Union Pacific continues to develop tie unloading system

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Ties are a big topic at the annual NRC Conference — just about every railroad mentions how many ties it will replace in the coming year —so it makes sense that Shane Keller, Union Pacific’s vice president of engineering, wanted to highlight UP’s effort to improve the tie-replacement process.

Keller was the leadoff speaker Thursday as the National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association opened its 44th annual conference at The Boca Raton resort. The event features most Class I railroads, major short line companies, and some transit agencies outlining their capital spending plans for 2023 for contractors who will bid on at least some of the work involved.

Keller noted that UP’s track maintenance goal is to keep slow-order miles for its mainline at between 1% and 2% of the system total, and has hit that goal for the last two years. Slow orders related to ties have dropped each of the last four years, from more than 300 to about 50.

The railroad has averaged about 3.7 million ties replaced over the last seven years, and projects a similar number this year. Meanwhile, its cost of tie replacement has gradually dropped from $571 million for 4.2 million ties in 2016 to $400 million for 3.8 million ties in 2022.

“So how does your spend go down and you put in the same amount of ties?” Keller said. “That’s productivity, which gets harder and harder every year.”

Which is where the railroad’s work to develop autonomous tie-unloading technology — a car that can eject bundles of ties along the right-of-way in advance of tie-replacement work — comes in. [The railroad produced this short video on the project last year].

“We had one [car] when I talked to you last year, and now we have five of them,” Keller said. “We think is a trainload of these things looks like about 60. This car has cages on it, and each cage has ties in it. It’s like Pez dispenser. There’s eight Pezes per cage … when you get seven cages, you’ve got 560 ties to a car; you get 60 cars, and you can put 33,000 ties on a 60-car train.

“So today, the way we unload ties … you can probably unload 30,000 ties in a couple of weeks. The way that we see this thing now, is if you’ve got the right territory, you’re unloading 30,000 ties in eight hours.”

The current challenge is loading the car, he says, but UP has been working with a company to develop a loader. It’s come up with one that can load a cage in 20 minutes, meaning 24 to 36 hours for the entire 60-car train.

“You can see how much of a difference that would make in our tie unloading program,” he said.

2023 capital plan, in general terms

As is generally the case with presentations at the NRC conference, since the event falls so early in the calendar year, UP has not yet finalized its capital budget for 2023. Keller said it should be similar to figures for 2021 ($1.95 billion) and 2022 ($1.91 billion).

That figure will likely include $275 million for structures work, primarily bridges, where UP continues to address almost 60 miles of timber bridges remaining in its network. The majority of those bridges are in Texas, which will therefore see a high concentration of that work. Projections are for replacement of 3.4 miles for bridges and 2.4 deck-tie miles, with two high-cost steel projects.

“We replace a bridge every day and a half,” Keller said. “That sounds like a lot, but when you have 17,000 structures, it’s a really small number.”

The railroad has faced more urgent bridge work with increasing climate change, Keller said.

“I would say we could typically lose one bridge to a fire a year,” he said. “Last year, it was six. … A good chunk of those were in Texas. Not one of those bridges put us out of service for more than 48 hours, and that’s due to a lot of people that are in this room, so we thank you for that.”

More than 60% of UP’s planned capacity spending — likely to be in somewhere in excess of  $200 million — will be on mainline projects, with some 35% of that to address train length (for example, siding extensions). After several years of focus on the California-Texas Sunset Route, the largest concentration in 2023 will be on UP’s line to the Pacific Northwest. Another half-dozen such projects are scattered throughout Texas.

Unlike most years, Keller said, the budget for commercial facilities will exceed that of the capacity projects; of that, 70% is destined for intermodal terminals, with the facilities in Southern California’s Inland Empire; Lathrop, Calif.; Mesquite, Texas; and Kansas City, Mo., the top priorities.

Track geometry expansion

UP will add three to four track-geometry-equipped locomotives this year, adding to its fleet that includes six other locomotives, three track geometry boxcars, two self-propelled track geometry caries, and eight light track geometry trucks.

“The beauty of the box is that you waybill it where you want it to go, the subdivision that you want it to traverse, and you don’t have to do anything,” he said. “The problem with the box is that it’s slow. It goes into a hump yard and does all those things. It has a lot of down time.

“A locomotive is pretty cool. … When you have a geometry car that weighs 200 tons, it’s going to stress your rail. Our maintenance folks like to complain about this when it runs, but when you go back out there and you hand-check [the findings], it’s for real. The problem is it does get a lot of mileage; it just doesn’t go where you want it to go.”

Testing with the locomotives and boxcars is projected to cover more than 500,000 miles this year, while the manned cars will cover less than 100,000 miles.

“[Measuring autonomously] is going to be the way things are done in the future,” Keller said. “Because it’s better than what we do today. … This is where we need to take advantage of big data. We used to have two [geometry] cars. Now we’re going to have 15 of them. Some people are going to have more? What are we going to do with that data?

Keller said 95% of UP’s track defects occur on 15% of the railroad, which suggests a refocusing of testing is in order: “Put your people fixing things that you know that are wrong. Don’t run over pieces of railroad that it’s really not necessary. That’s going to be the next big change in our business.”