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Railroad Newsline for Friday, February 09, 2007

Compiled by Larry W. Grant

In Memory of Rob Carlson, 1952 – 2006

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RAIL NEWS

RAILROAD FIRMS BRINGING ABORAD LAWMAKERS' LOBBYIST RELATIVES

WASHINGTON DC -- The railroad industry is hiring relatives of Capitol Hill lawmakers and staff members as it faces tighter federal safety legislation, employing a tactic untouched by the Democrats' new ethics proposals: lobbying by congressional family members.

The new Democratic Congress is working on the first overhaul of railroad-safety laws in 13 years. Long attuned to Republican control, railroad companies are now working to keep their GOP allies but also hiring Democratic lobbyists.

Days after Jennifer Esposito became majority staff director of the House transportation panel's subcommittee on railroads, her father, Sante Esposito, and brother Michael Esposito signed up as railway lobbyists. Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D-Ill.) has just taken a seat on the subcommittee, and in the coming weeks, the railroad industry trade association said, his father and predecessor in Congress, William O. Lipinski (D-Ill.), will register as a railroad lobbyist, too.

The new lobbyists join Bud Shuster (R-Pa.), a former congressman and chairman of the transportation committee who lobbies for railroads and whose son, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), also has just joined the railroads subcommittee.

The lobbyists said they would not directly advocate for clients through family members. The hirings are legal, experts on lobbying law said, but point to a topic left unaddressed in the new ethics proposals before Congress. While the Senate has voted to ban lobbying by some lawmakers' spouses, neither chamber has moved to limit lobbying by other family members.

"Like every other industry, we felt it was important to have representatives from both the Democratic and Republican side," said Peggy Nasir, spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads, which hired Shuster, Lipinski, and Sante and Michael Esposito. "We are meeting all the standards we need to meet for lobbying."

The stakes are high for the railroads. Last week, Congress began debate on a reauthorization of the Federal Railroad Safety Program, which has not been updated since 1994. With government figures showing an increase in railroad accidents and fatalities over the past decade, watchdog agencies, accident victims and many Democratic lawmakers want improved track and crossing inspections, better accident investigations, and heavy fines for companies that break the rules.

It is against this backdrop that the railroads association turned to Sante Esposito.

The Esposito family has a long history with the House transportation committee. Sante Esposito served for nearly two decades as its Democratic chief counsel. Michael and Jennifer Esposito were committee interns and Jennifer joined the railroads subcommittee as staff director in 2004, when Democrats were in the minority.

Sante and Michael Esposito are partners in Federal Advocates Inc. in Sterling, VA, which advertises its transport policy influence on its Web site. Sante Esposito, it says, "enjoys long-standing working relationships with numerous decision-makers in the Congress and Executive Branch."

Sante Esposito said that he told the railroads association, "I can advise you on the best strategy for dealing with the new majority in Congress," and he added that "it was clear right from the beginning that I was not to lobby my daughter."

"I don't think relatives should lobby relatives, but I don't think relatives of members or staff should be precluded from lobbying the Congress."

Jennifer Esposito said that her family's work will not keep her from representing the interests of her boss and the transportation committee's chairman, Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), who favors stronger safety laws. She said she considers the railroad companies her "adversaries."

When they were hired, she said, she consulted her supervisors and House ethics advisers who she said told her to create a "wall" to prevent them from lobbying her. Her father, she decided, "can't lobby me, he can't meet with me, I can't discuss any issues with him."

Lobbying experts said such precautions are not required by law. "The rules do not prohibit hiring a family member such as this to lobby on an issue," Kenneth Gross, an ethics lawyer at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, said about the Espositos. "It's up to the judgment of the individual."

Nevertheless, public-interest groups say such family relationships beg for oversight.
Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said: "Congressional staffers should be recused from dealing with matters their immediate family members lobby on."

Such recusals rarely happen, watchdog groups say.

Before he left Congress, William Lipinski championed the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency program (CREATE), a railroad improvement project for the nation's biggest freight-rail hub. The $1.5 billion project is funded by taxpayers, and $212 million of it by the nation's six big railroads. When CREATE began in mid-2003, Lipinski complained that the railroads were not picking up more of the tab.

"These improvements are worth more to the railroads than $212 million," he said at the time.
In 2004, Lipinski left Congress and joined the Association of American Railroads as a CREATE consultant. Daniel Lipinski won his father's seat, and last year his office issued a news release announcing a new funding agreement for CREATE, but the railroads' share of its cost has stayed the same.

After the November midterm elections, Daniel Lipinski was named to the transportation committee and its railroads subcommittee. And this month, William Lipinski will register as a lobbyist for the railroads but said he will not "lobby my son in regards to any of my clients."

Asked how father and son avoid the appearance of impropriety while working on the same railway project, Daniel Lipinski said: "CREATE is a very important project, not just for the Chicago area. . . . The more people working on this, the better."

In a 2001 special election, Bill Shuster won the congressional seat and the transportation committee slot vacated by his father that year. Shuster is now the new ranking Republican on the railroads subcommittee.

His father "doesn't need to lobby a junior member of Congress," Shuster said, adding that "he's got an extremely close relationship with the chairman" of the transportation panel, Oberstar.

He added: "How are you going to stop somebody who spent 28 years of their life being an expert on something from going to the private sector? It's discrimination."

Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), chairman of the railroads subcommittee, hopes to ready a rail-safety bill before June. Since 1994, train use has risen 17 percent, according to government figures, while accidents have increased by one-third. There are 421 federal inspectors checking tracks and equipment nationwide, leaving safety monitoring largely to the industry.

Nasir of the Association of American Railroads said that train accident rates have decreased sharply since 1980. She said that when complete figures are compiled, they probably will show last year to be the industry's safest.

The regulations, association chief Edward R. Hamberger told the subcommittee last week, cost railroads money and hamper innovation.

The industry prefers "performance standards," that "would rely on the superior knowledge of railroads," he testified. Except in special cases, federal regulators "would no longer specify how a railroad would achieve its safety goals," as they do now.

Jennifer Esposito disagrees with that proposal. "Train accidents are going up, and it's something that we feel needs to be addressed," she said. "I don't think that just because they hired my father, somehow there will be some conversation that will change my boss's mind."

Her father and brother, she said, "are working for my adversaries." - Elizabeth Williamson, The Washington Post (Staff writer Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.)

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ENDANGERED SPECIES: TEXAS STATE RAILROAD PLACED ON ENDANGERED SITE LIST

Photo here:

[www.palestineherald.com]

PALESTINE, TX -- With its future in jeopardy, the Texas State Railroad received the equivalent of a statewide 9-1-1 call Wednesday from the steps of the state capitol building.

The historic railroad was listed among the state's most endangered historic sites for 2007 by Preservation Texas, news which caught park superintendent Mark Price by surprise.

"We were not aware we were in the process," Price said Wednesday afternoon from Austin. "It was a very pleasant surprise to be in the top 10."

The 125-year-old railroad, designated as the Official Railroad of the State of Texas by the state legislature, was the fourth endangered site on a list held up by Preservation Texas officials during the announcement.

"Each individual listing is threatened by possible destruction, adverse development or neglect, and each has a compelling reason for being saved," said Libby Buuck, president of Preservation Texas. "The sites represent the most eminent needs and highest probability for positive action."

According to Preservation Texas' Web site, the nonprofit group is a statewide partner of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is dedicated to preserving the state's historic resources by direct action and by empowering individuals and local and state organizations through partnerships in education, communications and advocacy.

The railroad has faced funding shortfalls for several years as Texas Parks & Wildlife Department state park budgets have shrunk.

The state provided funding to keep the trains operational through the end of the current fiscal year, which ends Aug. 31, and state officials have said that if no other funding is found, the trains will cease to run, becoming a static display.

Price said that he wasn't sure what to expect as a result of the attention that the announcement will bring.

"I'm thrilled to get statewide recognition for the Texas State Railroad," Price said. "It will continue to stay in front of the state legislature and Parks & Wildlife, boosting their pride in the Texas State Railroad, and it will also do a lot to make sure the whole state knows we exist. Things like today can do nothing but be very positive (for us)."

News of Wednesday's designation encouraged Al Holmes, president of the Friends of the Texas State Railroad.

"Since the award was given in the state capitol at 10:30 this morning, all of the legislators were there (in Austin) and should become more aware of the problem," Holmes said Wednesday. "The railroad is a true jewel for the state of Texas."

Palestine Mayor Carolyn Salter, who has been active in historic preservation and in efforts to save the railroad, had filed the application for the railroad to be included on the 2007 list. Salter said she thought the news would help the efforts of various groups to keep the trains running.

"The recognition of (a site's) endangered status usually helps get funding and community support," Salter said. "I'm glad the entire statewide organization recognized the importance of the railroad to the State of Texas."

Palestine Main Street Manager Neely Plumb, who attended the announcement, agreed that increased public awareness of the railroad and its plight may be the most important thing to come from the designation.

"I would say a lot of folks are unaware of the issue," Plumb said. "It's to let people know that we have a problem here."

Local business owner Linda Walton, who runs Apple Annie's Bed-and-Breakfast on North Sycamore Street, said she was happy to see the railroad's uncertain future brought to public attention.

"This shines a big, bright light on something that will be gone if we don't pay attention," Walton said. "I think it's wonderful."

Guests often tell her that they've planned their overnight stays around the trains' weekend runs, she said.

"There are a lot of people who plan their vacations around where they can ride steam trains," Walton said. "Heritage travel is one of the fastest growing (areas) of tourism."

Her optimism about the news comes from personal experience, Walton said, having seen a previous Preservation Texas site saved after being included on a previous list.

"I grew up in Amarillo. My grandfather would pick us up from the train at Quanah," Walton said, referring to the historic train depot there. "We had seen that it was on the endangered list. We made a stop in Quanah and saw that it had been restored. It's really pretty now." - Beth Foley, The Palestine Herald

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CN TO KEEP TRAINS ROLLING DURING PLANNED CANADIAN CONDUCTORS' STRIKE

The Canadian National Railway is activating its strike contingency plan to maintain freight operations across Canada after the United Transportation Union (UTU) notified the company yesterday that it plans to strike CN's Canadian rail operations at 00:01 hours Feb. 10, 2007.

E. Hunter Harrison, president and chief executive officer of CN, said: "CN and the UTU remain in negotiations, and we believe there is time to reach a new collective agreement before the strike deadline.

"But let me be clear - we will continue freight operations across Canada during a UTU strike, with management personnel performing UTU-represented jobs, and provide the best possible service. This plan is essential to our customers and the Canadian economy."

The UTU represents approximately 2,800 CN conductors and yard-service employees in Canada.
A UTU strike will not affect other unionized employees in Canada.

CN and the UTU have agreed, during a conductors' strike, to maintain normal commuter rail operations on CN rail lines in Toronto and Montreal.

Excluded from strike action are UTU members employed on CN's Northern Quebec Internal Short Line, Algoma Central Railway in Ontario, and Mackenzie Northern Railway in Alberta. - Mark Hallman, CN News Release

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ROTATING RAILWAY TO GIVE TRAINS A NEW SPIN

Photo here: [mas.scripps.com]

Caption reads: Ken Van Fleet of Simi Valley walks around the newly installed railroad turntable in Fillmore. The Fillmore & Western Railway's 96-foot railroad turntable has been 10 years in the making. (Chuck Kirman/Star staff)

FILLMORE, CA -- An 80-ton piece of rotating railway was dropped into place in downtown Fillmore on Wednesday, culminating a decade-long quest to bring one of California's few working railroad turntables to the city.

When the turntable begins operating - probably near the end of March - it will allow the Fillmore & Western Railway Co. to turn locomotives around at its railyard. Without the turntable, the trains must go all the way to Ventura to turn around on a wye track, or triangular junction, at Union Pacific's Montalvo yard.

"It's a major hassle to get something turned around," said Ron Lewis, president of the Santa Clara Valley Railroad Historic Society.

The society helped raise money to purchase, move and install the turntable, with the rest coming from a state grant. The entire project will cost about $425,000, Lewis said.

The turntable is essentially a 96-foot railroad bridge on wheels. It rests on top of a rotating base sunk into a round hole, and is powered by an electric motor set near the outer edge.

Once the railway finishes laying tracks to connect the turntable to the main tracks, locomotives will drive onto the turntable, rotate 180 degrees, then roll off facing the opposite direction.

Fillmore & Western President Dave Wilkinson said the company bought the century-old turntable in 1996 from the Canadian National Railway.

For just over 10 years, it sat in Fillmore & Western's railyard while the company and the Railroad Historical Society raised money and secured necessary state and local approvals for the project. Finally, on Wednesday morning, two cranes and about a dozen workers lifted and moved it, a few feet at a time, into place. A crowd of about 40 people watched from the surrounding sidewalks.

"This is quite a day for us," Wilkinson said as he watched the workers line the turntable up for its final move. "This is going to help us a lot."

The turntable represents the first phase of a Railroad Interpretive Center project that will also include a roundhouse to display trains, Wilkinson said.

The turntable also will be an attraction for the Hollywood film crews who already make heavy use of Fillmore & Western's trains, tracks and depot, he said. - Tony Biasotti, The Ventura County Star

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LOUISIANA AMONG FINAL TWO FOR HUGE STEEL PLANT

BATON ROUGE, LA -- German company ThyssenKrupp Group announced Wednesday that its search for a site to build a $2.9 billion steel plant has narrowed to Louisiana and Alabama, cutting Arkansas out of the race and setting the stage for a high-stakes war between the states for one of the largest new U.S. manufacturing projects in recent times.

The decision dramatically escalates the six-month-old competition for the plant and increases election-year pressure on state and local leaders to jointly support a pricey incentive package while also addressing concerns about potential social and environmental impacts.

Sites near Convent in St. James Parish, Louisiana and in Mobile County, Alabama, are rivals for the 2,700-employee plant, which would begin operation in 2010 producing steel slabs, carbon steel and rolled stainless steel for the auto, appliance and construction industries. The 150-acre factory would be situated on 3,000 acres and would have a roof more than 15 times the size of the Superdome's lid.

That would make it the largest steel plant project in the country in at least 18 years, the second-largest new U.S. manufacturing plant announced since 2002, and the largest of all manufacturing plants in Louisiana after the Avondale shipbuilding yard. In addition, the construction phase would create as many as 29,000 jobs and the ripple effect over 20 years of operation would yield as many as 52,000 indirect jobs, the company has estimated.

Peter Urban, vice chairman of the executive board of subsidiary ThyssenKrupp Steel, phoned Gov. Kathleen Blanco on Tuesday with the news, and the company made a public announcement Wednesday morning.

"We still have a lot of work to do," said Blanco, who expects to visit the company's plants in Germany in the near future. "We are going to continue our aggressive recruiting efforts, and we hope to bring this one in."

ThyssenKrupp offered no timeline for a final decision but said in a press release it would move "as expeditiously as possible." Blanco speculated that a decision might take four to 12 weeks.

Open by 2010

The steel plant would be built at a time when a large number of private and government construction projects will be under way, including industrial expansions taking advantage of a federally sponsored post-Katrina financing program and several major bridges in southeast Louisiana. The demand for construction workers is expected to be strong, but steel company officials say they are confident the factory could be built on schedule.

"We're fully confident that we can begin operations in 2010," said Christian Koenig, vice president of public affairs at ThyssenKrupp USA Inc. in Troy, Michigan.

The company statement said Arkansas "made an excellent proposal" but that it was eliminated because of cost and logistical considerations.

Led by Louisiana's Department of Economic Development, the state's recruitment effort and incentive package have been partly shielded from public view, with both the state and the company citing a confidentiality agreement during their negotiations.

But a number of components of the state deal have been brought to light. The plant could take advantage of regular state incentives available to most large manufacturers, offering competitive wages and health benefits, including a tax rebate on wages, property tax breaks, recent cuts in business sales and franchise taxes and free training.

At Blanco's request, the Legislature in December set aside $300 million in a fund that can be appropriated at a later time for infrastructure improvements in the plant area. Those include major upgrades of several roads, a rail line and a riverside port facility on the east bank of the Mississippi River. The ground is soft compared with the Alabama site, so the state would assist by subsidizing the plant's foundation.

Louisiana's total package of regular and special incentives over time could be $1 billion or more, sources have said.

Entergy owns land

Some critical points of the deal are not in the hands of the state. Entergy Corp., Louisiana's largest utility company, owns much of the land at the Convent site and would have to work out deals to sell that property and provide electricity, a huge part of a steel plant's operating costs. In many major industrial deals in the Southeast, the state or a local government agency acquires the land and leases the property to the manufacturer at a nominal rate, and Louisiana is expected to offer similar help with land costs as part of its inducement package.

State Sen. Jody Amedee, D-Gonzales, who led the effort in the Legislature to set aside money for the project, said the impact on his district and the region would be "incredible." The challenge of preparing the local infrastructure and rousing a sufficient labor force will be great, but it can be accomplished, he said.

"With the quality of jobs it's going to produce, it's going to increase the quality of life in our area," Amedee said. "Anybody who wants to work will be working. The unemployment is going to be almost zero in the River Parishes area."

The plant deal with the state is sure to face a public-relations battle on several fronts.
Although the state Legislature in December overwhelmingly supported the project, a few state senators objected to the secretive negotiations as well as the pledge of money prior to a land price being set.

Also, Blanco is running for re-election this fall, and some of her detractors are expected find fault with her efforts to lure the steel plant. Criticism of generous state subsidies for industrial projects have been the butt of criticism even in states that have successfully recruited automotive plants.

The debate over the plant's environmental impact has not even begun. A proposed chlorine plant in the late 1990s in St. James Parish was not built there because of the legal challenges of the environmental justice movement, which seeks to prevent the concentration of industrial plants in relatively poor areas. The chlorine producer, Shintech, is building a plant southwest of Baton Rouge.

Public battle
Large incentive packages are common when states are competing for a major employer, said Mark Arend, editor of Site Selection magazine, a leading source on industrial recruitment trends. As is evident from a long list of plants built by German, Japanese and Korean automakers in the Southeast over the past 15 years, companies planning major investments typically engage states in bidding wars. But ThyssenKrupp appears to have gone a step further than most.

"It's kind of unusual for a company to make public their final two sites in this public a way," Arend said.

He speculated that the company may want to see if the states can bring more to the table.

The ThyssenKrupp plant would easily rank among the largest recent plant announcements in the United States in terms of jobs created, Arend said. Of the 55 major steel plant projects announced since Site Selection began keeping records of such deals in 1989, the largest was a 1,600-employee plant planned by Minnesota Steel Industries in 2005. The only bigger manufacturing plant announcement in the United States since 2002 was the Kia car plant reported last year for West Point, Ga., with 2,800 jobs.

The largest manufacturer in Louisiana is the 6,000-employee Northrop Grumman Avondale Industries shipyard in Jefferson Parish, followed by the General Motors pickup truck plant near Shreveport with 2,500 employees, according to the state's Department of Economic Development.

Work with Brazilian plant

The new steel plant will tie in to a steel slab plant the company is building in Brazil.
Starting operations in 2009, the Brazilian plant will supply the cruder form of steel for further processing at ThyssenKrupp plants in Germany and at the proposed plant on the Gulf Coast. For that reason, water transportation is a major factor in site location. Blanco has said Louisiana has an advantage in the Mississippi River, which can handle oceangoing vessels as far upriver as Baton Rouge.

The new plant will include multiple mills producing the various types of steel and a melt shop able to make as much as 1 million metric tons of slabs annually, similar to the material made in the Brazilian plant. The plant's supply and customer chain will be linked to take advantage of trade within the North American Free Trade Agreement area, the region from Canada to Mexico where ThyssenKrupp hopes to expand its share of business.

The company's subsidiaries, ThyssenKrupp Steel AG and ThyssenKrupp Stainless AG, both of Duisburg, Germany, will jointly build the plant. The parent company is involved in a variety of industries and is one of the top suppliers of elevators. Based in Dusseldorf, ThyssenKrupp Group has $61 billion in annual sales and employs 188,000 people in 70 countries.

In the United States, ThyssenKrupp has 70 companies in more than 400 locations accounting for 25,000 employees and nearly $10 billion in yearly sales. - Robert Travis Scott, The New Orleans Times-Picayune

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JUNIATA LOCOMOTIVE SHOP WELCOMES RUSSIAN VISITORS

Photo here: [www.altoonamirror.com]

Caption reads: Mendchenko Sergey of Moscow checks out the details of the driver's cab of a General Electric C40-8 diesel locomotive Wednesday at the Juniata Locomotive Shop. (Mirror photo by J.D. Cavrich)

ALTOONA, PA -- Norfolk Southern officials hope a visit from representatives of the Russian Railway System will lead to some additional work at the Juniata Locomotive Shop.

A delegation of 18 mechanical officials from the Moscow-based railway system toured the local shop Wednesday.

Norfolk Southern was pleased to host the European visitors.

"They have identified Norfolk Southern as a company they want to learn the best mechanical practices from," said Rudy Husband, Norfolk Southern spokesman.

"We are thrilled about it," Husband said. "It confirms our reputation as a leader in the rail industry, not just in North America but on a global level."

Norfolk Southern officials, aided by a translator, gave the Russians an overview of the shop in the morning and a walking tour of the facility in the afternoon.

"They are what we call benchmarking our locomotive mechanical practices," Husband said. "They are comparing how they maintain locomotives versus how major U.S. railroads maintain locomotives."

The Russian Railway System is much larger than Norfolk Southern with about 53,000 miles of track compared to Norfolk Southern's 21,000 miles. The Russian fleet is comprised of about 20,000 engines compared to 3,500, Husband said.

One presentation focused on Norfolk Southern's insourcing program which eventually could lead to work on Russian locomotives.

"This is an opportunity we have to showcase the capabilities of the Juniata Locomotive Shop and the benefits of our insourcing program," Husband said. "There may be an opportunity at doing some work for the Russian Railway sometime, if it makes sense for them and for us."

"I understand they have a significant fleet of locomotives. This may be an opportunity to bring some more work here from their railroad. We don't know what kind of locomotives they have; this could turn into something bigger for us in years to come," said Joe Richardella, system manager, locomotive sales and marketing. "It is a good opportunity to present this facility to a company like them."

The Russian delegation will visit the Norfolk Southern Conway shop today (Thursday).

"We have a locomotive shop there where they do light repairs compared to the heavy overhauls here," Husband said. "We hope to convey insight into how we handle and maintain our locomotives." - Walt Frank, The Altoona Mirror

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B & O RAILROAD MUSEUM ON A ROLL

Photo here:

[www.examiner.com]

Caption reads: A collection of vintage trains is ready to be explored at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. (Chris Ammann/Baltimore Examiner)

BALTIMORE, MD -- Trains don't literally leave the station at Baltimore's B & O Railroad Museum, but money for new facilities and the first profitable year in the museum's history mean times are good at the iconic city institution.

"We've had our best year ever," Chief Operating Officer Stefanie Fay said. "For the first time in our history we're profitable."

Fay attributes the museum's record 200,000 visitors in 2006 to bad weather.

During the blizzard of 2003, the roof of the roundhouse, the museum's main attraction, collapsed.
"It was heart-wrenching and devastating," she said of the damage.

But since what Fay calls "The Collapse Heard 'Round The World," the museum has raised attendance by adding nearly 80,000 square feet of exhibition space during its 21-month hiatus, including interactive attractions that draw more visitors.

"Since the accident, we've become more interactive and we've increased the number of exhibits," she said. "People can now experience what it was like to be on the trains."

Money for the latest expansion was approved on Wednesday by the city Board of Estimates, part of a $2 million grant to renovate the south car shop. The nearly 150-year-old building, which will be opened in late 2007, will add to the museum's depth, Fey said.

"It will have some really old railroad artifacts, pieces that have never been seen by the public," Fay promised.

Meanwhile, for train lovers who want to purchase a piece of the railroad history, parts of the collapsed roundhouse roof will be auctioned to raise funds on Feb. 17.

Fay said people interested in attending should visit the museum's Web site at [www.borail.org]. - Stephen Janis, The Baltimore Examiner

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(ED NOTE: The following made my head hurt. Some of you will find it interesting and some may not. It is a longer piece than is normally included in the Railroad Newline, but well worth the read. – lwg)

TRAINS OF THOUGHT: COMPUTING WITH LOCOMOTIVES AND BOX CARS TAKES A ONE-TRACK MIND

Guided by an unseen hand, a grimy railroad tank car negotiates a series of switch points in the tracks, veering right, then right again, then left. Next comes a lime-green box car, which makes two lefts. I observe these events from the control tower of a railroad facility called a hump yard, where freight cars sort themselves into trains bound for various destinations. It is an eerie scene. The cars glide silently downhill through the maze of tracks, seeming to steer themselves, as if each car knows just where it wants to go.

This is an illusion; a computer two floors below me is making all the decisions, setting the switches a moment before each car arrives. But I can't shake the impression that the hump yard itself is a kind of computer-that the railroad cars are executing some secret algorithm.

It's not such a far-fetched notion. In 1994 Adam Chalcraft and Michael Greene, who were then at the University of Cambridge, and later Maurice Margenstern of the University of Metz, designed railroad layouts that simulate the operation of a computer. The machine is programmed by setting switch points in a specific initial pattern; then a locomotive running over the tracks resets some of the switches as it passes; the result of the computation is read from the final configuration of the switches.

Photo here:

[www.americanscientist.org]

These constructions are wonderfully ingenious, although admittedly they have little to do with the day-to-day running of real railroads. Even at a more practical level, though, brawny steel rails and brainy silicon chips have surprisingly rich connections. The work of the hump yard is a case in point. Algorithms for sorting are a specialty of computer science, but railroads were sorting freight cars decades before the first electronic computer was built. Methods invented by rail workers have served as metaphor and inspiration for the development of algorithms and data structures in computer science; conversely, the theoretical analysis of algorithms has suggested ways for railroads to improve their operations.

What a Way to Run a Railroad

Railroads were the epitome of high tech in the later years of the 19th century. Even more than dot-com businesses of recent times, they were a magnet for capital investment and intellectual talent. They dominated the economy; nine of the eleven companies in the earliest precursor of the Dow-Jones stock average were railroads. Technological innovations bloomed: Pneumatic brakes in 1869, automatic signals a decade later. Like the Internet today, railroads transformed aspects of daily life and culture, knitting together distant regions and even changing the way people kept time.

Trains have also become a part of our mental furniture. They appear in paintings, poems, novels, songs, legends and figures of speech; children are still strangely enchanted by them. In the sciences, too, trains have made an impression. Einstein worked out some of his ideas on special relativity by thinking about hypothetical events inside railway carriages. Trains are also common props in the problems found at the end of the chapter in mathematics and physics textbooks.

Somewhat more challenging than a typical textbook problem are various railway-switching puzzles that began appearing in the 1880s. W. W. Rouse Ball presented a few of them in his Mathematical Recreations and Essays, first published in 1892. A good example of the genre was discussed at length by A. K. Dewdney in 1987. Eastbound and westbound trains are chuffing toward each other on a single track; they stop just in time to avert disaster, at a place where a short siding parallels the main track. The siding, which connects to the main line through switches at both ends, can hold only one car or locomotive. The question is: Can the trains get past each other, so that both of them can continue in their original direction, pulling the same cars in the same order? (You might want to try finding a solution on your own before reading on or peeking at the diagram under the subheading "On the Right Track," below.)

If each train consisted of a single engine, unaccompanied by any cars, the problem would be easy: Just have one engine (say the eastbound one) duck into the siding while the other engine proceeds along the main track; afterward, the eastbound engine can exit the siding and continue on its way without obstruction. In fact, this scheme works no matter what the length of the westbound train.

What if both trains have several cars? The trains can still pass, but the crews will have a busy day, coupling and uncoupling cars and throwing switches. The basic idea is to break the eastbound train into single cars and pass them through the siding one at a time. (The westbound train remains intact throughout the procedure.) The eastbound engine can slip by in the way described previously; for the rest of the process, the westbound train does all the work. First it moves forward and grabs the leading eastbound car; then the train backs up into the siding and uncouples the car, leaving it there. Now the train performs a maneuver called a runaround, backing out of the eastern end of the siding, driving forward along the main track until it is clear of the western switch, then reversing again into the siding in order to push the eastbound car out and hitch it to the waiting eastbound locomotive. The runaround procedure is repeated for each of the remaining eastbound cars; for each one the crew has to perform three hitching and three unhitching operations, and the westbound train reverses direction twice.

Track Topology

Playing with a puzzle like this one will quickly acquaint you with a salient fact about railroads: They are one-dimensional. Rail cars cannot jump over or go around one another. Indeed, if a rail line has no switch points-if it is an unbranched length or loop of track-then the order of the cars is absolutely invariant. So is their orientation, or polarity; each car always faces in the same direction along the track. As a matter of fact, even in the presence of sidings like the one in Dewdney's puzzle, no rearrangement of the cars can ever alter their orientation; you can shuffle their sequence but you cannot change the direction they are facing. Certain other configurations of tracks and switches, however, do allow the orientation to be reversed.'

Illustration here:

[www.americanscientist.org]

Railroad switches (also known as turnouts, or points) have roughly the same geometry as highway on-ramps and off-ramps.

The action of the switch is asymmetrical. A train departing A and moving from right to left can be steered either to B or to C, but trains traveling from left to right have no choices. The switch does not allow a turn from B to C or from C to B (except by going through the switch toward A and then backing up). For trains headed right to left, a switch in this configuration is called a facing-point switch; for those going left to right it is a trailing-point switch.

Switches combine with straight and curved sections of track to form the basic structural motifs of railroad layouts. The simplest such element (other than an unbranched length of track) is a lead, or stub: a dead-end branch connected to the main track by a switch at one end. Depending on a train's direction of travel, leads are entered either head-on through a facing-point switch or by backing up through a trailing-point switch.

A siding, as mentioned above, is a parallel track with connections to the main line at both ends; the two switches face in opposite directions, which means that a train can run through the siding and return to the main track still going the same way. A turnaround loop has a jug-handle shape, with two switches that face in the same direction; turnarounds are rare except at the terminus of a rail line. Finally there is the wye, a configuration of three switches joining three tracks, and allowing a train on any track to reach either of the other tracks. Turnarounds and wyes differ from other track elements in that they change a car's orientation: The car can go in facing east and come out facing west.

Illustration here:

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Some versions of the passing puzzle have the trains confronting each other at a wye instead of a siding. The third track attached to the wye is a short spur, with room for just one car. Despite this change in topology, essentially the same procedure can be used to get the trains past each other. Again the intact westbound train shuttles back and forth, parking the eastbound cars one at a time on the spur, then doing a runaround before pulling them out and shoving them along to the east. But there's a difference: The cars come out of the spur with reversed orientation. Turning them to face in the right direction takes another pass through the wye.

Can the trains pass if all they have to work with is a one-car, dead-end lead? Around 1900 Sam Loyd published a solution for trains of length 4 and 5. It takes 33 reversals of direction.

Another famous railroad puzzle asks if a train can make a U-turn at a wye with a one-car-length spur. A suitable unit of measure for the work done in turning the train around is the effort expended in moving a single car through its own length. For a train of n cars, Dewdney gave an algorithm requiring an amount of work proportional to n 3; in essence, n cars move through n car-lengths n times. In 1988 Nancy Amato, Manuel Blum, Sandra Irani and Ronitt Ruvinfeld (all then at the University of California, Berkeley) found an improvement, reducing the effort required to n 2log2 n.

Tracking Data

Sidings, wyes and other devices for directing trains inspired some of the earliest ideas about managing the flow of information through a computer program. In 1961 Edsger W. Dijkstra included a diagram of a railroad wye in a memorandum about methods of translating the new programming language Algol 60. In parsing an expression such as 3x(5+2), the seven symbols are read from left to right, but they must be acted on in a different order: First the subexpression inside the parentheses is evaluated by adding 5 and 2, then the result of this operation is multiplied by 3. Dijkstra showed that the reordering can be accomplished by temporarily storing the operators (such as x and +) in a data structure called a stack. The stack is a first-in, last-out storage device; in this case the x sign goes in first, followed by the + sign, but they come out in the opposite order. Dijkstra chose to explain this principle in terms of a railroad wye. One of the three tracks serves as input, one as output, and the third provides the first-in, last-out storage.

Photo here:

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A few years later Donald E. Knuth, in the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming, gave railroading interpretations of three important data structures: the stack, the queue and the double-ended queue, or deque. The queue is the simplest of these-at least for railroaders. A queue is a first-in, first-out data structure, and so it is represented by a simple straight length of track. Cars put in at one end of the queue come out the other end in the same order. A deque is an arrangement of tracks allowing cars to be added at either end and removed from either end (but there is no access to cars in the middle of the train). Knuth illustrates a deque by a complicated layout of two back-to-back jug-handle loops, requiring four switches. The same functions can also be accomplished by an ordinary siding, provided that trains are allowed to back up in order to pass through a trailing-point switch. (The siding and the double-jug-handle layouts differ in their effect on the orientation of the cars.)

On the Right Track

Routing and sorting are at the heart of railroad logistics. Cars enter the system from many points of origin, and they must be hauled to many destinations. Other transportation networks, such as shipping lines and the postal system, also sort their cargoes according to destination, but they do not have to deal with the strict one-dimensional constraint of railroad tracks.

Computer science offers a fully-stocked toolbox of methods for sorting-for putting things in order. The textbooks are filled with such algorithms: merge sort, insertion sort, selection sort, shell sort, heap sort, quick sort, bubble sort. It seems there's a sorting algorithm adapted to every imaginable purpose-except maybe the sorting of railroad cars.

When computer scientists evaluate the performance of a sorting algorithm, the usual practice is to measure the mental work done (deciding where each item goes) while ignoring the physical labor of actually moving things. An algorithm is judged to be more efficient if it requires fewer decisions, regardless of how often or how far the data have to be moved. This convention is reasonable when the things being sorted are bits and bytes of data, represented by packets of electric charge with a mass of maybe a zeptogram. The situation is different when you are sorting 100-ton rail cars.

Illustration here:

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Railroad sorting is usually done in two stages. First, a batch of cars going to the same general area is made up into a train; then the cars within a train are arranged in the best linear order for delivery to their individual destinations. The hump yard is mainly concerned with the first phase of this process. An incoming train is pushed slowly up a hill, and at the crest a worker "pulls the pin" to uncouple each car in turn. The separated car then rolls down the other side of the hill into a fan of diverging tracks. In a large yard there might be 40 or 50 of these "classification" tracks, where trains are assembled.

As each car comes over the hump, switches have to be set to direct it to the correct track. Years ago this was done by workers yanking on iron levers. Other workers, called runners, rode along on the coasting freight cars, cranking the hand brake to regulate speed so that the car would retain just enough momentum to couple with any other cars already on the classification track. The runners and the switch tenders are gone now. An unseen computer sets the switches and controls each car's speed through a mechanism called a retarder, which squeezes a passing car's wheels to slow it down. The speed is measured by radar units much like those used by the highway patrol. Each car is identified (so that the computer knows where to send it) by a radio-frequency ID tag.

From a computational point of view, the hump yard is an array of queues arranged in parallel. Each car coming over the hump is steered onto a specific track, where the car is appended to the rear of the queue of cars already present there. When the train is complete, a locomotive extracts the line of cars from the far end of the classification track. Because of the first-in, first-out property of a queue, this process does not change the order of the cars within each train. (To be more precise: If car A is ahead of car B in the incoming train, and if A and B are both directed to the same classification track, then A remains in front of B in the outgoing train.)

Solitaire Sorting

The second phase of the freight-car sorting process-putting the cars in order for delivery-is typically done in smaller, local switching yards. These are humpless "flat yards"; the cars are moved by engines rather than gravity. The tracks can be arranged as queues, as in a hump yard, or as stacks-dead-end leads-so that cars have to be pushed in and pulled out from the same end. Suppose a train has cars numbered 1 through n, but on arrival at the yard they are scrambled in some arbitrary order; the departing train should have the cars in ascending sequence, with car 1 just behind the engine and car n at the end. How many classification tracks are needed to achieve this result? How many times do cars have to be pushed onto and pulled out of the tracks? These are questions of obvious practical importance to railroaders. They are also questions that yield to mathematical and algorithmic analysis.

Robert Tarjan of Stanford University answered some of the questions in 1972. Here are a few of his results:

If a switch yard has an internal loop, allowing cars at the output to be brought back to the input for further processing, then any sequence can be sorted. Conversely, in the absence of such loops, no finite network of stacks, queues or deques can sort all possible sequences, even if the individual storage elements are of unbounded capacity.

If the yard consists of m queues arranged in parallel, then a train can be fully sorted if and only if the longest decreasing subsequence has no more than m cars. (The cars of a decreasing subsequence don't have to be consecutive; for example, in the sequence 1635492 the longest decreasing subsequence is 6542.) For a yard with m parallel stacks, it's the longest increasing subsequence that governs. But these constraints are somewhat artificial. They apply only if cars must always move from the input to a stack or a queue and then directly to the output. Real rail yards are more flexible; cars can be pulled from one stack and pushed onto another. When moves like this are allowed, it's harder to determine which sequences can be sorted.

In 2000 Elias Dahlhaus, Peter Horak, Mirka Miller and Joseph F. Ryan showed that a version of the switch-yard problem is NP-complete (which means, roughly speaking, that there's no efficient algorithm for solving it). Specifically, they proved it is difficult to decide how many tracks are needed.

Chinese mathematicians have taken a somewhat different and more-pragmatic approach to train-sorting problems, apparently in response to a request from Chinese railroad officials. (The exact provenance of these ideas is somewhat murky. In 1976 an American delegation to China heard a lecture on the subject by Ma Chung-fan; notes on this talk were written up by Henry O. Pollak and published in a National Academy of Sciences report. A 1983 paper by Zhu Yongjin and Zhu Ruopeng covers similar ideas but does not mention Ma.)

Pollak's lecture notes present an example: Use an array of stacks to sort the 10-car sequence 6324135726. (Cars with the same number are going to the same destination and thus should be grouped together.) Here I am going to consider the same example but look at it from a different point of view.

One approach to sorting the example sequence resembles a game of solitaire, building multiple stacks of cars in nondecreasing order. Working from the rear of the train toward the front, we examine the number on each car and push the car onto a stack. Suppose the car we have just reached bears number k. If there is exactly one nonempty stack whose topmost element is greater than or equal to k, then we put the car on that stack.
If there are multiple stacks with a top element greater than or equal to k, we choose the stack with the smallest top entry. If no stack qualifies to receive car k, then we have to start a new stack.

For the sequence 6324135726, we begin with the rightmost 6, which necessarily starts a new stack. We push 2 onto the same stack, but the 7 starts a second stack, which can also accept 5 and 3. The 1 then goes on the first stack, and the 4 inaugurates a third stack. Working through the rest of the sequence, we finally reach this configuration of four stacks:

Now the cars can be pulled out of the stacks in nondecreasing order; following the guidelines indicated by the colored blocks, this final assembly step will take seven "pulls." The sorted sequence, of course, is 1223345667.

In his Beijing lecture, Ma gave an alternative sorting procedure; I'm going to call it the Chinese solitaire algorithm. It partitions the sequence in a way that requires just four pulls to assemble the sorted train. Here is the final state of the four stacks:

It's easy to confirm that this configuration can be reached from the original train order, and that four pulls do indeed yield the properly sorted sequence. But by what rule were the numbers dealt into these particular groups? Both the notes on Ma's lecture and the paper by Zhu and Zhu give a rather convoluted algorithm. In trying to explain it I can do no better than quote the lecture notes:

Start at the leftmost (in this case the only) 1, put down all 1s, all 2s to the right of the last 1, 3s to the right of the last 2 if you have covered all the 2s, etc. In this case, the first subset defined in this way is 12.... The next subset takes the other 2 and the second 3...; it can't get to the first 3. The next subset takes the first 3, the 4, the 5, and second 6; the last subset is 67.

This procedure works, but there's an easier way to generate the same partitioning: Repeatedly scan from left to right, and on each pass extract the longest possible nondecreasing subsequence starting with the leftmost number. In the example considered here, the first such subsequence is 67, followed by 3456, then 23 and finally 12.

Zhu and Zhu give a proof that the Chinese solitaire algorithm allows the train to be assembled with the minimal number of pulls from the classification tracks. But the proof counts only pulls. What about "pushes"-the train movements needed to place the cars on the stacks in the first place? For the example sequence, the Chinese algorithm has the worst possible performance in this respect: Ten separate pushes are needed to stack up the 10 cars. The non-Chinese solitaire method is somewhat better, at seven pushes. Taking the sum of pushes and pulls, the two methods score a tie at 14. I don't know whether some other technique can do better.

All the Livelong Day

From the mathematical literature on railroad sorting, one might get the impression that putting the train in order is the end of all difficulties. The cars can then be dropped off at their destinations, one by one, without further thought. Train crews tell a different story. A memoir by Ralph E. Fisher, who worked on the Boston and Maine Railroad until the 1950s, refers to the process of making deliveries as a chess game. "Figuring out all these moves required no small skill if they were to be done in the shortest time and the least amount of motion."'

Illustration here:

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Inspired by Fisher's stories, I offer the little puzzle (right). The task is simply to deliver cars 1, 2 and 3 to destinations A, B and C. The cars are already in delivery order. The procedure shown requires six reversals, three couplings and six uncouplings, for a total of 15 steps. Is there a better solution? Would some other initial permutation of the cars be more efficient? Is there a worse permutation?

The chess game of making freight-car deliveries is one aspect of railroading that has gotten easier in recent years. Many of the spur lines used for such local runs have been closed. Much rail freight is now shipped in containers or piggy-back trailers that are lifted off the train at a central terminal and delivered by truck. Such "intermodal" transport doubtless has several advantages. One of them is escape from the tyranny of the one-track mind. - Brian Hayes, American Scientist (The Magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society)

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TRANSIT NEWS

SOUND TRANSIT FATALITY OCCURRED AT SITE OF EARLIER INJURY CRASH

SEATTLE, WA -- A fatal accident at a Sound Transit work site occurred at the same place where three workers were injured in a similar runaway train accident in October.

In both cases employees of Obayashi Corp., hired by Sound Transit to bore a mile-long tunnel for the light rail transit line beneath Beacon Hill, were unable to stop a locomotive coming out of the tunnel at the west portal near the Tully's Coffee plant, formerly the Rainier brewery.

Early Wednesday morning a 49-year-old mechanic died after a six-car train carrying concrete slabs, metal pipes and rails hit a parked train. The other worker, the train operator, was treated for injuries at Harborview Medical Center.

Joni Earl, chief executive of Sound Transit, visited the accident site and said the three-county agency and the contractor would review the accident.

"Our goal is to get everybody home at the end of the day," Earl said. "Something went seriously wrong."

Work will remain halted at the site until the investigation is complete, but the line should still open on time, she added.

Safety is Obayashi's "number one concern," said company spokesman Charles Sipkins, reading a prepared statement.

"We regret today's tragic incident and extend our deepest sympathies to the families of the victims," Sipkins said.

An investigation by the state Department of Labor and Industries was pending. State investigators found no violations during an unannounced site visit following a complaint in May, department spokeswoman Elaine Fischer said.

Judging by insurance records, Obayashi's safety record is better than average for the industry, Fischer said.

The tunnel is part of a 16-mile light rail line being built between the downtown area and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, a $2.4 billion project scheduled for completion in 2009.

Sound Transit officials also are considering extensions of the line north and south, as well as a line to the east across Lake Washington.

The accident Wednesday occurred after one of the two crew members on the work train realized going into the tunnel that they had forgotten a piece of equipment at the entrance, Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray said.

Returning to the west portal, the engine hit a parked locomotive. The mechanic either jumped or was thrown from the engine onto an elevated platform near the track and died after being rushed to Harborview, while the train operator was released from the same hospital after being treated for minor injuries.

On Oct. 27, three Obayashi workers leaped from a train they were riding as it failed to stop and hit a concrete wall and two parked train cars, raining heavy equipment from a 30-foot elevated section of the track, according to a Sound Transit internal investigation. Their injuries ranged from a broken toe to a fractured vertebra.

According to the agency's findings, an untrained worker who was operating the train apparently started out of the tunnel at high speed, contributing to a brake failure.

Obayashi subsequently suspended two supervisors for three days each for letting workers ride on top of a flat car behind the locomotive in violation of company rules. Operation of the work trains was subsequently limited to trained operators and a barrier at the end of the elevated section of the line was redesigned.

The October crash was not investigated by the state agency, but the new investigation will include a review of the internal probe, Fischer said.

Rick Capka, a Sound Transit engineer, said the train operator Wednesday was qualified, adding that since October the agency has verified that Obayashi regularly checks the braking systems and uses qualified operators. - The Associated Press, The Columbian (Clark County, WA)

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ON SATURDAYS KIDS RIDE FREE ON THE COASTER IN FEBRUARY, MARCH, AND APRIL

OCEANSIDE, CA -- For families looking for a fun and inexpensive weekend outing, a COASTER train ride is a perfect way to reach many destinations in North County, Old Town or downtown San Diego, California.

On Saturdays during the next three months, children ages 12 and under ride free on the COASTER when riding with a fare paying adult. The COASTER operates four southbound and four northbound trains each Saturday.

With plenty of parking available on Saturdays at the COASTER's North County stations, it's easy to catch the COASTER for a joy ride or to reach many of the region's fun attractions. Suggested destinations and schedule information about NCTD's COASTER are available at www.gonctd.com. Schedule information is also available by calling 1-800-COMMUTE (1-800-266-6883), after March 1, simply dial 511.

Up to two children are allowed to ride free with every fare paying adult. Only valid COASTER ticket and pass holders are eligible to transfer for free to NCTD BREEZE buses, MTS buses, and the San Diego Trolley. All others must pay full fare to ride the Trolley or bus systems.

NCTD supplies public transportation for all of North San Diego County. The BREEZE has a fleet of 165 buses covering 53 fixed routes including four COASTER Connection routes. The COASTER commuter rail service operates at eight stations between Oceanside and San Diego. It includes seven locomotives and 28 bi-level passenger train cars providing 122 trips each week. - The Fallbrook-Bonsall Village News

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