Heavy traffic and tight capacity are shortening engineering work windows, and railroads and suppliers are striving to meet the challenge of more work in less time.

By Tom Judge, Engineering Editor

	Meeting tight work windows involves planning and communications. Modern Continental Construction Co., for example, solved difficult time and space challenges rehabilitating Conrail trackage into Boston for MBTA commuter rail service. Photo by Modern Continental Construction

More trains and faster trains bring joy to the hearts of railroaders and healthy returns to the bottom line. Engineering department people are as happy as any other railroaders when the company is financially healthy, but maintaining and upgrading the property is an ever-increasing challenge.

To meet this challenge, railroads are more frequently turning to such strategies as track blitzing, taking a line out of service for a given period, and getting years' worth of work done in a relatively short time. Suppliers of equipment large and small are adding new features to enable their railroad customers to do more work in a tight time frame. Even contractors who handle such specialized chores as rail-flaw detection and vegetation management have to speed up their programs if they want to get the railroads' business.

Proper planning
Every year, railroads make up their annual plan spelling out what capital work they want to do in that 12-month-period. Then they try to plan that so they can do as much work as they can in a given area under one work block. In other words, rather than shutting down a whole subdivision at once, railroads usually prefer to shut down about eight to 10 miles at a time to do such work as relaying rail or changing ties. They usually work out a schedule with four or five work days in a row before running trains for a few days to clear the traffic backlog.

The key is that when you bring employees onto the property to work, the work block is there for them.

There are many key players. The work planners must plan the year's projects. The train dispatchers have to plan many hours ahead to make sure they don't have trains in that work window. Dispatching software can help.

When a work gang is out on the property, fixed costs run from $3,000 to $15,000 a day. If the work block doesn't happen, the costs are still there. So it's important for people to be committed to making sure that the work does happen when it's supposed to happen. If the work gang arrives and doesn't get the track time, railroads spend money to no avail, usually paid out to labor for no productivity. The big downfalls are not planning properly in the first place, an uneven commitment among the various parties involved to execute, and poor problem-solving if something does happen.

With railroads being dynamic operations, things happen. Perhaps there's an unforeseen event like a broken rail. Then traffic backs up and all the schedule charts don't work any more. If there's a track outage on an alternate route, then someone at a high level has to make the call on whether to continue offering the work block or not.

Track blitzing
One solution, not possible in all cases, involves full shutdowns like the Thayer Blitz on Burlington Northern and Santa Fe. But in the big picture, for every big blitz shutdown, there are 1,000 projects that have to be properly planned.

Like all work windows, planning is the key to a blitz. In the Thayer Blitz in Arkansas in June 1998, BNSF spent $16 million over a two-week period renewing eight bridges, installing 41,000 concrete ties and 264,000 rail clips, replacing 46,000 wood ties and 200,000 steel spikes, relaying 100,000 lineal feet of rail, performing nearly 1,200 rail welds, surfacing 105 track-miles, grinding 309 pass-miles of rail, and cleaning and undercutting approximately 20 miles of ballast (RA, August 1998, p. 42).

BNSF followed up the Thayer project with a 120-mile blitz on the Bakersfield-Fresno, Calif., main line in January 1999 and a smaller project on the Lakeside Subdivision in the Pacific Northwest.

Late last month, BNSF returned to California to continue 1999's blitz, this time spending $14 million in two weeks on the 126-mile Fresno-Stockton main line. This project included replacement of 96,500 wood ties, surfacing of 43 track-miles, ballast cleaning and undercutting on 23 track-miles, upgrades to three bridges and 55 crossings, and installation of two new switches.

CSX Transportation staged a three-day blitz with 400 employees near Danville, Ill., last summer. Teams installed almost 40,000 ties, surfaced 40 miles of track, refurbished 39 grade crossings with all new materials, restored two bridges, welded 147 joints, and cut 33 miles of brush during a Midwest heat wave over the July 4 weekend.

Blitzes offer savings in material and engineering costs, but add costs for re-routing trains and bringing in additional labor, equipment, and contractors from other divisions. The gains come from getting the work out of the way in one fell swoop and having a long stretch of track with no slow orders for a long time.

Supplier contributions
The supply industry is well aware of the difficulties in obtaining track time. And they are doing something about it by offering equipment with special features for greater speed and reliability.

CSXT informed Asplundh Tree Expert Co., its vegetation management contractor, that it had to get over the tracks faster or use an off-track method. Asplundh came up with a system using infrared detectors mounted under the spray car. The detectors locate the weed by color, then automatically turn the herbicide spray on and off. The system not only saves time because it can do the job at a much higher rate of speed, but it also gives better coverage and uses less herbicide.

Contractors offering rail flaw detection programs emphasize speed and reliability. Herzog, Sperry Rail Services, SPENO International S.A., and Harsco Track Technology all offer features that improve speed of operation without sacrificing the quality of readings.

Equipment reliability is another requirement. "Track time is one of the most precious things to railroad maintenance people today," says Tom Klarkowski, Herzog technical services manager (and a former BNSF employee). "If a railroad comes to us and says, 'We have two hours of track time' and we're broken down or can't perform the job, we have just wasted two precious hours. So reliability is very important."

Chuck Douglass of Hytracker Manufacturing Ltd. mentions four points to illustrate how his company's excavators can help with tight work windows.

"The old way was to take an excavator, put it on a flat car, and go out and do your work with a work train and the excavator," he says. "Our tracked unit eliminates the work train, which frees up space in the sidings. That allows the railway to plan a longer window." The Hytracker excavator with a cart can clear a line in about 8 to 10 minutes. If the job doesn't require occupying the main track, the excavator and cart can move off the track and work independently.

"In emergencies, our equipment allows you to go out without a work train to clear at the point of the emergency, which doesn't interfere with traffic," Douglass says. When doing maintenance work under planned circumstances in a given block, no time is lost moving back to a siding because the unit can clear where it is working. "Another plus is that when you're handling heavy traffic and trying to work on the track, motive power is at a premium," Douglass notes. "This system frees up the motive power that would have been needed for a work train."

Steve Birkholz of Racine Railroad Products, Inc., points to his company's S Clipper machine, which is designed to remove and apply SafeLok clips and is used in rail destressing operations. "Really two machines in one, this machine is able to apply four clips simultaneously on both rails or remove four clips simultaneously on both rails," Birkholz says. "The real advantage in destressing is that you don't need two machines. You've got the ability to move one machine on/off the track to do two jobs. The clips are removed, the rail is pulled and then the clips are reapplied without manual repositioning. So no laborer has to come back after the clips are removed and manually reset them."

Racine's Ultra E Clip machine is a small, self-propelled walk-behind machine designed to hand remove clips. It features a maintenance cart and a hoist to quickly load and unload the machine onto the track and turn the machine around for single rail applications and removal purposes.

Harsco has added several features to its heavy equipment line to improve work-window efficiency. On its P811 Track Rehabilitation Machine, Harsco added a rail heater to destress rail, eliminating the need for another gang to complete this operation later. The company also added a Fast Clip applicator, anchor removal and retrieval systems, and a spike retrieval system.

The new "C" Model Grinder from Harsco can travel from site to site at up to 60 mph. It features modified grinding angles to 75 degrees to the gauge side to minimize the need for another gang to complete gauge-face grinding at a later date. The unit also has 25% more horsepower to maximize speed and grinding performance and a shorter length to minimize turnaround time at each end of a grinding pass.

For its Tie Masters Tie Renewal Service, Harsco designed a new "Super TKO" that can remove up to 11 ties per minute; upgraded the anchor spreader to operate at more than eight ties per minute; designed a new plate placer to reduce labor and speed up plate insertions; and improved the spike reclaimer to minimize jamming and improve reliability. Harsco also designed a new MK-VI Production Tamper that operates at up to 26 ties per minute and travels at up to 50 mph.

Modern Track Machinery, Inc., offers a complete off-trackable tie gang including spike pullers, rail lifters, tie changers, spike drivers. and a hi-rail crane.

Knowing when to reopen a section of track to traffic helps railroads meet tight work windows safely. Plasser American Corporation's recently-introduced Automatic Track Finishing Machine checks the quality of work and operational safety before reopening a given track to traffic. A laser scanner measuring system scans the track in two dimensions without contact.

The right equipment for the job
Meeting tight work windows involves planning, communications, good equipment, and more than a firm grasp of logistics. Modern Continental Construction Co., for example, faced time and space challenges in trackwork trying to establish commuter rail service for MBTA on a 23-mile line operated by Conrail (now CSXT) from the South Shore area into Boston.

"We had to not only work on the track, but also change the vertical and horizontal alignment, then give the track back to Conrail at 5 p.m.," says Max Marino, vice president. "The biggest windows we had were on weekends."

About 20 grade crossings and several turnouts along the way added to the complexity. There would have been too many dead hours breaking down machines to get across crossings or turnouts. Marino looked into a TLP 650 Beam by VAIA CAR of Italy and found it fit the circumstances of limited time and work space.

During the week, the company built 160-foot track panels using concrete ties and 132-pound rail. and made the necessary cuts and fills. "On Friday morning, we took anything from 4,500 to 6,500 feet of track out depending on the foundation and other conditions," Marino says. "Then we had bulldozers and graders do all the necessary grading. Once we had the grading done, we brought a bulldozer with a spreader box to spread the ballast and compact it. We positioned the VAIA CAR Beam at the location where we started taking the track apart, then brought in two of the 160-foot panels stacked on dollies. At each location where we paneled the track we had a turnout so we could go in and out with the dollies. A VAIA CAR 340 hauled the dollies to bring the panels under the Beam. The Beam then picked up each panel, walked it into place, and laid it down. We put a joint bar between that and the old track, then repeated the process. In a matter of about 14 hours we put down between a mile and 6,000 feet of track. At the end of the weekend, we joined the last panel to the existing track and surfaced so the sections could handle trains again on Monday."