HNTB Corp. recently announced that Roger Prince has joined the team as Project Director and Associate Vice President of the firm’s program management and construction management practice. He’ll be based in HNTB’s New York City office in the Empire State Building.
A revolutionary track design to stage and process more trains more efficiently through loading and unloading terminals was recognized at The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) Engineering Excellence Awards Gala in Washington, D.C., on May 7, 2019. ACEC’s Grand Award was given to Omaha-based HDR, Inc., for its patent-pending Infinity Loop.
On June 21, 2019, the long-awaited ION LRT will formally enter revenue service for Ontario, Canada’s Waterloo Region. Leading up to the start of service, Bombardier Flexity LRVs will be operating in daytime service mode, with trains every 10 or so minutes.
Bombardier Transportation recently announced that it is opening a rail car assembly site in Pittsburg, Calif.
German Rail (DB) has begun testing a Socio Empathic Human-Machine Interaction (Semmi) customer service robot that, using artificial intelligence (AI), is able to answer customer queries.
Colleen Leonardo has joined Railway Equipment Company (RECo) as Northern Regional Sales Manager, with responsibility for customers in the company’s Northern service regions. She will be based in Tottenham, Ontario, Canada.
HNTB Corp. recently announced that Chris Price, P.E., has been named President of the firm’s Central Division.
Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) recently announced the appointment of David Schulze as Chief of Staff.
East-West Connectors has chosen Thales to provide its SelTrac™ Communications Based Train Control (CBTC) system for the City of Ottawa’s Stage 2 O-Train Confederation Line Extension project.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) recently announced that 45 projects in 29 states will benefit from $326 million-plus in grant money under the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements (CRISI) Program and the Special Transportation Circumstances (STC) Program.
Around 1900, sharp operators in New York City would fleece tourists by offering to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge, which still impresses and inspires New Yorkers and visitors today, was a marvel of its age and towered over everything else on the Manhattan or Brooklyn sides of the East River when it opened for service in 1883. Today, there are still people who have a bridge to sell us; two bridges, in fact. They want transit riders and taxpayers in New York and New Jersey to spend more than $3 billion to replace one bridge with two. They also say that replacing a two-track bridge with another two-track bridge will expand capacity sufficiently to qualify for a grant program established specifically for that purpose.
WATCHING WASHINGTON, JUNE 2019 – Here we go again with Amtrak. While complaining that host freight railroads unreasonably impair its legal right to passenger-train priority handling, Amtrak is employing thug-like tactics to escape federal law and extract greater rents and other concessions from commuter-train operators utilizing Amtrak infrastructure including track and stations.
If one looks at recent developments, the Federal Railroad Administration’s withdrawal of the two-person-crew-minimum NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking), it may seem “logical” to say the march toward one-person crews is accelerating. However, that may be an illusion.
In Part 2 of “Gateway – The Series,” authored by Contributing Editor David Peter Alan, the implication is made that all rail advocates support a two-track replacement of Portal Bridge as well as foregoing the Gateway Project by adopting the “L-Train Tunnel” solution advocated by Columbia University engineers to repair the existing 100-plus-year-old Hudson River tunnels.
Six out of the seven Class I freight railroads in operating in the U.S. (including CN’s and Canadian Pacific’s subsidiaries) have implemented or are in the process of transitioning to Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). While programs and processes will certainly vary from one railroad to another, all are likely designed around five foundation principles, as defined in 2016 by CP and the late Hunter Harrison during its aborted merger attempt with Norfolk Southern.
