21 June 2004 Rebuilding Railway Yards, by Bits and Bytes   Wireless training Noel Bourassa operates a locomotive using a wireless remote control pack at the Canadian Pacific Railway freight yard in Scarborough. Computers revolutionized Canadian railway operations when the facility opened 40 years ago this month, and continue to reduce costs and improve efficiency. When a Canadian Pacific Railway triple-deck flat car rolled through a banner of helium-filled balloons on 16 Jun 1964, it signalled the opening of the company's $15 million, 175-hectare Toronto Yard and the dawn of a new era in electronically controlled rail transportation in Ontario.   One year later, Canadian National Railway opened its advanced, 405-hectare version. The eyes of Canadian shippers were on these technologically sophisticated freight yards. Here, carloads of raw and finished products would be sorted into trainloads by a combination of gravity and then-revolutionary computer control systems.   Would all these bells and whistles help the iron horse learn new tricks and deliver the goods cheaper, quicker and on time? This was vital if the railways were going to halt the hemorrhaging of business to flexible and time-sensitive trucking.   "We're handling greater traffic volumes faster than we were 40 years ago, so you'd have to say this concept and its technology were part of the answer," says Chris Carroll, the CPR's southern Ontario service area manager, who is based at the sprawling Scarborough facility.   "But we have to constantly update the technology to remain competitive. The world has gotten even faster since then and shippers want service to match."   Over the last four decades, the CPR and CN yards have been completely redesigned and rebuilt in ways that aren't necessarily visible, but crucial if rail is to maintain or build its market share.   When both yards opened, they were described as push button railroading. Now, says Carroll, it could be called microprocessor railroading; there's a lot less button pushing and lots of mouse clicking.   These high-tech systems enable CN and the CPR to process as many as 6,000 freight cars daily as they carry shipments through the GTA, to and from the untold thousands of industries spread out along the continental railway grid.   The technological innovations that do it today were displayed for guests at the 40th anniversary recreation of the CPR yard's opening ceremony last Wednesday.   Carroll told the crowd of railway employees and pensioners the yard may look little changed, but under its steel skin, it has received successive generations of advanced communications and information technologies to increase its efficiency and reduce processing time.   In the process, trains of cars from all over North America are pushed up over a man-made hill or hump at slow speed. They are then uncoupled and sent down into yard tracks to couple up with other cars going to the same destinations; this is known as classification.   Yard locomotives pull these newly assembled or classified trains to the departure yard, where main line or road locomotives are coupled on to take them to their destinations. It's like endlessly shuffling and reshuffling decks of cards.   Though the basic theory has remained the same since both the CPR and CN yards were built, electronic brainpower has replaced much of the manual brawn once required.   For example, crews of five were required to operate the hump 40 years ago. They manually ran the locomotives that pushed the strings or "cuts" of cars up to the top of the hump tracks, uncoupled the cars and set the routes they took to enter one of the classification yard tracks at the bottom.   Foremen worked from paper lists with the numbers and destinations of all the cars, flipping switches on a panel to route them. Numerous other employees, spread out around the classification component of the yard, operated various pieces of equipment that were also part of the process.   Now, microprocessor-based information and communications technology makes it possible to do this largely with only a hump yard master or classification supervisor sitting in front of a computer screen up in the tower, and one yard service employee on the ground.   Under the yard master's direction, the ground worker sends radio commands to the track-gripping hump locomotives from a lightweight Beltpack radio control transmitter strapped around their chest. Designed by CN's Canac division and employed by most of the major North American railways - including the CPR - this computer-based system acts as an invisible engineer at the throttle, taking orders wirelessly.   By means of speed-controlling transponders between the rails and a radio antenna tether system, the train gets itself into position on the tracks leading to the hump. It stops and, on command from the worker at the hump crest, it shoves forward at a slow, preset "humping" speed. The on-board computer automatically adjusts the locomotive's power and braking system as the cars are progressively uncoupled and the tonnage decreases.   As well, each car now carries a plastic coated automatic equipment identification transponder conveying its number, owner, destination, estimated weight and a slew of other mechanical data to scanners along the track.   The computer puts the numbers of the cars up on an illuminated tote board beside the track to tell the employee at the hump crest which cars need to be uncoupled or given special handling.   If any complications arise, the computer sounds a warning bell or siren and shuts down the operation.   The hump process computer system receives constantly updated data as the train is shoved up the grade and automatically sets the track switches to route cars into their proper tracks.   The computer also keeps tabs on wind speed, weather conditions and the unoccupied space left in each track. It gets an accurate weight of the car as it rolls over a scale on the hump track, known at the CN yard as the Gozinta. It also assesses the car's ability to roll and the speed at which it should move. To control the speed, it applies a series of retarders - massive brake shoes strategically placed along the side of the rails leading into the tracks.   The computer calculates the braking force required and instructs these retarders to grip the sides of the car's wheels to slow it down to the proper speed for a smooth, damage-free coupling with the other cars.   "It's how you use the various technologies to put gravity to work"   Drew Duquette, senior manager of CPR's Toronto Yard   "When you take it down to its basics, the main feature is you're letting gravity do a lot of this sorting for you," says Drew Duquette, CPR's senior Toronto yard manager.   "It's how you use the various technologies to put gravity to work that is the key to your efficiency. Every railway uses a slightly different track layout, software programs and processes, but the concept is universal."   The CN and CPR yards graphically demonstrate some of these proprietary differences and similarities. The CPR yard is long and lean, stretching east-west from Markham Road to McCowan, at the apex of the junction of the lines to Havelock and Montreal.   It is a single hump, with two lead tracks narrowing down to one from which cars are sent into the 72-track classification yard, or bowl. When one set of hump locomotives finishes off and is sent off to get its next train, a second set pushes another string of cars into position.   CN's MacMillan Yard in Vaughan runs north-south, just off the busy freight-only line that forms a steel halo over the top of Toronto. CN uses three humps to sort out its traffic:  two parallel and interconnected tracks over the dual hump leading to the 76-track main classification yard; another hump south of this one to feed a 57-track local yard for cars going to industries around the GTA. Two trains are often humped side-by-side in the CN operation.   John Orr, superintendent of CN's yard, says techniques vary, but the objective is the same on every railway: "Keep 'em rolling. A yard is the last place you want your rolling stock to be. Your employees use advanced technology to classify and build your trains as quickly as possible. Cars sitting in yards are not out serving customers and bringing in revenue. This is an asset-intensive business in which you sweat the assets to maximize your yield."   As he stands on the manicured lawn between the dual hump tracks, Orr says that, as impressive as the yard's communications, information and control technologies may be, they're only components of a much larger set of systems railroaders need to keep a tight rein on the entire transcontinental and cross-border system.   "It's not just gathering and using data within the yard that counts," says Orr. "You have to do this for every car in every location on every train in the system.   "At CN, each car has its own electronic trip plan that has to be constantly monitored and tweaked if we're going to deliver as promised."   CN pioneered the concept of a scheduled freight railway beginning in the early 1990s with an information-technology platform known as the Service Reliability System. The CPR and all the other railways have followed suit with their own versions. Previously, freight trains tended to run when enough cars for a single destination accumulated at yards, leading many shippers to describe railway service as an oxymoron.   Says Orr, "You need computer software with "drill down" capabilities that will separate the data chaff from the wheat and give it to you before a train even gets here. You have to be measuring your adherence to those car trip plans and planning the connections that will deliver on the schedule and service guarantees we make to customers."   As an example, Orr points to a set of remote-controlled locomotives pulling a short cut of begrimed, open-topped gondola cars up the line that connects the local yard with the main yard.   They go up what might be considered the down side of the hump and, within minutes, the cars are being released from the crest to roll down into the main yard tracks at speeds of up to 30 km/h. Those, he says, are full of high-quality scrap from the automotive stamping factories of the GTA.   With steel prices soaring, scrap is suddenly gold and the materials that feed the steel mills are now very time sensitive.   Says Orr, "They have a guaranteed connection to a Chicago train and we were automatically alerted to that before they even came into the yard. Based on that information, the hump yard master has altered his plan to give them a priority hump and make sure they are on the westbound train as promised."   On both CN and the CPR, the investment in the real-time information technology that makes this possible is paying off.   Orr says cars now arrive and depart MacMillan Yard within an average of 20.3 hours, down from 48 to 50 hours only a decade ago. CN's main-line locomotives are now fueled, inspected and sent back out after only three hours in the yard. The CPR reports similar reductions in the amount of time cars and locomotives "dwell" in its Toronto yard.   "We're using fewer cars and power to haul more traffic," says the CPR's Duqette. "Money not tied up in motive power and rolling stock sitting idle in yards can be used to expand our main line track capacity or further upgrade our IT systems which, in turn, enables us to haul more traffic and generate more revenue."   Ironically, the technologically induced higher throughput of yards such as the CN and CPR facilities in Toronto has played a role in an on-going program of yard elimination.   The CPR has wiped out its hump operations in Montreal, leaving only Toronto, Chicago, St. Paul and Calgary with this type of yard. CN has closed its own Montreal hump yard and another in Moncton, NB.   CN president E. Hunter Harrison last week told investment analysts classification work will be further streamlined and one hump yard - either Winnipeg or Edmonton - closed.   In addition to the savings through such a consolidation, CN estimates it will realize $340 to $400 million from the real estate.   "The remaining yards are increasingly important points of connectivity and will have to continue to increase in efficiency," says CN's Orr.   "But that's not just a matter of technology. Railroading is a business in which people provide the kinetic energy to move inanimate objects. All railways are driven by people who understand the uniqueness of this business and then use the latest technology to make it better."