For C&S execs, helming the PTC implementation evolution and hiring accordingly are chief challenges

— by Julie Sneider, assistant editor

What's on the minds of North American communications and signaling (C&S) department chiefs these days?

Progressive Railroading recently asked C&S leaders at a cross-section of freight railroads and passenger-rail agencies to talk about their 2011 projects, priorities and challenges. For most, capital budgets were up this year — in some cases significantly — as their departments ramp up for positive train control (PTC) implementation.

C&S execs also cited workforce development as a significant concern. They all are struggling to find enough new recruits with the education, skills and/or training needed to replace the experience lost through retirements, as well as fill positions to support expansion of complex systems and adapt to new technologies.

To be sure, C&S department leaders have plenty on their plates to digest. As one official put it: "We're certainly swallowing a fire hose of work right now."

Norfolk Southern Railway Ray Rumsey Assistant Vice President, Communication and Signals

Q: Where has NS focused its C&S capital dollars in 2011?

A: The major areas of focus are PTC development and signal obsolescence projects. That includes finishing our pole line elimination program and replacing older, obsolete equipment.

The second area is infrastructure improvement projects, both for capacity and speed increases. A third major area of emphasis has been hump yards and terminal process control systems, retarders and switch rehabilitations; and another is wayside signal and communication renewals and replacements. The final big area of emphasis has been the radio conversion from wideband radios to narrowband radios. That's been ongoing for several years as part of the FCC mandate for narrowband conversions.

Q: What is your department's No. 1 challenge, and how do you see that challenge changing over the next few years?

A: Right at the front is manpower staffing and training, both for our agreement people — our signal and communication maintenance and construction people — as well as our non-agreement supervision staff; our staff to handle the increasing workload that we're having with these very large capacity and infrastructure projects; and the joint projects that the state and federal funding present to us for expanding passenger service.

We have a very substantial project that we'll be undertaking to establish passenger service between Norfolk and Petersburg, Va. That's a big one. We have to handle the increasing workload from those things as well as all the PTC-related projects and development. At the same time, we're having a substantial attrition of an experienced workforce. So, we're backfilling and hiring and training both for people leaving as well as those needed to increase our capacity to do the work.

Q: Describe the employment marketplace for filling positions in the NS' C&S department.

A: Our outlook is really excellent for both agreement workers — signal construction and signal maintenance and communication maintenance — as well as for non-agreement staffing for field supervision and for signal and communication engineers and design engineers. We're looking in the marketplace and hiring consistently throughout the year, and I don't see that will stop. We are finding good people and bringing them on, and continuing to ramp up for the construction and maintenance positions.

Q: As NS moves forward on PTC, what will be your major hurdles?

A: The first challenge is to build the infrastructure, the wayside signals and communications, the mechanical locomotive equipment and work, the network and the IT areas that will be required to make all the systems work and interoperate between railroads. Some of those products are still being refined and invented to be able to do that. Even now, some of those things are not available for the first parts of our construction. So we'll have to go back and retrofit. But then, once we are up and going on this multi-year major installation and construction, creating the management organization and training to handle all the requirements for this very complex system — the asset management, the configuration management, the GIS, the security and then training and teaching our people how to troubleshoot and maintain a very complicated interdepartmental operating system — is really a big hurdle.

Q: What other C&S innovations is NS pursuing?

A: We're doing a lot of substantial work on wayside inspection devices, and networking them for mechanical information, such as hot-box journal trending and wheel impact detectors and truck performance. ... We're doing a lot of wayside inspections and collecting a lot of data and supplying that to supplement the mechanical inspections for the performance of cars over the track.

We've been working on improving our effectiveness and efficiency for relay inspections. ... And also, we've had an ongoing program to create more reliable and robust process control systems for our hump yards and terminals. We've been doing that for several years and have had very good success.

CN Matt Glynn Chief S&C Engineer

Q: Where has CN focused its C&S capital dollars in 2011?

A: Most of our focus has been on most of the normal investment areas, such as pole line elimination, hot-box protection, both [in terms of] spacing and upgrades. We've been working to inspect our trains more frequently and cut down the spacing between inspection points. Crossing warning devices, other types of detectors, whether dragging equipment detectors or wind detectors, quite a bit of switch-heaters because of the climate and environment we operate in, and our hump control systems — those are some of the places we've been focusing. The things that are driving that focus are reliability, some of our other initiatives at CN to run bigger trains and to get an overall train velocity increase across our network, and what we have to do to support those initiatives.

Q: What are CN's major C&S projects this year?

A: The EJ&E [Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway Co.] integration — that's a pretty good-sized program in the Chicagoland area. We're doing some work in Canada that's funded by VIA [Rail] to enable them to run more trains in our Montreal-to-Toronto corridor. Around Toronto, GO Transit is investing in our property to improve and add more service. We've also got segments of double track that we're doing in Alberta. And of course, there's our PTC [initiative]: We're in the pilot stages, so we're going to do about 10 percent of our locations in 2011.

Q: What are some of CN's major C&S challenges today, and how will those challenges evolve over the next five years?

A: We have a perfect storm coming right now because we have this increase in tempo in what we're doing with expansion, but we've also got this attrition and loss of experience. And, as an industry and internally, there's a crunch on signal design capacity. So we have a perfect storm where everybody wants more, and we're rebuilding in terms of our staff. That's a big challenge for us. I think it will improve over the next five years because we will be working our way through the PTC hump — it's a big demand on the industry, and obviously internally our own team will be more mature by then. But we've hired a lot of guys and gals here in the last two years or so.

Q: You mentioned PTC. As CN moves forward, what will be the key hurdles for your department to clear?

A: Obviously the short implementation timeline is a big one. The cost is an issue for all of us, as an industry. Just the development of the new technologies and the complexity associated with the interoperable solution and driving for that coordination with the other Class Is are hurdles.

Q: What are some other innovations that CN is working on?

A: We're working hard on a number of things, but one thing worth mentioning is on the U.S. side of the house, we've already got the ability to request track time remotely from a laptop. And in Canada, we have a different dispatching system and we do not have that functionality across our property in Canada, so we're working on that. For us, that will be one of our bigger non-PTC enhancements, and we should have that ready by next year.

Q: You mentioned attrition, loss of experience and rebuilding staff. How would you describe the employment marketplace for C&S at CN ?

A: Everybody realizes the marketplace is pretty competitive right now. We've got a lot of folks looking for people to rebuild their staffs. We're relying on on-the-job training for the professional level for designers and also for maintainers. We're moving our people up quickly. It's best described as a pretty competitive market and bright future for anybody who wants to get into it — not only in S&C, but across the company we have quite a concerted effort to attract and retain employees.

Q: Is there a type of C&S position that's particularly hard to fill at CN?

A: Field supervisor is a very demanding position. It's tough. If [potential employees] want to come out of the ranks and if they're coming in off the street, the question becomes, are they willing to accept the demands of the transportation industry being a 24/7 operation? So, field supervisor is always tough. But also, designers and even senior leaders [are a challenge to find] because we have this attrition of folks with lots of experience. We've got a lot of 30-year guys leaving and we're replacing them with 15-year guys.

Alaska Railroad Corp. Eileen Reilly Vice President of Information, Technology and Telecommunications

Q: How has Alaska Railroad Corp. (ARRC) been spending its 2011 C&S capital dollars?

A: We have been spending our funds on adding to our CTC signal territory or operational improvements ... [driven by the] Rail Safety and Improvement Act. Most of our territory is dark territory. There are lots of switches that have no monitoring, so we give someone authority to hand-operate it so we can pass trains. With the [PTC] mandate saying you have to monitor those switches, we did an analysis and it showed it was less expensive in . . . our Whittier division to add CTC than it was to put in monitoring equipment because it also gave us the benefit of having remote control switches. ... So, we had the side benefit of operational improvement as we're moving forward equipping and getting ready for the PTC mandate.

Q: What will be ARRC's major C&S hurdles as you move forward with PTC implementation?

A: Probably the financial hurdle. We're a pretty small operation that is 65 miles of signalized territory, so that's pretty easy to implement PTC — not very costly. But the dark territory, we don't have much commercial power there. The bigger cost for us is bringing power [to] the sites because there's just no commercial power available.

Q: What other significant C&S projects is ARRC working on in 2011?

A: We are moving . . . our communications for our signaling and wayside crossing event recorders to a TCP/IP based-system so we can have multiple paths for communications. That's a large infrastructure project under way. That will help us today, so if a path goes down and we have to stop the train and move it at restricted speed, it will give us multiple paths to give the command out to the status of our signal system. ... We've put in a new wheel impact load detector to help keep damage from flattening our wheels, and that's been a successful event this year. It's a $700,000 project. We also are trying to finish up the narrow bandwidth radio effort this year.

Q: What is the main challenge for the C&S department at ARRC?

A: Probably the biggest challenge is to support the PTC mandate. Still being able to do the maintenance we need to do, train our people for the new equipment, support the new equipment that has to be put in place, and being able to hire and train people quickly enough to keep up with the PTC mandate [all at the same time] is our biggest challenge.

Q: How would you describe the C&S employment marketplace for ARRC?

A: We have had difficulty hiring signal maintainers. So, we have been hiring people with electronic backgrounds and then sending them to the lower 48 [states] for school, which is an expensive proposition to get them FRA-certified to be a maintainer.

Q: Is that because there aren't enough schools to train workers for the C&S jobs at ARRC?

A: By the time they get through school, they're usually not interested in coming up here [to Alaska]. For the most part, what we've done is hire people with electronic backgrounds and send them to school.

Q: What has been the main focus of Amtrak's C&S capital budget in 2011?

A: We've been continuing our state-of-good repair plan, which is to get the older systems replaced, and in a state of good repair and higher reliability. That's been along the Northeast Corridor out on the Harrisburg line between Harrisburg, Pa., and Philadelphia. We continue to replace an outdated signal system and installing bi-directional signaling — it's a two-track railroad and it's signaled for one direction only, so we keep chipping away at that. ... But our biggest projects for 2011 have been PTC projects.

The other project is replacing the dispatching system on the Northeast Corridor. We just replaced the dispatching system in Chicago. So, where we have three dispatching centers on the Northeast Corridor — and in the past, we had three different or stand-alone mainframe computers — we're now going to a server-based system. ... It will be one system operating on a wide area network. That is due to go into service this fall, starting with the Philadelphia dispatching center and moving those people to Wilmington, Del. That will be followed next year with converting the Boston and New York dispatching centers.

Our budget for 2011 is about $25 million, not counting what's remaining of the [federal] stimulus money. Our general capital budget is about the same as [it was] in 2010, but in 2010, we had a lot more stimulus money.

Q: What non-PTC C&S innovations is Amtrak working on?

A: We've been doing a lot of work to eliminate wayside signals and go with cab signals. ... As we do that work, we're going to be using more microprocessor-based track circuits. We've been working with our vendors to develop remote diagnostic capabilities in that equipment. We have a fiber network throughout the Northeast Corridor, so we have the capacity in the fiber network to bring information into a central location. We're working with the vendors to incorporate SNMP [Simple Network Management Protocol] protocols so that we can do remote diagnostics, and that way we will be able to see problems arising before they become a train delay.

As a whole engineering department, we are working on our asset management system. We use a Maximo, which is an IBM software management product, and it tracks every asset that anyone touches. We know how much time or money was spent on it. We're also going to roll in our tests and inspections and all the documentation will be computerized so the maintainer and technician will do his tests and have a hand-held device and it gets recorded. We avoid a lot of human error and time associated with filling out paperwork. And hopefully, that system will help us with remote testing that would save some time.

Southern California Regional Rail Authority (Metrolink) Darrell Maxey Director, PTC and C&S Systems

Q:Where has Metrolink focused its C&S capital budget in 2011?

A: We've been focusing our investments, as can be expected, mostly on PTC, but also on communication network improvement — partly to support PTC, but also to support our general communication system needs, [as well as] grade crossing safety enhancements, and rehabilitation of existing interlockings and signals.

Q: What are Metrolink's major C&S projects for 2011?

A: We're performing a major grade-crossing safety enhancement, particularly in Orange County. That's a three-year project that is beginning to wind down. There's also a service expansion component of that program, where we put in new crossovers, turnouts and some interlockings to support that program. That was a three- or four-year, $180 million program, half of which was C&S, and we're in the final year. Again, we went through and completely renewed and upgraded 50 crossings to our new standards, and also they'll be quiet zone compatible or capable.

The other project we had ...[was] a system-wide communication network improvement, including a fiber backbone, digital microwave network management system to run or manage all this communication infrastructure that we're putting in place. That's a three-year, $60 million program, and we're into the second year.

The final of the bigger three projects is positive train control. Our PTC project includes the replacement of our computer-aided dispatch system, and that has other elements such as a new train control building. That's a $201 million program, and we're about one- quarter into that program.

Q: What is Metrolink's No. 1 challenge in C&S, and how will that change in five years?

A: Our biggest challenge is planning, designing and driving all this communication signal program work safely with no or minimal interruptions in service, and we have to do that while maintaining budget, schedule, quality and functionality objectives. So, I think it's the sheer volume of the work at this point in time, which will continue for the next couple of years. That's the big challenge. Hopefully we'll see a ramp down in four or five years. We're certainly swallowing a fire hose of work right now.

Q: What will be the primary hurdles as Metrolink moves forward on PTC?

A: I think system integration, and we're currently dealing with product delays. We're on a very aggressive delivery schedule, in advance of the FRA mandate, and so any product delays will have a major impact on our delivery schedule.

Q: What other innovations is Metrolink working on?

A: One of the work processes that we're trying to implement is shifting a lot of our inspection, repair and new construction work from typical weekday work to nights and weekends. That may not seem like a big transition, but it really is. ...The reason we want to move to nights and weekends is we have very dense traffic on our rail lines, and the opportunity to perform any work without delaying or impacting train schedules is not during the day, it's after 8 p.m. and before 4 a.m. and on weekends. That's a big deal for us to migrate into that.

The other process is, we are realizing that we need to do extensive training of our maintenance and operation personnel associated with all these new systems and technology that we are installing. You have to make sure all your personnel on the front lines maintaining these new systems have completed training, and understand how to maintain and troubleshoot problems on the systems being deployed.

Q: How would you describe the employment marketplace for C&S positions at Metrolink?

A: We're seeing a global shortage, all the way from the signal maintainer to the signal engineer who designs the system, and communication engineers and technicians. We are seeing shortages of personnel at all levels, particularly with experience and expertise. If we do bring in entry-level personnel, maybe they have technical training or have a good solid technician or engineering background, but they still need to be put into a program to acclimate them to the railroad industry and the communications and signal systems that we're installing. And this training element is a big deal.

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Tim McKay Senior Vice President, Rail Program Development

Q: Where has DART focused its C&S capital dollars in 2011?

A: We are expanding at a rapid rate. In December of last year, we added 28 miles and 20 stations to our system. And we currently have another 15 miles of double track light-rail under construction, and have five out for solicitation right now. ... We're spending a lot of dollars on signaling and communication for the benefit of efficiency. The part of that that is patron-related is customer information, which is keeping our traveling public informed of changes, delays. ... And the other side is technology such as security cameras and more safety and security things.

Q: What are DART's biggest challenges in C&S?

A: When gasoline prices fluctuate, more people look for choice, and then there's more demand on the system. And when there is more demand, we have to spend dollars on equipment and facilities and expansion to bring more people into the system.

We have done pretty well in terms of funding through the FTA's New Starts program; we've done pretty well with grants on the federal side with high-speed rail, and on state side. The challenge is that those grant dollars will not be dependable sources in the near future, and the prediction is that we're going to have to be more innovative in how we finance projects.

Q: How does the employment marketplace look for DART's C&S department?

A: There are some standard categories in general transportation where we are blessed with the best of the best. It's in the specialty areas where everybody is struggling. I represent DART on the FTA's Construction Roundtable [which meets twice a year to share knowledge among grant recipients], and we have been talking for nearly 10 years about the systems side of the house: traction power, signaling and communications. And it seems even with a tough economy, it's hard to find folks who qualify in those areas. We are working with APTA [American Public Transportation Association] and other industry leaders to try to figure out ways to attract more college students into transportation and some of those shortage areas.

Q: Is there something colleges and universities can or should do to help guide students into those areas?

A: Absolutely. ... For example, I was pleased to see Michigan Tech has a transportation and rail group, and they are working on internships with Union Pacific and other railroads. What it boils down to is that most of the schools do a really good job on the technical side. ... Specifically now, while there's a growing interest in railroading, we have to be out there as much as we can to establish internship partnerships with these schools so kids understand what it is that we do.