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April 2009
By Pat Foran, Editor
Students of the interaction complexities at the wheel/rail interface long have maintained that it’s crucial for railroad department planners to work together — and in concert with researchers and suppliers — to break down the barriers that can keep them from collaborating constructively.
How are department heads faring these days when it comes to taking a more holistic approach to solving a range of wheel/rail issues? They’re getting there, or so a sampling of railroad engineering and mechanical execs told us during a series of recent interviews.
“It does not help us to suboptimize, and we know it,” says Lisa Stabler, assistant vice president of quality and reliability engineering for BNSF Railway Co. “The reality is, as long as the organization is focused on service, you know you can do the right thing.”
For more and more freight and passenger roads, doing the right thing at the wheel/rail interface starts with looking at the bigger picture.
Whether it’s revisiting a long-standing rail grinding program, considering whether curve blocks are a cost-effective risk-minimization solution to prevent rail rollover derailments or turning to a top-of-rail (TOR) friction modification system to reduce wheel/rail wear and fuel consumption, rail officials are trying to prevent decisions that come with wheel/rail consequences from being made in a departmental vacuum. Instead, they’re encouraging decisions to be made jointly — with engineering, mechanical and operations strategists offering feedback and/or input.
“Science really has to drive you,” Stabler says. “And it really does not matter who does the science.”
Or whose budget it comes out of.
At BNSF, it’s helped, perhaps, that some mechanical and engineering execs have experience walking in their colleagues’ shoes.
In 1999, the Class I’s engineering and mechanical departments were combined into one organization. The arrangement didn’t last more than three years.
“It was a large organization to say grace over,” says General Director of Maintenance Planning Mike Armstrong, who’s been with BNSF for three decades. “But some interesting things came out of that.”
For example: Early in the short-lived combined-department era, Stabler was responsible for track measurement/geometry. After engineering and mechanical once again became separate departments, she retained her track measurement role for several years.
“To those of us in engineering, that worked just fine,” Armstrong says. “The moral of that story: You do things for the good of the overall organization.”
Sometimes, eyeing the greater good means viewing tried-and-true practices through a wider lens. Take rail grinding.
“I’ll tell you, rail grinding is a huge cost — as in multiple tens of millions [of dollars] — but it has helped us avoid a number of issues,” Armstrong says, adding that BNSF contracts Harsco Track Technologies and Loram Maintenance of Way Inc. to handle its grinding needs.
TOR lubrication is making a difference, as well. Three years ago, the Class I installed TOR friction modification units on the Lakeside Subdivision in Washington state, Armstrong says.
“We were very pleased with the operation there,” he says, adding that Portec Rail Products Inc. supplied the application units and the friction modifier. “We are expanding the use of the top-of-rail friction modifier because we know there are benefits to it — reduced lateral forces, reduced wear on wheels and on track, fuel savings. We’re sold on it.”
At Canadian Pacific, engineering, mechanical and operations execs, too, are sold on TOR — and on pursuing the greater organizational good when it comes to solving wheel/rail-related problems. They call it “making a business case.”
“One department investigates it, develops a business case for implementation and then puts it out in front of all the stakeholders, but there’s a lot more involvement now at every level,” says Michael Roney, CP’s general manager of technical standards —
engineering. “If there’s a good idea, we’ll vet it with everyone.”
Witness CP’s experience with wheel impact load detectors. At first, the Class I’s mechanical department shouldered the budget load. But the detectors didn’t just tip off CP to wheel health issues. Their use ultimately led to a “significant reduction” in the number of broken rails, says Roney, who’s served CP for 28 years. “There was good cross-functional impact,” he adds.
Then there’s CP’s decade-long foray into friction management. One in-progress project, which the railway has been working on in conjunction with Portec, involves the application of KELTRACK® TOR friction modifier via about 330 PROTECTOR® IV application systems between Calgary, Alberta, and Vancouver, British Columbia.
The project, which began more than a year ago, was about half finished as of mid-March. The early results were good, Roney says.
“What we’re seeing is it’s reducing lateral forces by 30 percent, on average, where we put in friction modifiers,” he says. “We haven’t seen all the rail benefits yet — we had some shelled rail problems that accumulated before the friction modifier systems were in place — but the business case projected fuel consumption would be reduced by 4 percent and now it looks like it’ll be substantially better. So, we’re continuing with that program.”
In March, CP took TOR a step further. The Class I began to implement Portec’s Total Friction Management™ program, which features new technologies, equipment and practices.
The program involves Portec Rail’s Railway Maintenance Products Division and Kelsan Technologies Corp. Total Friction Management incorporates KELTRACK friction modifier and PROTECTOR IV application systems to control surface friction, upgrades of all gauge face lubricators and the addition of remote monitoring with Portec Rail Remote Performance Monitoring™ technology.
“Friction management using a top-of-rail modifier has probably been the silver bullet in recent years,” Roney says. “Preventative grinding was a big one, but we’ve now had that since the 1990s.”
Not that grinding is any less significant in CP’s wheel/rail problem-solving scheme.
“The best solution for us over time has been preventative grinding,” Roney says. “Our grinding frequency is between 15 and 25 million gross tons, which is quite frequent.”
[Note: Roney will present “Reducing the Stress State on CP’s Western Corridor Operations” at the Wheel/Rail Interaction ’09 Heavy Haul Seminar, May 6-7 in Chicago. The seminar and two others scheduled that week — Rail Transit Seminar ’09 on May 4 and Principles Course ’09 on May 5 — are co-sponsored by Progressive Railroading.]
The inter-departmental collaboration will keep on coming. CP currently is working with Applied Railroad Research Technologies Inc., which analyzes the impact of long trains on lateral forces, Roney says.
“They have helped us convert to longer trains, and to do that with the right distribution of motive power to get a train that actually lowers the stress state,” he adds. “Of course, business case drives it.”
It’ll continue to.
“Ultimately, we’re still chasing the perfect conformal fit between the wheels and rail,” Roney says.
Wheel/rail watchers at Norfolk Southern Railway continue to chase it, as well.
“In many cases, as we’ve all learned, you start out with applying the technology within a specific department, but it becomes clear very early on that you’ve got benefits for both,” says Gerhard Thelen, NS’s vice president operations planning and support.
Just as their Class I colleagues have, NS officials have tested and/or implemented a range of technology solutions — from TOR lubrication to wayside detection devices to truck performance detectors — that have netted cross-departmental benefits. So, it behooves department planners to stay in the information-sharing loop.
To that end, NS establishes VP-level steering committees that sort out the issues — in this case, as they pertain to wheel/rail interaction — identify potential technologies and application opportunities, and assess implementation costs as well as cost benefits.
“The way we make sure everybody is involved is in the decision-making — they need to continue to be informed of what we’re doing in terms of technology,” says Thelen, who’s served in various mechanical and engineering capacities at different railroads during the past 30 years. “It’s really been a corporate focus over the last three or four years.”
So has TOR lubrication.
“If you look at the savings, some of them are long term, in the area of track deterioration and track maintenance,” he says. “On the other hand, the fuel savings are immediate, so every rail car that goes over the rail is going to save fuel on every train. We’re pretty sure the savings can be anywhere from 2 and 8 percent — that’s significant, especially where you run very high tonnage.”
As an example, about 200 TOR systems have been installed on the Pocahontas Division, NS’s “heavy coal route,” Thelen says. More systems also will be installed on the railroad’s high-tonnage Cincinnati-to-Chattanooga, Tenn., mainline. Portec/Kelsan and Lincoln Industrial Corp. have supplied wayside TOR systems, Thelen says.
“The wayside technology has been a lot more mature, and seems to work much better,” he adds. “We still see issues with onboard reliability. We worked with onboard flange lubrication in the ’80s and early ’90s, and had similar problems. It just seems to be a lot more mature on the wayside.”
Meanwhile, another cross-disciplinary group is investigating steering trucks with an eye on reducing forces, and “pretty much everybody is informed as to what the benefits might be,” Thelen says.
“In the case of steering trucks, we would look to the coal department for input,” he adds. “It’s what we’re doing with all technology, basically. It’s just a way of doing business now at NS.”
Ditto for North American rail transit agencies, which also continue to tear down silos in order to address wheel/rail interface issues more effectively.
Steve Hill spent most of his 36-year rail engineering career with freight railroads, so he’s experienced a different slice of rail life since 2002 when he joined Caltrain, a commuter railroad that operates between San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.
“On the freight side, it’s a little bit different than what we’ve got here, simply because the loadings are so much different,” says Hill, Caltrain’s chief engineer track and structures. “It’s a very different testing ground.”
But the engineering issues are very much the same, particularly those of the wheel/rail variety.
In November 2008, the Peninsula Joint Powers Board, which oversees Caltrain, awarded Advanced Rail Management Corp. (ARM) a three-year rail grinding services contract.
On March 18, Caltrain launched a three-week grinding project designed to “result in measurably reduced noise impacts for neighbors next to the right of way and a safer, smoother ride for passengers,” according to a statement posted March 11 on Caltrain’s Web site. The project should be complete some time this month.
“The idea is just to get an initial profile shape that’s uniform,” says Hill.
The plan isn’t for the engineering department to go solo on the project.
“ARM has been pushing the wheel/rail interface concept here, saying ‘You really need to look at the wheel, too,’” Hill says. “Every time they’ve been out here, it’s been ‘Talk to mechanical.’”
Hill says he’s done his share of talking up grinding’s potential, particularly when it comes to minimizing truck hunting, which occurs when at least one of a freight car’s wheelsets shifts from side to side and the wheel flanges strike the rail as the car moves.
“[Grinding] is a concept that has piqued their interest,” Hill says. “They’re coming along slowly.”
Mechanical isn’t the only Caltrain department keeping tabs on where the wheel/rail interaction is.
“Transportation’s in the loop, definitely,” Hill says. “They’re looking at the whole cost-benefit viewpoint — ‘If we’re going to spend money, what’ll it get us?’ That’s what we’ll have to prove to them.”
Hill figures they’ll need “at least a year under our belts” before revisiting the way or how frequently Caltrain grinds rail, adding that ARM along the way will gather data on wheel-change and truing frequency.
In addition to finding better ways to reduce component wear, energy consumption and lateral forces, Caltrain execs plan to step it up a notch on the noise-reduction front. A test featuring a TOR friction modifier developed by Portec/Kelsan Technologies in “a high-noise area near one of our major facilities in San Jose” could help them take the next collaborative wheel/rail step.
“This isn’t just about rail grinding — it’s about rail/wheel optimization,” Hill says.
That sentiment certainly isn’t lost on Nick Lombardi and Charles “Mickey” Rooney. Lombardi’s a rail vehicle engineer for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA); Rooney’s an engineer in MBTA’s MOW engineering department. For the past decade or so, the two MBTA vets — Lombardi’s been with the agency for 28 years, Rooney for 17 — have worked to change the way the agency solves problems, and where better to start than at the wheel/rail interface?
“A few derailments prompted us to sit down at one table,” says Rooney. “We call it a ‘system approach’ — we had to get away from this departmentalized philosophy. It just became clear that it wasn’t working.”
By simply sitting down and talking, it also became clear that it didn’t make sense for the engineering department to develop a quarterly grinding program without seeking mechanical department input, or run a geometry car through the system without sharing the results with every link in the system chain.
“With issues like ride quality, I used to get it thrown at me, ‘Is this a problem with the vehicle or is it a rail problem?’ Lombardi says. “How can you answer that without getting input from everybody else?”
MBTA department heads no longer try to fill in the blanks without seeking feedback from their colleagues.
“We had TOR in the yard for a while, but it didn’t just happen — everybody had a say in it,” Rooney says. “It’s just a different mind-set now. You don’t just go out and make changes — we discuss it first. Not the other way around.”
Of course, soliciting feedback and sorting out the input can extend the deliberation process. And it takes time to change mind-sets — and to learn to empathize with colleagues in other departments if you’ve spent most of your career toiling inside a silo.
“You have to feel the other guy’s pain,” Lombardi says. “That’s been part of the learning curve, too.”
When it comes to the wheel/rail interface, the learning curve is long.
NS’s Thelen, for one, hopes the industry will continue to study gauge widening caused by high lateral forces.
“It can even get to the point of broken spikes, which requires a lot of maintenance work,” he says. “That probably has been the major issue.”
Wheel and rail fatigue issues, too, aren’t likely to go away anytime soon, he adds. CP’s Roney agrees.
“Over the years, we’ve done a great job on reducing wear, but it’s more susceptible to fatigue,” he says. “We need to get back harder on the whole fatigue issue.”
Roney also would welcome “anti-shelling wheel profiles and metallurgies that are more fracture resistant,” and TOR lubricators “that never have to be turned off.”
One thing rail execs are pretty sure they’ll be seeing is even more collaboration on the wheel/rail problem-solving front. And help won’t just come from departmental colleagues. With increasing frequency, customers and competitors, too, will join them at the problem-solving table.
“There’s still a ways to go, but we have come a long way,” Thelen says. “And we’ll continue to try to get there.”
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