Railway Track & Structures - October 2007 - (Page 49)

cover most, if not all, of those costs for certain courses that are geared to Homeland Security or response on security issues. We already have some of that in our existing curriculum. We don’t believe it will take too much to adjust the curriculum. We’ve been wanting to become and believing we should be a member of that consortium for four or five years now. Thanks to our local congressional delegation, we finally made it through and the bill got signed into law at the beginning of August. The funds have yet to be appropriated, and we don’t expect massive funding, but we do expect to be able to serve everyone who does need this type of training in this day and age. The FAST Loop is really our bread and butter, the mainstay of a lot of our research program. It’s where we learned a lot about the 286,000-pound issue that I addressed earlier. It continues to be extremely well funded by the member railroads. We’re actually running that at a higher budget level than we did a few years ago. That’s how important it is to the industry to try to keep ahead of the curve and keep up with the various issues that are being seen, particularly in the Powder River Basin. Operations in some areas there are doing upwards of two or three million mgt annually. They now put on more mgt on an annual basis than we do at TTCI, where we’re now at about 150 mgt annually. But we are able, of course, out here to do things that you wouldn’t necessarily do in revenue service, to try out new products. Very often trying out those new products means we’re able to help the manufacturer to improve the product, make it safer, whatever the appropriate issue might be, before railroads start adopting that technology. It’s an extremely useful service that the high-tonnage loop can provide. RT&S: Can you talk about your Annual Research Review? R.A.: We started that off in 1995. Actually, it’s the same concept that we use now, but it’s just grown since then. It started off with basically one day in the classroom learning about what’s been going on in the research program in the previous 12 months, then touring the center on the second day, but most particularly walking the FAST track. The civil engineers can look at what’s been happening and what the various components look like. The format has held steady and is the one we’ll use for the 13th year in a row next March. We’ve totally outgrown where we started in a very small meeting room in a very small hotel in Pueblo. Now, of course, we pretty much fill up the Pueblo Convention Center. I’m told we had about 330 attendees last year, up from the first one that had fewer than 100. It’s been fairly steady around the 300 mark, which makes it one of the betterattended 1.5-day events in the industry at the moment. The Research Review started in the 1990s because we had a lot of criticism that people knew we were doing some fine research, but they wanted to know what exactly was going on. It was a communications issue. That’s how the whole concept was born. We did a lot of things in the 1990s to improve our way of communicating. About that time we started doing more magazine articles in conjunction with your magazine, for one, and a lot of short, sharp and to-thepoint reports we called technology digests. The Research Review was one part of that overall package of improving the www.rtands.com Posters and TTCI experts help visitors to the Annual Research Review understand exactly what they're seeing as they walk the FAST Loop. way in which we communicate the research results back to the folks who pay for it, the railroads. Now, of course, there are lots more organizations represented at the Research Review, not just railroads, although railroad attendance is pretty good. Of course, you have a lot of suppliers, consultants, etc. In general, our goal is to keep everyone in the industry updated, at least on an annual basis, on the latest and greatest results from the Railway Track & Structures October 2007 49 http://www.rtands.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Railway Track & Structures - October 2007

Railway Track & Structures - October 2007 Contents On Track Industry Today Supplier News AREMA News NRC News TTCI R&D Crossties by the Billions Provide Essentials for Full Support Modern Tools Manage Risk M/W Challenges: Better Management of Thermal Forces in CWR TTCI Celebrates 25 Years as Facility, 10 as Part of AAR Products and Literature People Calendar Sales Representatives Website Directory Advertisers Index Professional Directory Classified Advertising Chicago Perspective

Railway Track & Structures - October 2007

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