WASHINGTON — The National Railroad Construction & Maintenance Association has announced winners of its 2018 Field Employee of the Year and Projects of the Year awards, to be handed out at the upcoming NRC conference at Marco Island, Fla.
Joe Sudduth of Herzog Contracting Corp. has been named Field Employee of the Year after most recently serving as superintendent on the Phase 2 expansion of the Orlando, Fla., area’s SunRail commuter rail project. His extensive experience also includes work with Dallas Area Rapid Transit, Trinity Metro in Texas, the Connecticut Department of Transportation, Amtrak, Metrolink and the San Diego Association of Governments, among others.
The NRC’s Large Project of the Year award goes to SEMA Construction for its work on expansion of BNSF’s Alliance Intermodal Facility in Haslet, Texas, a project including construction of track, pavement, ditch grading, culverts and related work. In its application for consideration, SEMA noted the logistic challenges in completing the expansion with minimal impact on the facility: “Due to the high demand at this facility, the maximum days that any one track could be shut down was limited to 10, and at no point could the project have two tracks out of service. This required a change from three phases to seven with no long-term shutdowns and intermittent 8-hour windows, so required drainage could be installed under live tracks. … SEMA completed the project with 11,125 man-hours without a single lost-time incident.”
The Small Project of the Year is i+icon’s Flat Rock River Bridge replacement on the Louisville & Indiana Railroad in Columbus, Ind. The company demolished the existing bridge and installed its replacement in only 50 hours, well under the 96-hour deadline for the project. “Three construction operations occurred simultaneously, requiring crews from multiple job sites in different states,” the company wrote in its application. “While one crew set precast sections, another peformed demolition on the north side, and yet another slid the structure’s river span. … We not only coordinated our crews, but also made it easier for [the Louisville & Indiana] to expeditiously complete its necessary work during the same outage.”
The award winners will be honored on Wednesday, Jan. 9, the final day of the 41st annual NRC conference. Trains News Wire will be providing coverage of the conference, which features presentations from all seven U.S. Class I railroads on their capital project plans for 2109.
I would love to know Joe Sudduth’s reaction to Amtrak’s failure to add enough coaches to it’s trains on CTrail to handle demand instead of limiting riders on its trains.