00:52:07.088]traffic demand in the near future?
[00:52:09.564]Well intermodal,
[00:52:11.558]you know intermodal's a pretty broad term, so.
[00:52:14.954]I'm not sure if the question is about intermodal
[00:52:17.531]truck to rail or intermodal
[00:52:20.393]bus to passenger train?
[00:52:22.351]Bus to passenger.
[00:52:23.307]Bus to passenger train.
[00:52:27.931]If you get that core feeder network that's reliable
[00:52:30.778]and you can get from the center of Illinois
[00:52:32.515]to Chicago or St. Louis
[00:52:34.406]much faster than you can drive it,
[00:52:36.951]I think it will be successful provided it's reliable.
[00:52:40.501]And it will, when you look at what's happened
[00:52:42.436]at Normal, Illinois,
[00:52:43.816]they built and intermodal center there
[00:52:46.876]around the high speed train station.
[00:52:49.293]So I think you'll see more of that.
[00:52:53.510]Are there any last questions?
[00:52:57.261]All right, to Dr. Rilett.
[00:53:00.739]Thanks David that was a fantastic talk.
[00:53:03.061]For the folks in Lincoln we're gonna be having
[00:53:04.967]lunch and David will be around to answer more questions.
[00:53:08.735]I should also mention that,
[00:53:10.825]the sponsor for our series is Union Pacific Foundation.
[00:53:13.276]We appreciate that.
[00:53:15.084]I think it's been very good to have
[00:53:16.960]a different perspective than we normally do
[00:53:18.792]and having the railways come in.
[00:53:19.788]We're gonna continue that in the near future.
[00:53:21.825]So thank again David.
[00:53:22.926]You bet, you're very welcome, thank you.
[00:53:25.402](audience applauds)

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2012 MATC Fall Lecture Series: David Connell

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