OTTAWA, Ill. — The Illinois Railway has become one of the first short lines to fully implement positive train control, completing installation of equipment on three locomotives to be used on BNSF Railway’s busy Chicago-Aurora, Ill., main line. The equipment allows interoperability with BNSF and Metra trains between Aurora and Eola, Ill.
The Illinois Railway, a OmniTRAX property based in Ottawa, Ill., operates 113 miles in three separate segments in Illinois, including the line between Streator and Montgomery, Ill, with trackage rights on BNSF to Eola.
The IR received a grant from the Federal Railroad Administration for 70% of its PTC implementation costs. The system from Wabtec, which provided, hardware, configuration, installation, testing, and training, needed less than a year to go from the grant award to deployment.
“We are delighted to be a first mover on PTC in the short line industry and are making our railroad even safer than it already was,” OmniTRAX CEO Kevin Shuba said in a press release. “We credit [FRA Administrator] Ron Batory, who has made PTC the focus of his leadership of the FRA, as well as U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Department of Transportation and BNSF for their support of this project.”
GP40-2W. Note the lack of dynamics. Or can you?
Given the height of the control panel, the road switcher design might as well return to the high nose configuration last adopted by Southern Railway and the Norfolk and Western Railway.
All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.
A year to fully equip 3 locomotives? And 70 percent grant funded ( as it should be, since it started as an unfounded mandate…)? Perhaps PTC is just a little bit too complicated
@Walter Rittle: Probably because the siding at Zearing isn’t long enough and it would block a local road in 2 places.
Besides most of that frac sand is (was) going to the Bakken, that requires the Aurora Sub. Zearing is on the Mendota Sub.
Perhaps FRA needs to do a study of locomotive cab instrumentation. Arrange a better layout, etc. Only spend a few bucks here and there, take time to do it right. Say 5 or 10 billion dollars and maybe 100 years or so(as long as the ICC was in existence). ??
Yikes! The wall of boxes on top of the control stand is getting tall! Once upon a time, the new cab with desktop controls and screens (IFC/ICE) was supposed to “tear down that wall”. Oh, well.
This line is a former Burlington Route that serves the sand-silica plants in Wedron. During the frac sand boom, this line was rocking bringing unit trains up to Eola Yard to go west. Now they don’t have to attach a PTC BNSF engine at Montgomery to bring them up.
Why are they backhauling westbound trains 60 miles east to Eola instead of interchanging at zearing?
When it was ordered of course, obviously IR has it now.
SD60F?, CN Only Locomotive?
Why don’t they just put all the equipment in front of the engineer. Seems to me you limit the vision for both the engineer and the conductor. Pretty soon they will need a camera to monitor the camera.