FRA HEAD BOARDMAN CONVENES INDUSTRY GROUP AT NYAB TO REVIEW ECP BRAKES
Boardman: “The time is right” for ECP brakes
The head of the American Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), Joseph H. Boardman, and New York Air Brake (NYAB) President J. Paul Morgan, welcomed a group of twenty-seven North American railroad leaders to NYAB headquarters in Watertown, NY, October 12 for a two-day meeting about Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) railroad freight brakes.
The meeting brought together representatives of railroads, industry associations, car owners, and unions for a more detailed look at a recent FRA report on ECP brakes. The August report called for financial incentives and regulatory relief to accelerate the adoption of the new braking technology. The FRA plans to issue the new rules in 2007. NYAB is currently the only supplier of ECP brakes and systems approved by the Association of American Railroads (AAR) for use in revenue service.
Boardman told the group that ECP brakes would save fuel and increase the capacity of American freight railroads, while improving their safety. “The time is right,” Boardman said. “We are facing increasing congestion on our roadways and railroads are a key element in reducing that. At the same time, rising fuel prices are helping to make the business case for ECP brakes.”
“This was the first visit of an FRA administrator to Watertown, and a unique meeting of key industry stakeholders focused on ECP implementation,” Marshall Beck, NYAB senior vice president for sales and marketing, said. Beck reviewed the readiness of Knorr-Bremse’s ECP train control system (EP-60) and showed how the Locomotive Engineer Assist/Display Event Recorder (LEADER) system could play a role in measuring the benefits of ECP brakes.
Experience With ECP Brakes
Tim Murphy, a senior associate with Booz-Allen Hamilton (BAH) and the author of the FRA report, told the gathering that the study examined the history and results of ECP use and sought answers as to why their adoption has been slow and inconsistent. He reasoned that a lack of funding and limited experience with the technology was responsible. His reported cited NYAB’s pioneering work in proving the technology.
NYAB first demonstrated its EP-60 ECP brakes onboard a train in 1995, and commissioned the first ECP stand-alone (not overlaid over standard brakes) installation at Canada’s Quebec Cartier Mining (QCM) in 1998. Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad installed an overlay ECP system on a taconite mining train in 1999; within two years, BNSF was using the first fully-integrated EP-60 – CCBI – WireDP locomotive. In 2004, the American Association of Railroads (AAR) released the TAG S-4200 specification for ECP brakes and approved NYAB’s EP-60 for service. That same year, NYAB commissioned a fully-integrated EP-60 – CCBII brake system at QCM. In 2005, NYAB installed $16.5 million in EP-60 brakes and WireDP on South Africa’s Spoornet CoalLink railroad and, in 2006, was given an order to equip an additional 110 locomotives.
Quebec Cartier Mining
The QCM project began in March 1998. One-hundred and ninety cars were fitted with EP-60 brakes as singles and married pairs, and seventeen locomotives were equipped with the integrated CCBII – EP-60 system. The train involved carries 17 million tons of iron ore annually, 260 miles each way from Mount Wright, Quebec to Port Cartier on the St. Lawrence River, often in severe cold (as low as -40 degrees F/C).
Since installing EP-60 brakes, QCM trains have experienced 5.7 percent decrease in fuel use and a 15 percent increase in throughput capacity. ECP brakes have virtually eliminated Undesired Emergencies (UDE), allowed an increase in average speed, and shortened stopping distances. Safety has been improved and component life lengthened (e.g. a 27 percent increase in brake shoe life). QCM has been able to increase train length from 156 cars to 182 cars without adding extra locomotives, and has been able to stop its practice of shortening trains to 100 cars and adding in-train compressor cars in the extreme cold.
Spoornet
The Spoornet project involves work on about 200 electric locomotives and nearly 3,000 coal wagons in singles and rakes of two, four, and six cars. Locomotive installations began in this third quarter of this year, wagon installations will begin in the second quarter of 2007, and the system will be in production by the second quarter of 2008. This contract was split with NYAB competitor Wabtec Corporation and will meet the AAR’s interoperability requirements.
Initial Spoornet test results cited in the FRA report show a decrease in stopping distance by as much as 70 percent and a 23 percent decrease in energy use. Further, a reduced need for brake inspection will cut terminal turn times for these trains by nine percent. In his presentation, Murphy noted that Spoornet could have justified its entire ECP investment in the cost of one runaway train wreck in 2005, an incident that he said ECP brakes would have prevented.
Costs, Benefits, and a Plan
Murphy said that these and other deployments allowed the FRA to calculate the costs and benefit of ECP brakes and their deployment, and to present a sound business case for their adoption. It further identified that unit trains and intermodal service represented the best opportunity for recovering the costs of implementation.
As an example, Murphy outlined a hypothetical implementation of ECP brakes on the trains serving Montana’s Power River Basin coal-mining area. An investment of $432 million in equipment and services would return an annual benefit of $170 million, resulting in a three-year payback and an internal rate of return of 47 percent, according the FRA study. Increased fuel economy would represent $78 million of those cost savings, while reduced brake shoe wear and savings from reduced brake inspections would total $45 million each.
The Tour
Following a short series of presentations, meeting attendees were taken to NYAB’s 150-car test rack to see the ECP brakes in operation. At a signal from the control room, all 150 brakes applied and released simultaneously. In the test track control room, a graph showed how quickly the signal reached all 150 brake sets on the test rack, and how they all came on together. A graph made previously using standard brakes showed the significant lag between when the first brake set began to brake, when the 75th set reacted, and when the 150th set finally came to life, 103 seconds later.
A demonstration using NYAB’s TDS-5000 simulator highlighted the differences in fuel use, time, and in-car forces between the EP-60 brakes and the older, air-actuated technology. Attendees with engineering experience were selected to “drive” the two simulated trains, with the results posted for all to see.
CSX engineer Dave Caniff, a representative from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and a 30-year veteran engineer, said that the ECP brakes were “smoother” and required “less brake” than the traditional brakes for the same situation. Caniff said that the improved technology gave him “time to pay attention” to other elements of the locomotive’s operation.
The meeting attracted parties from: the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and Quebec Cartier Mining railroads; the National Transportation Safety Board and American Association of Railroads; car owners CIT Rail, First Energy Corporation, Southern Company, and Detroit Edison; and the unions BLET and International Brotherhood of Electronic Workers. Dinner on the St. Lawrence river and factory tours rounded out the visit.
Sidebar - How ECP Brakes Work
ECP brakes use electronic signals to trigger a train’s brakes, rather than the traditional pulses of air along the brake line. Air signals take as long as two minutes to reach the end of a 150-car train. As a result, cars in front brake well before cars in back, squeezing the train and making it difficult to control, and wearing out car connectors. All cars get ECP’s electronic signals at nearly the same time, resulting in even braking for the train.
ECP brakes also replace mechanical brake valves with electronic ones that allow engineers to back off their brakes gradually, rather than all at once. Moreover using electronic signals allows each car air reservoir to be continually topped off. Engineers save fuel, have more control of their train, and save brake line pressure for future stops (important on long, steep hills). Electronic valves are also fail less, and are able to diagnose themselves and report to the engineer.
