“The world’s changing pretty dramatically. We all see it,” CEO Lance Fritz told investors and analysts at the railroad’s Investor Day on Thursday.
Using just a few clicks or a voice command, consumers can buy practically anything online, schedule the shipment, and track it to their doorsteps.
“Our customers are expecting the same level of service for their several thousand dollars per car purchases that they make with us,” Fritz says of the so-called Amazon effect.
“Customer expectations are changing rapidly and they are changing radically,” he says.
Trucking is on the verge of a revolution, as well.
“Autonomous trucking and platooning are not some far-fetched dream,” Fritz says.
UP’s answer to these challenges is an array of technology that will make it easier for customers to do business with the railroad, increase automation and productivity, and improve safety and efficiency.
“We have awesome leading-edge technology,” Fritz says.
Some of the technology is currently being deployed in pilot programs, ranging from commercial applications that provide real-time car data to track-mounted sensors that can help detect problems and prevent derailments.
“But one-off pilots aren’t the end game,” Fritz says. “What we’re trying to create is a posture of constant evolution.”
Positive train control will make one-person crews or fully autonomous operation viable sometime after 2020.
“One employee per train inside PTC operations will be a longer-term initiative that Union Pacific has,” Chief Operating Officer Cam Scott says. “I think we feel extremely confident that the technology will work efficiently and safety to allow that to become reality.”
Scott has visited Australia, where mining company Rio Tinto last year began using autonomous trains, with an engineer on board for supervision, for 60 percent of its train-kilometers.
“There was nothing like seeing and touching and smelling to believe that it is possible. We were on board their trains,” Scott says. “The technology exists on our railroad today. It is not a brand-new technology that needs to be developed. The reliability of PTC has to be proven out first.”
Fritz emphasized two things about one-person crews and autonomous operation. First, neither is required for UP to reach its operating ratio goal of 60 percent by 2020 or an eventual 55-percent target. Second, the railroad doesn’t have a plan or timeline in mind.
Labor negotiations and regulatory approval from the Federal Railroad Administration would be required, officials say, and the ramifications and limits of one-person crews or autonomous trains need to be fully thought out.
“There are still a lot of moving parts in that, not the least of which is that most trains have to do some sort of work anyway,” Fritz says. “And so there’s going to be people doing some amount of work, whether they are in the cab of the locomotive or somewhere else.”
Ultimately, competition from platooned or driverless trucks — which have the potential to siphon traffic off the railroad due to their lower costs — may drive a reduction in crew size or a move to autonomous operations for main line trains.
Until that day arrives, UP’s 1,500-person in-house technology team is working on ways to make the railroad easier to deal with, safer, and more productive.
UP’s SmartETA takes real-time GPS data from the PTC system and then puts machine learning and algorithms to work to produce a far more precise estimated time of arrival than is currently possible. The information can help customers better plan for shipment arrivals and departures.
UP is testing SmartETA and expects to do a widespread rollout of the technology this summer, Chief Marketing Officer Beth Whited says.
The UP tech team has redesigned mundane equipment like locomotive radios to slash the cost by more than half, saving the railroad $10 million. But it’s also working on cutting-edge projects.
It has filed patents for its SensorX, an orange plug not much bigger than your thumb that is installed in rail. The device includes an accelerometer, strain gauge, and digital temperature sensor. It can take 40,000 measurements of vibration and rail movement per second, and send the data along for analysis through UP’s NetControl Internet of Things system.
The goal, says UP Chief Information Officer Lyndon Tennison, is to prevent derailments. The SensorX, currently being tested in Iowa and Oregon, can replicate the function of wheel-impact detectors, help detect broken rails in cold weather and sun kinks in hot weather, as well as detect loads that might be out of balance.
UP has other new systems in the works, as well, including mobile devices that will allow car inspectors to log defects in real time.
I just happened to get a good laugh when I remembered the mantra of many of the proponents of “Newest , latest and greatest”. People will tell you that Windows 10 is the greatest thing since sliced bread but when you say “you” have troubles with it the comment is “replace all your hardware because everything else is obsolete”. Then Windows 10 decides to do an update on you and because you are a 24/7 operation you can’t allocate 8 hours for it to do an update. You will find your system just dies as it does an update and then you sit there with SCOD “The Spinning Circle of Death”. The fix “Well you need to buy the “newest” version because this one will not have the troubles your old one had”. “Of course there is compatibility problems and a lack of interoperability”. On top of that you get parts that came from a one time contract from a sole source vendor that has gone out of business. If you have ever worked in any industry that has used computerized operations for years you are used to all these troubles. I worked in Communications , voice and data stating back in the late 70’s and there is still some systems up and running that were installed in the 1980’s because they do the job the customer wants and needs. They get told over and over to “buy this because it is the latest and greatest” then they check with other users and found they are down more often then they are up.
Computers and systems management sounds great “At least from a sales view point”. I spent years in technical support flying all over North America fixing all the things that were guaranteed not to fail. I spent hours doing power and grounding audits of facilities finding “stuff” that was not put in properly or connections had failed. The longer it is in service the greater the chance for failure. Now for the railroads plug in weather , vibration and “other” equipment failure coupled with the push to have 2 mile long trains that have “incidents” of pull aparts or derailments and you have only one person or no people available to fix it then you have “situations arise”.
Now throw into the mix self driving trucks and platooning of trucks it again sounds great except when the weather goes to crap in a hand basket. Let’s not forget that on most roads are not just truckers but a lot of other vehicles and now you have an inter mix. As one who likes riding his motorcycle I am leery of a self driving tractor trailer riding up on me or me trying to pass one.
One self driving train with explosive or hazardous material or a self driving truck with 10,000 gallons of flammable or hazardous material and “computer glitch” causes a massive accident and it will all get shut down.
Two-man crews are a better safety feature. What happens if there is broken coupler or some malfunction in a helper set? Could one engineer handle it? What happens if vandals try to inflict damage on the train or threaten the engineer? A one person is a big responsibility to place on an individual.
Andrea Hart, did you ever take and pass a college economics course?
Now I want to read a feature article by Michael Colby. Your comment was great!
Automation is great! Until it runs afoul of some old Luddite that has ‘not gotten the memo’. Or a Computer Hacker bent on mayhem. Until the Human is removed from the operating side of the equation.
Technology, and its success will suffer the slings and arrows of that Human”X” factor. On its road to the future. IMHO…
The one thing everyone has to keep in mind is that no matter the cost savings achieved they never pass it on to the end user.Just as our wonderful Tax cuts it will all go to the very rich and the middle class and the poor will pay!
Union Pacific has just made its first moves to become the railroad of the future. To quote “Positive train control will make one-person crews or fully autonomous operation viable sometime after 2020.” Having worked with and sold CNC machine tools for most of my career, I have come to understand one fact. When computers are adapted to a task such as machining they will always outperform humans.
For a long time I have been considering the long term survival of railroads and whether they will be eclipsed by technology and all but disappear from the evolving world of transportation systems of tomorrow. Or can they reinvent themselves into a competitive transportation system.
Imagine it is Saturday August 4 2040 and thousands of people have gathered along the Global II, Proviso Yard to Global III in Rochelle right of way of the Union Pacific railroad. This day will mark the last operation of a freight train with a human crew to be operated on a main line railroad in the United States. The locomotive is a GE ET44AC a 21-year old diesel electric that was the last new engine designed to be operated by a human crew that was bought by the Union Pacific railroad. The locomotive number 4026 will be pulling a train of 20 cars, a mix of boxcars, covered hoppers, a tank car, and a TTX flat car with 2 conventional truck trailers that have been borrowed from a museum. The end of the train will have 3 cabooses, also borrowed from a museum, to provide a place for the VIPs to ride. At 12:00 noon the Union Pacific, locomotive 4026 sounds its horn 2 times and the last human-crewed freight train departs Proviso to keep its date with history. On completion of this run, the train will be deadheaded back to the Illinois Railroad Museum and presented to them for preservation.
Okay, so your first thought is this can’t happen, but why not? Over the years almost everything that I have known about railroads has changed or gone away. The only constant that I can count on is 4 feet 8 ½ inches. As long as the model of how to run a railroad is still to move the least time sensitive freight. Tie every car in the yard onto the fewest number of locomotives that will move the train, and re-sort all of the cars when you reach a major terminal, you will not be able to compete with the soon-to-be deployed robotrucks.
The winner is always any enterprise that adapts the best technology to the problem. An article in Teckcrunch recently described: “A convoy of self-driving trucks that recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam.” They also stated that. “It is estimated that the cost of operating a self-driving truck from New York to Los Angeles will be cut by as much as 75% without having a driver.” It has been proven over and over again that once you start to adapt a computer to a given problem, the computer will prevail and do the task better, faster, and cheaper.
With this kind of threat, how do railroads survive beyond a few main lines hauling the least desirable freight with the lowest return in profit? Only by rethinking how the railroads operate and making drastic changes can they hope to survive.
The model for the future railroad needs to be fast, frequent, and efficient. Only by attaining all three can they expect to be relevant by the middle of the 21st century. Railroads of the future will have a major advantage in controlling their own right of ways, unencumbered by the traffic jams that the robotrucks will be facing. The train of the future will be able to move over long distances with predictable schedules and high speeds. Speeds of 100 to 120 mph will need to be attained to properly use the new model correctly. With speeds of 120 mph, markets that are out of the question today would be competitive for this new system. Overnight air cargo could be challenged, within a 2000 mile distance, with the new trains making the 2000 mile trip in about 17 hours. By noon of the next day deliveries would begin to be made.
Frequent service is required to match the robotrucks ability to get on the road as soon as they are loaded and keep driving around the clock until they get to their destinations. Departures for the new railroads need to be no more than 30 minutes apart, or as soon as you can load 15 cars all heading to the same location. Trains should be running like street cars, one right after another, performing more like a conveyor belt than a barge.
Efficiency is the most important of the requirements of the future railroads. The first item to be considered is the locomotive. The 4,500 HP engines of today would be overkill for the short, fast trains of the new railroads. The new engine at 2,500 HP would be a computer-controlled machine that uses positive train control, GPS, and a digital model of the railroad. This engine would be a hybrid genset that would be paired with a lithium battery tender. Being a hybrid, all dynamic braking or coasting would charge the batteries in the tender instead of wasting the power running it through resistance grids. The saved power would then be used to accelerate or maintain the speed of the train. Also being a genset, the engine would use only the required number of its 3 diesels to maintain the necessary speed.
A key piece of the locomotive technology is the lithium battery tender. When the engine arrives at a terminal, the tender is uncoupled from the engine and is moved to a charging station. A fully charged tender is then coupled to the outgoing engine to provide power for the traction motors until it is depleted; then the diesels start to power the traction motors. The charging stations will receive their power from the solar cell arrays that cover the entire facility. Wind turbines could also be erected to generate electricity for charging the tenders.
All freight will be moved in containers whether it is grain, car parts or anhydrous ammonia. The double-stack car will have couplers that are more like transit system cars than standard railroad cars. All connections will be made when the couplers come together, including air and electrical connections. The brakes will be air but applying them will be through an electronic system and not by reducing the air pressure of the train line. The double-stack cars themselves will be much lighter than they are today, because the design requirement will be for a train that is never longer than 15 cars. Aluminum or carbon fiber construction would produce drastic reductions in the weight of this equipment.
The terminal of the future would be similar to any container terminal of today. It would look like a big parking lot with tracks running through it. There would be two major differences. The first is the entire facility has a roof of solar panels collecting light and making electricity to charge the tenders and power the terminal. Where wind is abundant, wind turbines would supplement the power production. (Just think about how much power you could generate in Amarillo or Cheyenne.)
The second feature of the new terminal would be computers controlling all loading and unloading of the containers. This lights-out terminal would use bluetooth-retrieved data from the container to sort outbound loads for one destination and place them on to a train headed to that location. The time allowed to load a train will be limited to no more than 30 minutes. The train would not be longer than 15 cars. When the condition of 30 minutes or 15 cars is achieved the train departs. When a train arrives the containers are removed by computer operated cranes, and placed on a waiting robotruck. A bluetooth device on the container identifies it and downloads the GPS coordinates of its destination to the robotruck, and it is on its way.
Like everything else on this future railroad, how it is operated will change to accommodate the new trains. Single track medium to high density main lines will be built with numerous 45 car length sidings. The computer will control the speed of an opposing move so both trains arrive at a given siding at the same time. Both trains continue to roll with one holding the main line and the other entering the siding. The trains pass each other, never stopping, and the train in the siding reenters the main and both trains accelerate back to track speed. High density double track lines will be able to run trains bumper to bumper. There would be no need for block signals to separate or restrict trains by 2 blocks. A group of 2, 3, or more trains can be moved closely together at high speed and operated as one train by the computer. All of the engines will receive identical commands at the same time and act as one.
And yes, there will always be a place for a human in this new railroad. Programmers, administrators, inspectors, and technicians will be required to keep the railroad running.
My views may seem like they came from Isaac Asimov, but to not rethink how railroads do their business is condemning them to join the horse drawn freight wagon in history.
This is all fine n’ dandy UP….UP and you other RR’s need a intermodal revolution. Doesn’t matter what technical innovation you have access to. If you can’t get the freight where and when it’s needed. Locate facilities where DC’s/fulfillment centers are concentrated…It will be irrelevant….