UP’s Olsen Recognized for Environmental Stewardship

Grace Olsen, General Director-Locomotive Engineering and Quality, Mechanical, Union Pacific

Union Pacific (UP) has presented its 2022 Chairman’s Environmental Award to Grace Olsen, General Director-Locomotive Engineering and Quality, Mechanical. The award, established in 1994, recognizes a UP employee who demonstrates “outstanding environmental awareness, leadership and responsibility.”

“Olsen’s work is at the forefront of Union Pacific’s hybrid locomotive and battery-charging technology development,” the Class I railroad reported on Oct. 12. “Additionally, she’s played an integral role driving locomotive manufacturers to test and approve higher locomotive biofuel blend limits.”

(UP earlier this month announced its partnership with ZTR to build hybrid-electric locomotives, and in July reported that four of its locomotives in California are running on 100% biomass-based fuel as part of a field test.)

Olsen also represented UP this summer as a nominee for the Association of American Railroads’ (AAR) John H. Chafee Environmental Excellence Award for her work “identifying and addressing risks associated with locomotive emissions, locomotive idling and remanufacturing of older locomotives.”

More recently, Olsen earned a spot on Diversity Journal’s 2022 “Women Worth Watching” list, which honors “extraordinary women in leadership who have made a name for themselves in the professional sphere,” UP reported.

Olsen, who joined UP in 2010 as a Mechanical Associate, told the magazine that her personal philosophy, heavily influenced by her grandmother, is the reason she has made it so far in her career. “There are many people who have influenced my life along the way,” Olsen said. “And it has made me realize that my personal philosophy is that every experience, interaction and relationship is teaching you something.”