Morning Edition, May 25, 2006
When you watch a freight train roll by, you might think you’re watching something that technology hasn’t really touched. After all, the essentials – steel wheels on steel rails – are pretty much the same as they were 200 years ago.
But high-tech tools are reshaping the railroad industry, and they’re playing a big role in creating one of the most profitable periods the industry has enjoyed in decades.
Inside Norfolk Southern’s green-glass headquarters building in Norfolk, Va., there are models of trains, pictures of trains, and train memorabilia dating back a century or more to what many still think of as the golden era of railroading.
CEO Wick Moorman says that visitors expecting to find a low-tech business are often surprised.
“Railroads are inherently interesting because they are so complex,” he says.
Norfolk Southern has more than 21,000 miles of track, so making sure the trains run on time requires a lot of advanced technology.
Vice President Deborah Butler says that Norfolk Southern uses four large mainframe computers and more than 1,000 servers to manage the company’s far-flung operations.
Combined with global-positioning satellites and scanners, the complex system keeps track of the railroad’s 195,000 locomotives and train cars.
“There are a lot of things you can do with GPS and communication modules on the locomotives,” Butler says. “Because you can not only see where the locomotive is, you can read the fuel level. So you can use that to make better decisions about where and when to fuel your trains.”
And that’s significant for a company like Norfolk Southern, which burns 40 million gallons of fuel each month.
In the old days, railroad workers used pencil and paper to schedule the arrival and departure of trains. These days, workers use logistics software to identify the best routes, determine where the trains are going, identif