BNSF completes Tulsa yard upgrades in tight timeframe

BNSF Railway Co. in early April completed reliability upgrades at its Tulsa, Oklahoma, hump yard in a condensed time frame — an effort that required extensive planning to avoid disruptions to freight traffic flow. 

The yard was shut down completely for 48 hours on March 25 until the morning of March 27 while BNSF’s signal, track, structures, operating and service design teams completed the most disruptive work, BNSF officials said in a “Rail Talk” blog article by Stephen Manning. Rail cars were briefly rerouted to other yards to be processed during the shutdown. 

"The original schedule tried to separate out the work to minimize the number of tracks impacted at a single time,” said Matt Hammond, assistant vice president and chief engineer for BNSF’s South region. “As we continued planning the work, we learned it would actually be less impactful to completely shut down the yard for 48 hours, and then incrementally complete all the project work within 168 hours."

After the 48 hours, the yard reopened some tracks to accept rail cars for processing. Crews then worked on remaining tracks and reopened them one by one until all work was completed.

BNSF's team of 140 worked around the clock to build a new approach scale, replace a retarder and its foundation for the yard’s Group 2 tracks, adapt the master retarder foundation and replace the master retarder, install nine NX power switches, add skate retarders to safety stop rail cars, install 10,000 feet of track and surface 5,000 feet of track.

The project was completed ahead of schedule with only a few obstacles coming up, BNSF Signal Director Corey Stethem said. No injuries or accidents occurred, and the upgraded hump yard is fully operational again.