Chief C & S officers tell it the way it is at AREMA panel

Railway Track and Structures, June, 2004

What is the state of the art in communications & signaling? Top C & S officers from five Class 1 railroads and Amtrak delivered a positive, but cautious, picture of their part of the industry during a panel discussion at the AREMA C & S Technical Conference in Nashville, May 17 and 18.

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Robert DeMarco of Simmons-Boardman Publishing moderated a panel that included Philip Abaray of Union Pacific, Michael Choat of CSX Transportation, Dennis Boll of Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, Keith Holt of Amtrak, Robert Nash of Canadian Pacific Railway and Dwight Tays of Canadian National.

Some key points:

* Railroads are willing to pay more in order to obtain increased reliability of C & S products.

* Positive Train Control is a good thing, but the industry is far from ready technically or financially to go to full implementation.

* All railroads would like better remote monitoring of grade-crossing warning systems. Also on the wish list were elimination of insulated joints and better derailment-prevention systems, such as broken rail or broken wheel detection.

* BNSF is installing its ETMF system, which offers 80 percent of the benefits of PTC at 20 percent of the cost.

* Where are the C & S leaders of the future coming from? Something needs to be done to encourage movement by scheduled employees into management. Both pay and lifestyle questions must be addressed.

When asked what new products were needed to allow high-speed commuter trains to operate on the same tracks as slow-moving freight trains, Boll of BNSF replied: "Magic carpets."

The conference, a departure from joint C & S/Track AREMA conferences held the past few years, was followed by a two-day technical exhibit sponsored by Railroad Systems Suppliers, Inc.