Original subtitles

- [Narrator] It's the greatest freight transportation system

in the world.

A complex network woven into the very fabric

of the United States.

From the early iron horses

to today's sleek steel stallions.

They grind up hillsides,

snake through valleys,

thunder across prairies to deliver the goods.

Now, Freight Trains Plus on Modern Marvels.

[intense electronic music]

Welcome to North Platte, Nebraska,

home of the largest rail yard in the world,

Union Pacific's Bailey Yard.

- The yard is approximately 3,500 acres.

It's eight miles long, about two miles wide,

no other rail facility like it in the world.

- [Narrator] Rail yards are the hubs of railroad operations.

Here, freight cars from across the system

are funneled in, sorted,

and then reassigned to new trains

that will bring them closer to their final destination.

- Just about anything that's produced in the United States

is shipped by rail.

So if you're talking about wine or cheese, fresh vegetables,

televisions, radios, automobiles, automobile parts,

you name it, just about everything that America uses

on a daily basis comes through North Platte.

- [Narrator] The Bailey Yard is strategically located

in the center of the Union Pacific rail network.

The facility is so large,

you can't see more than a third of it

from any point in the yard.

Well, that is except from the computer screens

of the command center,

[inquisitive music]

where all rail activity on the yard is monitored.

- What we do in the BCC, Bailey Command Center,

is coordinating movement

of between 130 and 180 trains per day.

- [Narrator] Utilizing computer based controls,

the Center monitors all traffic

over Bailey Yard's 315 miles of track.

In addition to locomotive movements,

workers process 14,000 freight cars

through the yard each day.

For some of these cars,

their first stop is one of the two classification yards,

or "hump yards".

- This is where we process eastbound trains.

Trains that come into North Platte are gonna be sorted here

to their four destinations.

So we are taking these cars apart

that have come in on a train

and then we're sorting them to go out

to destinations, further points from here.

- [Narrator] The hump is a three story manmade hill

that allows up to four cars a minute to roll into its bowl.

- Gravity pulls 'em off the hill.

The computer picks up the weight of the car

as it goes over the scale rails here.

- [Narrator] The car then passes

through a system of computerized retarders, or brakes,

that pinch the wheels as they go through to slow the car down.

- It slows them down accordingly,

not only to distance that it needs to travel

to the other end,

but it also computes how much distance is left in the rail.

And the computer will go all the way from 12 mile an hour

down to one mile an hour if necessary

to allow for safe and careful handling

of the freight that's inside these cars.

It's pretty amazing that the amount of tonnage

that's going over this hill,

how softly it's handled

down here when it hits the bottom end of things.

- [Narrator] The destination of each car

is entered into a computer.

It automatically switches the track

so the car rolls directly onto its assigned rail.

- At the trim tower at the other end of the ball

are trim crews

and what they do is they actually build the trains

that are gonna leave North Platte.

So we take 'em apart here

and they put 'em back together down there.

- [Narrator] Remote controlled switch engines,

less powerful locomotives

used for switching cars in a rail yard,

assemble the trains

when enough freight cars going to a single location

have been humped.

- The hump used to be the focal point of the railroad yard.

Pretty much all traffic was handled in this fashion.

What's changed that has taken the pressure off of this,

are trains like you see leaving over there.

They leave their originating point all in one big chunk,

they arrive at their destination in one big chunk.

- [Narrator] Unit freight,

or an entire train consisting of the same type of freight,

like a coal train, is treated differently

since it doesn't need to be reassigned.

For unit freight, there are 26 run-through tracks,

some with pad areas,

which allow trains to pull up, refuel, and depart

without having to detach from the locomotive.

- Every train that comes in

must have a mechanical inspection by our car forces.

We have a NASCAR pit team concept for our locomotives.

They're a team of five men and women

that attack each locomotive that comes in,

whether they have to be fueled,

their oil has to be checked,

they shine the windshields,

they get the locomotive ready to go.

- Our goal is to do it in 45 minutes

to service the train completely.

And then we expect the train crew to be here

as soon as we drop our protection,

which is blue flags.

- [Narrator] In addition to these pit stops,

the Bailey Yard boasts a locomotive repair depot

the size of five football fields.

- This is not a heavy duty repair facility.

What we do here is quarterly maintenance,

semi-annual, annual and tri-annual

standard maintenance on our locomotives.

- [Narrator] And just as important,

rail cars are serviced at the Bailey Yard as well.

- Part of the issue we have with derailments on occasion

are our wheels or axles failing en route.

And so our car department employees

really focus in on the conditions of wheels and axles

as they're coming through our run-through facilities.

- [Narrator] Four person crews sort, service,

and repair locomotive tires at the train car.

The repair facility handles roughly 50 cars daily,

totaling approximately 10,000 pairs of wheels each year.

What used to take 12 days to repair,

takes crews 8 to 12 minutes

to get a train back on track.

And most important of all,

are the people at the Bailey Yard.

Today, the train yard is home

to approximately 2,000 Union Pacific employees

that work around the clock, 365 days a year,

inspecting over 14,000 freight cars a day

and keeping freight moving.

- There's an absolute production mandate at North Platte.

Whether it's rain, snow, sun, blizzard, high winds,

we must hit those production targets because if we don't

we will back up the railroad on both sides

and we cannot have that kind of impact

on the Union Pacific system.

- [Narrator] The Bailey Yard may be the largest rail yard

servicing the largest railroad in North America,

but it's also a mammoth cog in a much larger machine.

We're talking about an $80 billion a year industry.

[soft rock music]

A system so large,

it encompasses over 140,000 miles of track

and extends to nearly every corner

of the continental United States.

And it's more than that.

It's approximately 38,000 locomotives,

1.7 million freight cars.

Its trains average 100 cars long,

extending over a mile and a half.

It's 1.8 billion tons of freight

crossing the country each year.

But it was the movement of freight

that was the driving force

behind the creation of the railroad.

The railroad business traces its roots

back to rudimentary horse drawn carts like these.

Navigating rails in coal mines

and stone quarries in the 1820s.

- The whole principle is

that you have steel wheels on steel rails

and that lowers the coefficient of friction.

You could pull more with less power on a steel rail

than if you were trying to pull a wagon

over the mud or dirt roads.

- [Narrator] Rail ways that utilized horses

to move public goods soon emerged.

- After 1830, when it was the Tom Thumb

and the first successful steam engines,

the best friend of Charleston and those early ones,

they proved that steam was reliable

and more powerful than horsepower.

- [Narrator] Steam engines quickly replaced

horses and mules on rail operations.

And it didn't take long for railroad entrepreneurs

to set their sights

on capturing the American freight business,

a market cornered by the growing east coast canals.

- Just about the time it was taking them to build the canals

to a standard where they would be really useful,

you could build a railroad next to the canal

and just beat the pants off the canal boats with a train.

And the railroad simply

technologically replaced the canals

almost overnight.

- [Narrator] Laborers built tracks

as fast as humanly possible.

By the 1850s, railroad tracks extended

from the east coast to the Great Lakes.

In 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads

met at Promontory Summit, Utah,

and completed the Transcontinental Railroad.

- The railroad business expanded very rapidly

because you could make a lot of money at it.

There was hardly a hauler in West Virginia

that didn't have a branch line reaching a coal mine.

There was hardly a hill or valley in the Pacific Northwest

that didn't have a lumber railroad in it.

- [Narrator] Railroads changed the landscape of America,

creating new towns along their tracks,

supplying the new population

with building materials and other necessities,

and carrying far flung crops to markets back east.

- They could send their money and their gold and stuff

back from California to the bankers in the east.

All of the things that people wanted and needed

could be brought in by train.

- [Narrator] But moving America's freight

didn't become the complex system of rails

that stretches to every corner of the nation overnight.

- [Narrator] Today, American railroads

move more than 5,000 ton miles of freight

per person every year,

more than any country in the world.

But getting there began with tycoons

like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould,

and Leland Stanford, competing to dominate the market.

- What separates the United States

from the rest of the world is

that the American railroads were all private enterprise.

They were all private companies,

highly competitive companies,

often run by robber barons who would have financial wars

and the whole business.

- [Narrator] Due to the infighting

among the rival railroads,

no cohesive system existed to move freight efficiently

across the various independently owned lines.

- During the first world war,

there was concern that the railroads wouldn't be able

to keep up with the demand for service,

and the federal government

took over the operation of the railroads

under the United States Railway Administration.

Their idea was to standardize railroad operating procedures

and try to make the railroads more efficient.

- [Narrator] Soon after the war,

the government returned the rails to private enterprise.

20 years later by World War II,

a collection of independent railroads

operated as a coordinated system

and no government intervention was needed.

The steel backbone of the nation

played its part in winning the war.

But by the 1950s,

the railroads monopoly on freight transportation

was quickly eroded.

Trucking and the newly created interstate highway system

threatened to derail the railroads.

- Then, the railroads,

which were a network of little feudal domains

of different railroads all competing with each other

in a system that was set up to compete among each other,

were suddenly having to compete

with a new outside competitor.

- [Narrator] Railroads responded by merging

as well as upgrading and modernizing.

And today, freight trains are still the number one way

to move goods long distances.

An early pioneer was General Electric.

Since 1907, GE owned and manufactured locomotives.

At this factory in Erie, Pennsylvania,

208 ton, 44,000 horsepower diesel electric beasts

roared to life.

General Electric needs approximately 26 days

to completely build one of these steel giants.

And the last 12 days

are spent in this final assembly building.

- This is station one,

the first station of a four station final assembly process

for the locomotive.

In station one, you can see where the platform is brought in

and inverted in the upside down position.

- [Narrator] Workers install sensitive electronics

and piping to the undercarriage.

Next, is a staging area for pre-built components

waiting to be installed.

- This is an example of the Evolution Series engine

that is really the heart and soul

of the Evolution Series locomotive.

- [Narrator] The 44,000 horsepower diesel engine

produces with 12 cylinders

what the previous engines needed 16 cylinders to accomplish.

- The new Evolution Series locomotive engine

is three percent more fuel efficient

than its predecessor engines.

The average locomotive

will burn approximately 350,000 gallons a year.

And if you expand that over a 20 year life,

the three percent improvement in fuel efficiency

correlates to about 200,000 gallons

less diesel fuel is burned over the life of the product.

- [Narrator] With the frame now upright,

the engine and other components

are ready to be put in place.

- [Pete] This is really

where the locomotive assembly process

turns into an automated assembly line.

The platform from station one is brought down

and put into its upright position.

And here we will start to place

the individual cabs and components on the platform

and start to do the final assembly of the locomotive.

- [Narrator] The locomotive starts taking shape

as it advances down the line

in what workers call,

"the world's largest air hockey table".

- What happens is, we'll connect an air hose

to the air jacks,

the air will slightly elevate the locomotive platform

and move it down from one workstation to the other,

which is kind of impressive when you think of

as it nears the final workstation,

it's over 300,000 pounds.

- [Narrator] But the 75 foot long,

16 foot high steel behemoths aren't finished yet.

- At this point, the locomotive is essentially complete

except for the truck assemblies.

From here, we'll lift the locomotive assembly

off the air jacks and take it over to station four.

- [Narrator] A crane operator lifts the 150 ton locomotive

over the factory floor

and deposits it gently onto a set of trucks

or wheel assemblies.

- After the locomotive is completed in station four,

it is brought back to one of our paint booths.

And as you can see here, it's in the initial stages

of being prepared for the final paint job.

- [Narrator] Specific colors and logos

to identify a company's freight

is key for safety and brand recognition.

And with that,

a custom paint job is complete for this BNSF locomotive.

In the initial years of

the biggest obstacle was simply

making sure the trains carrying expensive cargo

could go the distance.

This shiny new goliath is much smarter and much cleaner

than the power and might that ruled the rails

for nearly two centuries before.

- The development of the steam locomotive

was both evolutionary and revolutionary.

The biggest problem initially was finding the proportions,

the proportions between the boiler, the cylinders,

the drivers and the linkage mechanism.

The first locomotive that really got it all right

in the right proportions

was a locomotive called the John Bull.

- [Narrator] Mechanics put the John Bull into commission

in 1831 and it became the first locomotive ever

to be duplicated.

But the wood burning model was quickly outmoded

as locomotives increased rapidly in size and power.

- Wood was used generally in the American railroads

till sometime right after the civil war.

And what happened was that a lot of territories

that the railroads are going in,

in the prairies and the plains,

the weren't any trees around.

- [Narrator] Most locomotives

introduced at the end of the 19th century burned coal.

- Back in those days, about every three, four years,

you'd get a larger locomotive.

They just kept advancing the technology

every couple of years.

And it's like your automobile.

Somebody would come out with a new model

and the railroads would try it out and find out that,

yeah, this is pretty efficient and we'll buy some of these.

- [Narrator] Early 20th century locomotives

easily dwarfed their predecessors.

Their size and power may have changed drastically.

However, there were a few fundamental changes

in how they worked.

Pressurized steam enters one side of the cylinder

and pushes the piston away.

A valve shifts the steam to the other side

and forces the piston back.

A series of connected rods

convert the pistons back and forth motion

to the rotational motion of the wheels.

By the second World War,

the steam locomotive had reached its pinnacle

of technological development

and it had an unlikely replacement.

- The diesel was introduced in the 1920s.

It was not considered to be a real road worthy locomotive.

They were used in switch engines.

They were used in specialties.

They were used in lightweight streamliners,

but they weren't really considered a threat.

The Electro-Motive Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio,

decided that until they could replace

a full size steam locomotive with a diesel,

the diesel wasn't gonna get anywhere.

So in 1939, they created the FT freight diesel,

which was a two unit diesel,

had two 16 cylinder engines,

rated at 1,350 horsepower each.

And that locomotive

single handedly killed the steam engine.

- [Narrator] For railroaders like Bernie O'Brien

who spent decades working on steam locomotives,

like the Union Pacific Challenger,

the switch to diesel was bittersweet.

- It was a sad thing for me to see that happen.

Our last Challengers were only six years old

when they phased them out of service,

which is just pretty hard to believe.

- The steam locomotive did not fail as a machine

because it wasn't a good puller of freight.

The steam locomotive was extremely labor intensive

and it required a lot of care.

The diesel is like your automobile.

It's automatic, you fire it up and it goes.

- [Narrator] The mechanics of a diesel locomotive

are very different from those of a steam engine.

In the cylinder, a fuel air mixture

is compressed by the piston to a point where it ignites.

The explosion forces the piston down,

which turns the crank shaft.

An alternator then converts the motion of the crank shaft

into electrical power,

which is fed down to individual traction motors on each axle

to turn the wheels of a locomotive.

- Well, one of the advantages of diesel power

is that you could couple as many units together

as you needed for power to get it over the the road.

It just depends upon how much power you needed.

And one man controlled all of those units.

- [Narrator] Like their steam predecessors,

each generation of diesel electric locomotives

continue to outpace the last.

Today's freight locomotives

are able to haul more tonnage than ever,

but it's a feat that requires more than just horsepower.

- [Narrator] With its punishing uphill grade,

tight curves, and steep descent,

southern California's Cajon Pass

is one of the most treacherous railroad routes

in the United States.

Patrick Marquez,

a locomotive engineer for the Burlington Northern Santa Fe,

used to make the grinding journey up the mountain pass

several times a week.

He does this with a mile and a half of freight,

which weighs upwards of 6,000 tons

trailing behind the engines.

It's normally a two-man operation,

a conductor who serves as the manager of the train

and its rolling stock.

- BNSF 764040, O'Brien, over.

- [Narrator] And the engineer or train driver.

But for this grueling journey,

a second engineer with two helper locomotives

couples onto the rear of the train,

to push it to the top of the hill.

- Helpers are gonna contact me

and let me know when he's getting a release

on the rear end of the train and then we'll leave.

- [Helper] 764040 released to come and get you.

- Here we go.

So now he just gave me the signal

that the air brakes are releasing.

We come right off of the brakes,

give it some throttle and we take off.

But as soon as we take this corner,

you're gonna notice our speed dropping dramatically

'cause the hill and it's all the way up the summit.

- [Narrator] The engines must provide

64,000 pounds of tractive effort

to propel the train forward.

- The more power we exert into the traction motor,

the more likely that that wheel has the opportunity to spin.

In order to keep it from spinning, we'll use sand

and that will put a grit or sandpaper underneath the wheel

so we don't have metal to metal and it'll keep it moving.

- [Narrator] Today's locomotives

are equipped with an electronic traction control system.

The system uses compressed air

to spray sand from a nozzle in front of each wheel.

- If I spin my wheels,

the computer will sense a wheel slip,

you know like on a car, you feel it,

and you'll also feel it in here,

and I'll get a little signal in here, it'll say wheel slip.

One of the helpers clear block-

- [Narrator] Engineer Marquez is in constant communication

with the helper locomotive engineer

at the back of his train.

- If we didn't pick up those helpers,

we'd probably be getting a lot of wheel slip.

The wheels would just be slipping

'cause we wouldn't have enough power

to pull this up the hill.

- [Narrator] It takes a lot of effort

to get more than 12 million pounds

to the top of the hill.

- Gravity's pulling it that way.

I'm trying to pull it that way, right? [laughs]

[rock music]

If we stopped out here

and if I release my brakes without giving it power,

we'd start rolling back.

- [Narrator] With all the tools on board

to keep his train moving forward,

Marquez can sit back and enjoy the ride to the top.

Well, sort of.

- That's an alerter, it's like a safety device.

It's basically to keep me awake. [chuckles]

If I'm capacitated somehow and the alerter times out,

it'll apply the brakes at a service rate,

just slow the train down gradually

and just come to a stop.

I just hit this button, the alerter resets

and every time it pops up,

if I do something with the throttle, brakes,

something like that, it'll reset it too,

because it's showing that I'm awake

and I'm moving the controls.

- [Narrator] Marquez has to stop his train at the summit

to let off the helper engines.

- All I gotta do is throttle down

and the train will stall out, come to a stop.

- [Narrator] This stop was planned,

but not all of them can be.

- If we're moving 20 mile an hour

and we're coming down a mountain grade territory

and this train weighs roughly 6,000 ton or more,

it could possibly take us a quarter of a mile

to stop the train in an emergency application.

- [Narrator] And as every early railroader knew,

being unable to stop a speeding train was,

well, a train wreck.

[metal crashing]

- The earliest railroads used hand brakes of various types.

Often this was as simple as a lever with a wooden block

going against the wheel.

As the cars got bigger,

they would go to what we would call a stem winder

that tightened a chain

that pulled iron shoes against the wheels.

But they all had to be done by hand.

- [Narrator] Every five or six cars would have a brakeman

who had to apply the brakes on each of his cars.

- And the brakeman

was probably one of the most dangerous jobs in railroading

because there was this chance

that you would be thrown off the car

or lose your footing on that.

But you had to walk from car to car

on the roofs of the cars applying the hand brakes

in order to stop the train.

- But back then, the workers were considered expendable

and that's what it took to stop trains.

- [Narrator] In 1866,

George Westinghouse took on the challenge

of finding more effective way to stop a train.

And by 1873, he developed what remains to this day

one of the most significant safety inventions of all time,

the automatic air brake.

The air brakes on a freight train

are supplied with compressed air from the locomotive.

As the air reservoir in each car fills,

it trips a valve to release the brakes on that car.

Only when the last car disengages its brakes

can the train move.

The system is fail safe,

as any reduction of its air pressure,

such as a rupture in the air supply hose,

causes the brakes to be applied.

When diesel electric replaced the steam locomotive,

it brought with it another revolutionary technology,

dynamic braking to supplement air brakes.

Back at the Cajon Pass,

engineer Marquez relies upon dynamic braking

to start his downhill descent.

- I'm in dynamic braking now

and it just turns the traction motors into big resistors.

- [Narrator] Instead of feeding power to the wheels,

the traction motors now take power from the wheels.

The energy is dissipated as heat.

The underpowered traction motors have become hard to turn

thereby providing resistance to the wheels,

slowing the train.

- [Marquez] The more I move this lever forward,

it demands more amps,

which basically slows the motors down,

adds resistance to 'em.

So they're the ones slowing us down now,

which means I gotta be prepared to add more amps

to keep my train under control.

- [Narrator] Dynamic brakes are very useful on downgrades

and save a considerable amount of wear on air brake shoes,

thus lowering maintenance costs.

- Gravity's just pulling us downhill.

Like I said, I have resistance on my head end

'cause I turn these traction motors into to resistors.

So the wheels are turning and I'm trying to slow us down,

the engines are trying to slow us down.

And the train's just pushing against our engine

and I can try and control my speed with the dynamic brakes.

As we get faster, if I don't want to go too fast,

I'll add more dynamic brakes,

trying to slow down or keep our speed constant.

If I want to gain some speed,

I can reduce my dynamic braking,

which means the wheels will turn easier on the engines

and it means gravity will shove more.

- [Narrator] But the dynamic brakes may not be enough

to keep this freight train

from becoming a roller coaster ride.

- [Marquez] I'm in full dynamic brakes.

I'm demanding 35 kilo pounds from my motors

and all that resistance

and the trains just going too fast.

I'm just gonna keep picking up speed unless I do something.

So now I'll slow my train down with some air brakes.

- [Narrator] Essentially, he's riding the brakes

the rest of the journey down.

When Marquez's 6,000 ton train reaches the bottom,

it becomes yet another train

that has successfully negotiated the Cajon Pass

and transported hundreds of freight containers

over the mountains.

And the containers it carries

are significant beyond the goods they hold.

With the increase in imports coming from Asia,

these freight containers

have come to rejuvenate the railroad industry.

Over seven million containers

enter the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year,

more than anywhere else in the United States.

They are intermodal loads,

containers designed to flow easily

from one mode of transport to another,

and they have revolutionized

and revitalized the rail industry.

- Intermodal containers

are an extension of the container ship operations

that are here at the Port of Los Angeles.

Containers come off the ship,

they move onto the dock

and then they're either moved out by truck

or moved out by rail.

- [Narrator] Over 50 trains leave the twin ports

of Los Angeles and Long Beach on a daily basis,

each carrying approximately 220 containers.

That keeps about 11,000 trucks

off congested Los Angeles freeways every day.

- The advent of trade with Asia,

especially in the last 20 years,

and specifically China in the last 10,

has a doubled the amount of volume

that is coming into the west coast ports

over that period of time.

And the container trains have really been a way

to be an outlet for large volumes.

- [Narrator] And intermodal train traffic

coming out of the ports is expected to double

to 100 trains daily in the next two decades.

- Over 60% of the cargo that comes through these ports,

containerized cargo, in the form of imports,

is destined for the rest of the nation.

And the first stop or the first passage if you will,

for that traffic is on the Alameda Corridor

as it heads east to service the rest of the nation.

- [Narrator] The 20 mile long corridor

is essentially an expressway for trains,

[train whirring past]

connecting the ports to rail yards east of the city.

- This 10 mile section that we fondly refer to as the trench

was kind of the crown jewel of the program.

It's 10 miles long,

represents about one half the length

of the overall corridor.

- [Narrator] In the trench,

train travels unimpeded beneath city traffic.

A journey that once took almost two hours

has been cut to only 45 minutes.

- It's really a national asset.

What the Alameda Corridor represents

is probably one of the strongest lengths

in the Transcontinental Rail Network at this point in time.

- [Narrator] Intermodal freight has surpassed coal

as the number one revenue generator for the rail industry.

And the articulated well car,

designed to carry intermodal containers,

helped railroads remain relevant

in the competitive world of freight transportation.

Each car is able to fit one container

in a depressed well area.

With another resting on top,

the well area lowers the height of the load,

allowing it to make bridge and tunnel clearances

as well as lowering its center of gravity.

- The double stack opportunity

provides two for the price of one in a given car space.

So the loading volumes can increase,

the cost per unit drops, and makes the rail

a very, very efficient and cost effective way to move cargo.

- [Narrator] Of course, the well car

isn't the first freight car to fill a special need.

The earliest freight cars were simple platforms

with wheels attached,

but soon enough, sides were added.

- This particular type of car here is a gondola.

Now it's gondola, not gondola, all those are in Venice.

There are none on America's railroads.

This particular type of car

was one of the earlier types of cars.

- [Narrator] But gondolas were no match for harsh winters,

extremely hot summers, and long treks

between settled areas of the US.

This called for an enclosed car, thus the box car,

an icon of American freight railroading was born.

Box cars often functioned

as rolling billboards for the railroads they served.

- Box cars were modified into several other car types

with open slats on the side.

It was modified into a cattle car to carry cattle,

with heavy insulation and ice bunkers in either end,

it could be used as a refrigerator car

to haul perishable items.

- [Narrator] "Reefers", or refrigerator cars

changed the way America ate.

- The refrigerator car was essentially

an ice box on wheels.

And this worked well

until the advent of the frozen food industry.

Enter the mechanical refrigerator car.

In the early 1950s, a small diesel engine

was used to power a refrigeration device.

The cars then became a set of ice boxes on wheels,

actual refrigerators on wheels.

This spelled the doom of the ice reefer.

- [Narrator] The rail industry was able to accommodate

just about every market in the United States.

The petroleum age led to the introduction of the tank car.

The automobile revolution

led to the emergence of the auto rack.

And the piggy back, or TOFC trailer on flat car

was developed in response

to trucking competition in the 1950s.

But with a proliferation of freight car designs,

came the demise of another railroad car, the caboose.

- Radios made possible to work with fewer people.

So you didn't need four or five people to run a train,

you could run a train pretty effectively

with two or three people.

The caboose became an unnecessary appendage

on the rear of the train.

- [Narrator] Technology caught up with the caboose

in the form of FRED.

- FRED means flashing rear end device.

For the men who lost their jobs as a result of this,

the F had a different connotation.

- [Narrator] The dumb FRED can be anything

from a blinking light to a simple red flag

stuck on the end of the last car.

Smart FRED, or the end of train device

as it came to be called,

can radio information about the airline pressure

as well as let the engineer know

what the cars at the end of the train are doing.

But it's not just the end of the train

that's gotten smarter.

Railroad operations are moving full throttle

to the very cutting edge of the information age.

- [Narrator] At any given time, there are thousands of trains

snaking their way across the North American continent.

Their paths intersect,

they share some of the same rail,

and may even use the same line in opposing directions.

It may sound like a train wreck just waiting to happen.

[intense music]

But every move of every train

is closely monitored and calculated

by dispatchers located at operation centers

throughout the United States.

- The train crew has a responsibility

to operate the train,

but the train dispatcher gives them the route to run on.

- [Narrator] Train dispatchers are the rulers of the rails

and no move can be made without their authorization.

BNSF Railways Network Operation Center

is command central for the dispatchers

of one of the largest railroads in North America.

- The facility is 45,000 square feet,

about the size of a football field.

We house at any given time about 225 employees.

There's 94 different dispatching work stations.

- [Narrator] Each dispatcher's territory is 200 to 500 miles

and their planning horizon is two to three hours ahead.

- He or she has a screen

with a track layout on the computer screen

and it's all point and click.

The dispatcher can point to a switch or a route

and direct that train's movement over that

with just a point and click operation.

- [Narrator] This way, it's the dispatcher

that selects the path of the train, not the engineer.

So it's imperative that the dispatchers know exactly

where their trains are at all times.

- We've got two different tracking mechanisms.

One's through the signal system that actually tracks trains

through electric current in the rail

that brings the information

into the train dispatchers dispatching system.

And then secondly, we've got a wireless AEI,

automatic equipment identification,

that wirelessly transmits information

into the train dispatcher

and gives him or her a location and route.

- And this is basically an RFID

that we place on all the rail cars, all the locomotives,

on every rail car in North America.

BNSF has around 500 AEI readers

and as the trains go by these readers,

it energizes the tag and captures what car that is

or what locomotive that is.

And then we use that information to update our mainframe

and identify exactly what's on the train

at that point in time.

- [Narrator] Within a few seconds

of a train going by a reader,

the information is available

to the dispatchers at the Network Operation Center,

as well as to customers online.

But since readers may be up to 100 miles apart

and conductors set out cars

at various points along the route,

dispatchers need even more accurate reporting.

BNSF on a daily basis has around 1,400 trains in operation.

The trains go through a reader,

reporting critical information

through the voice train reporting application.

The application automatically

converts verbal information into computer data.

- So they basically just use the radio that they have,

they tell us what they did.

Within nine seconds,

that information's updated in our mainframe.

- [Narrator] This information can be anything

from picking up cars to leaving cars out

at various sidetracks and yards along the route.

Handheld computers are also used to report car movement.

- This will be very similar to what UPS does

in that that's how they keep track of their packages.

This is how we keep track of our rail cars.

And if you consider a rail car is just a lot bigger package,

this is basically where we track

where we left the car, when we left it there

and it's how we identify to the conductor

you need to go pick up that package.

- [Narrator] Railroads are now exploring innovative ways

to utilize Wi-Fi and GPS technologies

to increase rail safety.

- An example of a safety initiative

is electronic train management system, or ETMS as we call it.

[train engine humming]

The locomotive on board system

would have the authority that's granted to the train,

the speed, the distance that they have

to travel with the authority that's been issued.

- [Narrator] The system automatically

takes control of the train

if the engineer exceeds the authority

given to him by the dispatcher,

fails to acknowledge his signal,

or even if he's about to take a curve too quickly.

The system constantly monitors information

about the path ahead of the train

and determines what actions are required from the engineer.

It gives a warning to the engineer

if he's not taking the appropriate action

to stop or slow down the train.

- If they violate that or don't react

to stop the train

before they get to the end of their authority,

it'll automatically stop the train.

- [Narrator] Once implemented, ETMS will allow railroads

to run trains more safely and efficiently.

So, as we move forward faster the than ever before,

we can be sure that the rail industry will continue

to be the best and most cost effective way to move freight.