July 19, 1999 Electricity is the lifeblood of a railroad. It powers the thousands of switches and signals across Union Pacific Corp.'s 36,000 miles of track. It fuels its locomotives and the communication systems that link hundreds of dispatchers, engineers, brakemen and other train crew members.

No wonder it's the railroad's biggest year 2000 contingency challenge. "If electricity goes out, so does our signaling system  and our railroad runs on signals. Trains can't operate successfully without red, yellow and green signals," said Tim Brechbill, year 2000 project manager at the $9 billion, Omaha-based railroad. The company has a $46 million Y2K budget.

Union Pacific does have manual procedures  which include dispatching flagmen to crossings  "but if we were talking about an across-the-board outage, it would be a severe constraint on the amount of merchandise you could move," Brechbill said.

Yet it isn't a full-blown outage that most worries Gayla Fletcher, the railroad's top year 2000 contingency planner. Far more likely, she said, are lots of local outages, which the railroad has prepared for by buying 500 mobile backup generators. Plan B calls for tapping Union Pacific's 520 refrigerator cars  which are distributed throughout the entire rail system at any given time  as backup generators.

Union Pacific's Gayla Fletcher says she fears lots of local outages rather than a full-blown loss of power Fletcher said Union Pacific has also built in redundancies to its onboard and field communication systems, buying 200 additional cellular and satellite telephones that crews can use to communicate in places where power is out.

At its national customer service center in St. Louis, Union Pacific has contracted with four long-distance carriers to furnish service.

On the supplies side, Union Pacific is stockpiling printer ink, paper, computer tapes  "mainly things that will allow us to create hard copies of things we look at electronically," Brechbill said.

In the next six months, printers will be cranking out backup, paper-based copies of critical files and paper-based forms for crew, payroll and other key reports that are prepared electronically.

Other planned contingency measures  all filed away in three-ring binders and stored electronically in a Lotus Notes database  include operating the railroad's regular van transport service for crew members who must be shuttled to and from hotels. The company has also alerted hotels of the potential need for additional rooms for extra crew members who may be dispatched to handle emergencies.

Ironically, it's Union Pacific's computer systems that Fletcher worries about the least. "We have a high level of confidence because we've tested, tested and integrated-tested," she said.

Instead, "the most challenging thing has been to make assumptions" about what is likely to go wrong, Fletcher said. "You work off of various [disaster] scenarios, [but in the final analysis], the biggest challenge is that nobody knows for sure."

url..http://www.computerworld.com/home/features.nsf/all/990719up

-- kevin (innxxs@yahoo.com), July 22, 1999

Answers

This may sound stupid but has Union Pacific made sure that there is equipment available to convert the generators in the refrigerator cars and locomotives to usuable 120/240 volt electric power that can be used for other purposes? I am surprized that a refrigerator car generates electricrity to power the refrigerator compressors instead of using internal combustion engines to run the compressors directly but I know nothing about these systems. Same with the locomotives. Are they adaptable to provide power to the grid? Dumber things have happened than to make a contingency plan that will not work because of the lack of technical knowledge and coordination between the plan writers and the technicians.

-- Moe (Moe@3stooges.gom), July 22, 1999.