The Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD) recently received an Outstanding Achievement Award for Excellence in Environmental Document Preparation from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for its environmental documentation for the West Lake Corridor project.
Following its acquisition of the Kathrein rail antenna portfolio in May, HUBER+SUHNER has introduced an expanded connectivity offering for customers in the railway market.
Trinity Industries, Inc. recently named Gregg B. Mitchell the Chief Commercial Officer of TrinityRail.
After talking about tomato paste for a good portion of the morning, Jake Harrison, the general manager of California Northern Railroad Company, recommended a Hawaii teriyaki restaurant for lunch.
Amtrak recently announced the progress on its new high-speed Acela trainsets that it says “will redefine the customer experience on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor when they enter service in 2021.”
Jackie (Jack) Wells Matthews, founder and CEO of JMA Railroad Supply Company of Seymour, Ind., passed away Oct. 3, 2019 at his home.
Kansas City Southern (KCS) has entered into accelerated share repurchase transactions (ASR Transactions) with Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC for an aggregate amount of $550 million.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has chosen Anthony McCord as its Chief Transformation Officer as it undergoes its Transformation Plan—“a historic reorganization to improve service and modernize all aspects of operations for the first time in half a century.”
Kansas City Southern’s (KCS) Board of Directors recently approved a new capital allocation policy, under which it intends to deploy available cash in the following manner: approximately 40-50% to capital projects and strategic investments, and approximately 50-60% to share repurchases and dividends.
The Association of American Railroads (AAR) reported U.S. rail traffic for the week ended Nov. 9, 2019, and, for this week, total U.S. weekly rail traffic was 515,269 carloads and intermodal units, down 5.9% compared with the same week last year.
Thales recently launched a new podcast mini-series, This is Artificial Intelligence, about its approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) which keeps humans in the decision-making loop and how AI affects the world around us.
Frank Wilner’s excellent article in the September 2019 issue of Railway Age, “STB Moves to Rehab Antique URCS,” brought back many memories of my direct involvement in its development. To this day, I often spell the acronym for the Uniform Rail Costing System, URCS, backwards—SCRU—as many “experts” developing rail costs with it can produce these results!
Safety is important. Yet, we can do safety research and development a lot faster. It’s timely to ask why the regulatory process takes so long. Today in transport logistics, our society seems to lack a sense of urgency. As one example, it now takes regulatory agencies (and non-regulatory bodies like the National Transportation Safety Board) as long as 18 to 24 months to complete an accident investigation report. Why so long? It’s a mystery.
WATCHING WASHINGTON, RAILWAY AGE NOVEMBER 2019 ISSUE: At the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), where challenges are voluminous and time is short because the nation’s top rail safety cop serves at the pleasure of the White House occupant, Administrator Ronald L. (Ron) Batory is pedaling furiously to accomplish priorities—cardinal of which is assuring demonstrable facts overwhelm opinion.
FINANCIAL EDGE, RAILWAY AGE NOVEMBER 2019 ISSUE: Recently, three events impacting the railroad community—shippers and carriers and regulators—rushed through the news wire:
Before CN or CSX rolled out Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) under the leadership of the late E. Hunter Harrison, a much smaller terminal railroad company in the eastern U.S. was demonstrating aggressive cost reduction. It was Consolidated Railroad Corporation (Conrail).
