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The Association of American Railroads (AAR) has named the six nominees for this year’s John H. Chafee Environmental Excellence Award.

Named after John Chafee, the late Rhode Island senator who advocated for conservation and environmental causes, the award recognizes a railroad employee who demonstrated a high level of environmental stewardship the previous year.

The nominees are:
• Keith Ebbeskotte, a work equipment plant manager for CSX Transportation, who has helped reduce the Class I’s carbon and air emissions footprint, cut hazardous waste volumes and identified a biodegradable absorbent material designed to clean up minor petroleum spills;
• Michael Hartung, a mechanical supervisor for Norfolk Southern Railway and the lead environmental trainer for employees at the Roanoke, Va., locomotive facility, who is proactively involved in all environmental issues at his shop and developed an environmental tracking program that’s been used as a model for other shops;
• Michael Iden, Union Pacific Railroad’s general director of car and locomotive engineering, who is considered the father of low-emission GenSet locomotives and has focused on improvements in locomotive traction performance, fuel efficiency and diesel engine emission reductions throughout his 31-year railroad career;
• Robert Jones, Amtrak’s senior director of utilities management, who undertook the shutdown of the central steam plant for Amtrak’s Chicago yard, led an initiative to replace existing lighting systems with more energy efficient ones and was instrumental in developing plans that culminated in Amtrak’s adoption of its first energy reduction goal;
• JP “Jim” Langan, a signal supervisor for BNSF Railway Co., who performed a reverse engineering of skate retarders to identify the cause of a hydraulic fluid leak, designed a custom made retrofit that seals the leak point and developed a system to collect hydraulic fluid potentially leaking from a cylinder's internal seal; and
• Richard McFadyen, CN’s director of corporate facilities, who implemented an energy management system network-wide, initiated an energy review of all shops and spurred a lighting replacement effort to conserve electricity.

The AAR will name the Chafee award winner in early May.