You don't learn engineering maintenance in school - Brief Article

Railway Track and Structures, Feb, 2001 by Michael D. Roney

Seems like most of us in the railway and transit industry spend the bulk of our time maintaining what someone else built. Whether it is a length of track, a few dozen bridges or a whole host of signal and communications installations, we didn't design it and put it there in the first place, but we sure are on the hook to make sure it continues to perform. I don't know about you, but I don't have a diploma in maintenance engineering and I wouldn't know where to get one. I did learn civil engineering. So I know the principles of bridge design and could design a track foundation. But the bulk of what many of us do today is making the right decisions on maintenance.

The railway maintenance discipline is actually very sophisticated. Your local infrastructure manager, be he or she responsible for track, bridges, buildings or train-control systems, follows the same disciplined logic. He is responsible for running a low-risk infrastructure that provides the level of service to traffic that the customer is willing to pay for, while stretching the service length of his assets to the maximum, without overburdening his resources, like the maintainer. He is therefore skilled in risk management, service cost/benefit analysis, life-cycle costing, asset performance monitoring, resource leveling, project management, repair vs. replace analysis, people management and emergency response. It sounds like an executive position to me, but it is usually called a track supervisor, b&b master or c&s supervisor.

While our safety records and steady increases in GTM's per employee and per track mile speak very well of how skillfully we practice our art of railway maintenance management, it is still curious that engineering maintenance is not often taught in our technical schools. Not that there aren't practitioners of maintenance management who take it to a high level, such as Willie Ebersohn and Conrad Ruppert at Amtrak, but we haven't got our secrets all down on paper so a young fellow has a chance to pick it up quickly. And the guys with the money don't understand our witchcraft.

Good maintenance management requires excellent experience and judgment. We do that well. Better maintenance management is assisted by some solid data. Let me give you some examples. You inspect a bridge and find some corrosion on some important structural elements. Knowing how to prioritize this job in competition with other deck and bearing replacements is maintenance management, and it sure would help if you had an objective condition rating system. Or you are concerned about the age of your train-control system and your ability to get parts. If you could estimate the probability of outages and the cost to the company, it would go a long way to selling your story. Accountable for your track? If you can project rail service failures or ERA track geometry violations into the future, the marketing folks might well listen to your story of impending speed restrictions.

It may sound like the same "putting a good story together" that we all face at budget time, but it is also sound safety, and service management. And that is why we get a paycheck.

So I would like to close with a message to our AREMA committees as we put together our updates to the Manuals of Recommended Practice for Railway Engineering. Let us not forget that we are the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association. I would like to see our committees take on assignments that are specifically geared to answering the questions of how do I best manage maintenance. How should this asset be inspected? When is there a risk? What information best quantifies the risk? And how do I maintain it to get the best performance and service life?

You won't learn this in school. But our frontline supervisors can contribute a great deal to such assignments, and would love to get involved. AREMA is here to supplement the knowledge and experience of railway maintenance practitioners with documented recommended practice. The answers are in our heads. Now let's get more maintenance-oriented materials into the manual and watch our credibility grow at the budget table.