Rail Group On Air

Direct Chassis Link, Inc. (DCLI) is the largest provider of marine and domestic container chassis to the U.S. intermodal industry. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., the company owns, leases and manages more than 154,000 marine chassis and 89,000 domestic chassis serving customers involved in the global movement of containerized goods. DCLI Chief Commercial Officer Ryan Houfek and Senior Vice President Government and Public Relations Mike O’Malley discuss the intermodal market, focusing on rail’s critical role in the transportation supply chain and logistics, with Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono.

In this Rail Group On Air podcast, part of our series with the Commuter Rail Coalition, North County Transit District Executive Director and CEO Matt Tucker, BNSF Assistant Vice President Passenger Operations DJ Mitchell and CRC Executive Director KellyAnne Gallagher discuss the San Diego Pathing Study with Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono. Released in November 2020, the study provides an implementation blueprint for a unique NCTD/BNSF partnership that will bring capacity and service improvements for commuter and intercity passenger rail and freight rail to Southern California’s LOSSAN (Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo) rail corridor, the second-busiest rail corridor in the U.S. In a typical year, the LOSSAN rail corridor moves approximately $1 billion of freight and more than eight million rail passengers. DB Engineering & Consulting USA, Inc., the international consulting division of Germany’s national railroad Deutsche Bahn, prepared the study, which identifies and prioritizes infrastructure improvements that are tied to a specific increase in service capacity over the near-, mid- and long-term future. DB E&C applied an approach to rail operations and infrastructure planning that allows rapidly iterating service design, operational adjustments and infrastructure improvements in order to derive an attractive solution. The blueprint will assist NCTD and its rail partners in growing service along a corridor that is currently bottlenecked by single track and other infrastructure deficiencies.

The first lines of Riyadh’s six-line, 176-km metro network are due to commence operation in the final quarter of 2021. As the world’s largest single-phase metro project nears its conclusion, IRJ Editor-in-Chief Kevin Smith speaks with Carter Rohan, project director for the Riyadh Metro Transit Consultants (RMTC) project management consultancy (PMC), and Lindsay Vamplew, project director for the Riyadh Advanced Metro Project Execution and Delivery (RAMPED) PMC, which have overseen project delivery. Rohan and Vamplew address the challenges of delivering such a vast scale of work in a country with no past experience in metro construction, and in Saudi Arabia’s tough environmental conditions. (Introductory music: “Tired Traveler on the Way to Home” by Andrew Codeman – CC BY 3.0)

RT&S Editor-in-Chief Bill Wilson takes a look back at 2020 and provides a forecast for 2021. He also interviews HNTB's Ronnie Hakim and Herzog's Troy Elbert.

New Jersey Transit met the December 31, 2020 federally mandated deadline for implementing Positive Train Control. NJT President and CEO Kevin Corbett discusses the project’s complexity, and the “come from behind” coordination and cooperation it took with numerous stakeholders to reach the finish line with time to spare, with Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono.

Railway Age’s 58th Railroader of the Year, Canadian Pacific President and CEO Keith Creel, talks with Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono about his career, and his mission at CP, in this audio version of the video interview. Creel has been instrumental in Canadian Pacific forging a leadership role in the industry, while acknowledging the railroad’s place in history and its role in driving the North American economy forward. He has helped renew Canadians’ and CP employees’ sense of pride in a company that connected a nation, and connected Canada to the rest of the world. Under his steady hand, and under very difficult circumstances this past year, CP has been a safe, efficient and productive railroad, enabling its customers to connect with domestic and global markets. Podcast sponsored by Amsted Rail and TrinityRail.

Railroad Financial Corp. President and Railway Age Financial Editor David Nahass; Cowen and Company Managing Director and Railway Age Wall Street Contributing Editor Jason Seidl; and Cowen and Company Transportation Equipment Analyst Matt Elkott join Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono to offer their perspectives on 2021, a year in which the world hopes to see the end of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. What are the prospects for freight rail growth? For railcar orders and deliveries growing? Will intermodal continue to lead the way? How is the rail industry’s trucking competition faring?

Jim Derwinski, Commuter Rail Coalition Chair and CEO/Executive Director, Metra; John Cline, CRC Government Affairs Director and Principal, Cline Strategic Consulting; Chuck Spitulnik, CRC Counsel and Partner, Kaplan Kirsch Rockwell; and KellyAnne Gallagher, CRC Executive Director, discuss access, capacity, and public convenience and necessity issues of importance to commuter railroads with Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono.

Cogniac is a startup enterprise-class AI image and video analysis company providing enterprise-class software for automating railroad visual inspection tasks. Based in San Jose, Calif., the company has landed two contracts with U.S. Class I railroads and a Mexican client in the past year. Cogniac is also working with the AAR to help reshape and modernize federally mandated inspection regulations. Dr. Amy Wang, a technologist and the co-founder and VP Systems at Cogniac, discuss advances in deep learning to achieve better-than-human accuracy and continuously improve railroad inspection workflows with Railway Age Editor-in-Chief William C. Vantuono.

Industry 4.0 (also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution) is a reality. Railroads, including their partners in the transportation supply chain, are at the beginning of their journey to establishing true end-to-end digital continuity. For example: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT); Positive Train Control (PTC) and Enhanced Train Control (ETC); and AI (artificial intelligence)-based automation such as expanding autonomous inspection to include predictive analytics for track data. How do we know that these solutions and systems are safe and that there are no lurking issues? How do we know that the integration of multiple components from vendors, partners, and even from within meet safety objectives? How do we know if safety integrity is preserved after a change is made? How do we shift the paradigm where safety moves from a cost center to a value-added business driver? In Part 3, the conclusion of this three-part series on System Safety, Sonia Bot chief executive of The BIT Consulting Group Inc., and Tony Zenga, owner of CMTIGroup Inc., draw attention to three often neglected or not fully understood aspects of system safety practices. They are integration into the systems engineering lifecycle, designing for safety, and process-based safety performance management. By having these technical aspects in place, a system safety practice can effectively achieve its potential and influence the maturation of the organization’s safety culture.