Union Pacific offered no comparison to its 2018 capital figure of $3.3 billion, but the presentation by Eric Gehringer, vice president of engineering, showed a continuing focus on addressing needs in Texas and Louisiana.
That includes the company’s largest-ever capital project, the $550-million Brazos hump yard near Hearne, Texas. “There is a tremendous amount of focus and pressure to ensure that this yard is built no later than Christmas of this year,” he said. “And we are on schedule, due to the hard work of a lot of people.”
Brazos is a massive undertaking, with 64 miles of track. The bowl track, in its entirety, could hold an 18-mile-long train, Gehringer said. Construction has involved moving 2.8 million cubic yards of dirt, and 206,000 linear feet of drainage.
The yard is the largest piece of the railroad’s efforts to increase capacity, which mostly will fall in three areas, Gehringer said: yard extensions and expansions, new sidings, and siding extensions. Those projects are “spread across the entire system, but the preponderance is down in that Houston-Louisiana area.”
UP’s maintenance plans for 2019 include replacement of 3.7 million ties, 515 miles of rail, and 170 miles of ballast renewal. And the company is trying to reduce the maintenance windows required for that work, an effort receving even more attention under the Unified Plan 2020, UP’s version of Precision Scheduled Railroading.
“You’ll see us combine gangs that haven’t historically worked together,” he said. “… The plan we have now, if you compare it to [2018], we’re putting in about the same amount of units across the board, but we’re doing it with 20 percent less curfew time. That’s a huge number. A world-class improvement would be 3 to 6 percent.”
New technology will help that effort. In less than three months, the company will receive its first new machine designed to streamline tie-plate distribution during the rail-laying process. It will reduce the number of times a plate is handled during the process from 11 to two.
For Norfolk Southern, project spending for 2019 will be roughly equal to 2018, said Jon Zillioux, associate vice president of sourcing. NS’s capital spending in 2018 was $1.8 billion.
The railroad is planning some 72 projects this year. Capacity projects, in the form of new or extended sidings, will allow the sidings to handle trains up to 14,000 feet. NS will also be expand intermodal facilities at two Chicago sites, as well as facilities in Sharonville, Ohio; Rossville, Tenn.; Kansas City, Mo; and Austell, Ga. Major building projects a new car shop in Buffalo, N.Y.; a crew building at Moorman Yard in Bellevue, Ohio; and operations buildings in Pitcairn, Pa., and Northumberland, Pa.
The NS maintenance plan for 2019 include replacing 99,179 tons of welded rail, 252.8 miles of dual rail and 162 miles of single rail; 2.5 million ties; 2.1 million tons of ballast; and 70 bridge and 100 culvert rehab and replacement projects, ranging in cost from $100,000 to $4 million.
Outside of the normal engineering projects, NS is also beginning work on its recently announced move to a new headquarters in Atlanta. “In fact,” Zillioux said, “the [request for proposals] is going out tomorrow for interior work.
“What the company’s trying to accomplish is to approve our alignment,” Zillioux said. “It would be much nicer for our group, for example, to be where our operating folks are. We’re not. They’re in Atlanta; we’re in Norfolk. It’s one thing to email or talk on the phone, but it’s much better to walk down the hall and talk to those folks.
