Class I Briefs: UP, CSX

Written by Carolina Worrell, Senior Editor
Team members (from left to right) Martin Ertz, Josh Saltz and Jessica Codr accept their awards for the Hack! 2022 event from UP Senior Vice President and CIO Rahul Jalali. (Photo Courtesy of UP via Twitter)

Team members (from left to right) Martin Ertz, Josh Saltz and Jessica Codr accept their awards for the Hack! 2022 event from UP Senior Vice President and CIO Rahul Jalali. (Photo Courtesy of UP via Twitter)

Union Pacific Railroad (UP) honors winners of its Hack! 2022 event. Also, CSX employees distribute school supplies to more than 2,000 children of military families.

UP

UP on Aug. 4 awarded the winning team of its Hack! 2022 event, an online Hackathon conducted by the Class I on coding platform and developer HackerEarth. The winning team of Martin Ertz, Josh Saltz, Jessic Codr, Steve Wozniak and Tammy Hinkel created a security profile enabling the railroad’s Customer Care and Support Team to mirror an external customers’ security setup without sharing account credentials–a big enhancement, UP says, that could allow the railroad to troubleshoot customer concerns more easily and securely.

 UP Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Rahul Jalai presented the winning team with their awards. Jalai was featured on Railway Age’s May 2022 cover as one of the top 10 nominees in our third annual Readers’ Influential Leaders online poll.

Jalai was recognized “for his leadership and influence in the technology space. Soon after becoming CIO, he launched a product transformation that will regularly deliver value-generating capabilities, prioritized jointly by the business and technology groups, with a focus on agility and customer centricity. Jalali’s team of nearly 1,000 technologists is modernizing UP’s platforms by establishing a presence in the Cloud and launching a connected data platform to provide valuable business insights, while maintaining UP’s cost structure.”

Jalai continues to make tech employee development a key focus area of his, serving as a mentor to many UP employees.

CSX

CSX employee volunteers are helping children in the military community start their school year off strong by distributing thousands of backpacks with essential school supplies as part of Operation Homefront’s annual Back-to-School Brigade®.

On July 23 in Jacksonville, Fla.; July 29 in Clarksville, Tenn.; and July 30 in Tampa, Fla., employees took part in the delivery of backpacks prepared previously at a CSX-Operation Homefront event at CSX headquarters in June.

CSX employee volunteers have distributed school supplies to more than 2,000 children of military families.

A CSX Pride in Service partner, Operation Homefront created the Back-to-School Brigade® as a “tangible way to express gratitude to military families for their service on behalf of all Americans.” The program, CSX says, helps alleviate the cost of school supplies, allowing military families to apply those funds to other critical needs.

“Thanks to the generosity of CSX and their dedicated employees, for a fourth consecutive year, we are able to serve these very deserving military families at a time when the stresses of military life hit them hard,” said Robin Carter, Senior Director of Operation Homefront. “Not only does CSX commit valuable resources to meet the needs of military families, but their employee volunteers spent countless hours packing more than 2,000 backpacks in preparation for our distribution events.”

Click here to watch a video of volunteers preparing for the 2022 Back-to-School Brigade®.

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