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BY TIM GREEN, P.ENG.
Athabasca Northern Railway
Railways in Canada have largely disappeared from the public's
consciousness in the last two generations. Rail lines have
been torn up. Passenger train travel has become largely a
tourist activity.
Declining employment means less community contact with people
who know anything about railways. Children learn from their
storybooks that trains go "choo-choo" - when in
fact they haven't done so for more than 40 years.
But railways have evolved and are thriving in Alberta, and
they provide some interesting employment opportunities for
engineers. This article looks at one recent railway project,
the engineering involvement in it, and how railways contribute
to meeting some of the challenges Albertans face.
Train Sense
North America's largest single-line kraft pulp mill is the
Alberta Pacific Forest Industries, or Alpac, mill at Boyle.
It consumes a vast quantity of pulpwood from its forest management
area in northeastern Alberta.
Getting that wood to the mill puts many trucks on the road,
especially during the winter haul season of January to March.
In mid-October 2002, Alpac signed a 10-year contract with
the Athabasca Northern Railway to haul logs by rail. This
covered setting up permanent log terminals near Conklin and
Fort McMurray, 220 and 360 kilometres respectively from the
mill.
These off-site rail terminal alternatives offer Alpac several
operational advantages. First, the truck cycle times for deliveries
of logs to the terminals from the nearby cut blocks are much
shorter.
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Railways in North America
all have one or more reporting marks. These
are two-, three- or four-letter codes that
indicate ownership. Railway cars and intermodal
containers carry the reporting mark and
an equipment identification number. Together
these serve as a unique tracking ID for
each piece of equipment as it may end up
traveling far from its home tracks. When
Athabasca Northern Railway was formed in
the fall of 2000, the mark ANR was already
used by another railway. The American Association
of Railroads assigned "ANY" instead.
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This means wood can be picked up from where it's cut more
quickly in the limited time between freeze-up and thaw when
trucks can actually get into the cut block areas. The shorter
distance also reduces driver fatigue, as well as the number
of long-distance logging trucks on provincial roads.
Second, while trucks cannot run all year round, trains can.
With a substantial portion of the inventory in the remote
terminals, the woodpile at the Alpac mill is smaller. There
are some months where there are no logging trucks at the mill
at all; during these times, the trains hauling wood from the
terminals can keep topping up the mill's on-hand inventory.
Third, the system just makes good economic and societal sense.
Alpac will save about $800,000 every year by shifting some
of its logs from road to rail. At the same time, overall greenhouse
gas emissions drop, and fewer trucks on the road mean savings
in highway maintenance.
Making Tracks
Known by the reporting mark ANY, Athabasca Northern Railway
is a modern shortline railway, running 320 km from Boyle to
Fort McMurray. The company's headquarters is in St. Albert,
while its operational centre is in Lac La Biche.
ANY hauls a lot of heavy machinery and pipe north to the oilsands
region near Fort McMurray, and sulphur and petroleum coke
south. Since the track from Boyle to the Alpac mill belongs
to another shortline, RailAmerica's Lakeland and Waterways
Railway, ANY negotiated a running rights agreement on the
40-kilometre section so it can haul logs directly to Alpac.
The trackage at the mill required some additions to adapt
to the log haul. ANY's parent company, Cando Contracting of
Brandon, Man., installed a wye for turning trains, and enough
track under Alpac's two gantry cranes to hold 40 log cars
for unloading. Canadian Weigh Systems of Oakville, Ont., installed
a coupled in-motion rail scale to weigh log cars as they roll
over it slowly.
In the first season, ANY's remote log terminals are very simple.
ANY cleared and leveled areas near the railway's main line,
and set up unmanned truck scales.
In the longer term, once all the winter's wood decked in these
areas has been shipped out, ANY will construct parallel tracks
through the cleared areas. This will mean that logs can be
offloaded from trucks on each side of the tracks and then
loaded directly onto log cars, instead of forwarding them
to the main line.
Railway Engineers
Due to many uncertainties, neither Alpac nor ANY could start
work, purchase equipment or commit resources to the log haul
until the contact was signed in mid-October 2002. This meant
extremely tight timelines to get things running for the winter
season. Even so, ANY's first computerized truck scale was
operational in mid-December and the first trainload of wood
arrived at Alpac at the end of February 2003.
Three engineers, all members of APEGGA, were involved in
setting up the Alpac/ANY log-haul.
Hassan Farzadeh, P.Eng., of 3Log Systems in Richmond, B.C.,
wrote the software for the unmanned truck scales. The software
takes the full and empty truck weights directly from the scale
and stores them with the truck identification in a database,
from where they are collected by Alpac over a cell phone data
link. Mr. Farzadeh also developed the interface to feed the
rail scale output into Alpac's accounting system.
Bob Feeney, P.Eng., the ANY manager of project development,
was trained as an industrial engineer. A former western director
of planning and administration at Canadian National Railway,
Mr. Feeney was instrumental in economic analysis and log terminal
development.
And there's me, Tim Green, P.Eng., the author of this article.
I'm an electrical engineer and former Army signals officer,
and now the ANY projects engineer. I worked on setting up
the computerized scales and developed operational procedures
for the log haul.
The scale of operation of a modern shortline is generally
not enough to justify a dedicated person to each specialized
function. This means that some tasks such as track design,
railcar modification, surveying and road construction are
handled by ANY's parent company or contracted out to engineering
firms in Alberta who specialize in these areas. It also means
that the engineers inside ANY are generalists rather than
specialists, and end up doing a much wider variety of work
and developing a greater variety of new skills than they would
in a larger company.
The two ANY professional engineers together cover a broad
spectrum of functions, from the definition, negotiation and
management of contracts through to business development, and
even into interaction with regulatory agencies. For the log
haul project, we took on diverse tasks such as conceptual
design of rail yards, roads and computer systems, and on-site
coordination for scale testing and log-loading procedures.
The Rail Impact
Alpac has estimated that about 20 per cent of its wood will
move by rail. This will take about 10,000 loaded logging trucks
off Alberta highways every year. The result is a net reduction
of greenhouse gases by 50,000 tonnes over the life of the
contract. It also means reduced highway maintenance costs.
The advantages of shifting from road to rail have come into
sharp focus in the Toronto-Montreal corridor where highway
planners struggle with increasing the capacity of overloaded
public highways. Running parallel are under-used, privately
funded rail lines. In Alberta, the Alpac/ANY log haul is just
one example of what is possible with a bit of forward thinking.
To some degree, three other freight shortlines in the province
also transport logs, logs that used to travel by road.
Moving everything from road to rail is not the answer. However,
finding a better balance between the two transportation modes
may pay big dividends - as it has for Alpac and ANY, and for
Albertans at large. Engineers will continue playing a key
role in making that possible.
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