ATLANTA — Norfolk Southern is installing Wabtec’s Yard Planner system at Norris Yard in Irondale, Ala., as part of an effort to improve the hump yard’s efficiency and make service more consistent.
“Norfolk Southern is the first Class I railroad to implement Yard Planner and we are already seeing greater consistency of car movement,” Joe Gioe, vice president of transportation, said in a statement today. “Most importantly, Yard Planner embeds safety and efficiency in our yards. We are excited about the long-term potential of this technology to support our customers.”
Yard Planner uses computer-aided decision making to help reduce switching by as much as 10%, boost car connections by 10%, reduce dwell by 5%, and ease yardmasters’ planning workload by more than 40%, according to Wabtec.
The system generates a yard-level car-processing plan that includes detailed schedules for the movement and processing of every car. It also visualizes current car inventory, activities, and inbound and outbound schedules, Wabtec says. Yard Planner incorporates safe train build practices, NS says.
NS says it has seen improvements in the predictability of yard operations since the initial rollout of Yard Planner in September. The system will be fully implemented early next year, with the introduction of computer-aided decision making for outbound train assembly.
Nearly 50 trains per day pass through Norris Yard, a key hub that occasionally has been a congestion trouble spot for NS in recent years.
Eventually, NS aims to install Yard Planner at its other hump yards. NS also plans to tie Yard Planner and its real-time data to Movement Planner, the automated dispatching tool used at the railroad’s Network Operations Center inside its Atlanta headquarters.
In June NS replaced the yard’s primary retarder system and scale. All inbound train traffic was diverted for 24 hours while the work was under way. NS also replaced the track and switches leading up to the hump, while also elevating the hump’s grade. Engineering forces also replaced three turnouts between the hump and the north end of the receiving yard.
This project took longer than Movement Planner!
It’s been 15 years, at least.
The problem with both was data quality and timeliness.