Preparing for Winterization

This episode, host Walt Bleser, PE, talks with Brian Lindamood, PE, SE, Vice President, Chief Engineer of Alaska Railroad.  A Past AREMA President and Committee Chair, Brian offers his unique perspective on the subject of winterization and what a railroad needs to do year-round to prepare.  Who best to discuss winterization with than a resident of Alaska? Permafrost, avalanches, lasers, and fewer snowblowers than you might think, this is an episode for those who love the ins and outs of engineering.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:00

You know, we get some we get some interesting things that a lot of people don't think about when it when you have that much di differential and temperature. Uh when you have, for instance, fixed deck bridges off the end of of curves, uh our curves breathe for lack of a better term. They'll slide in and out an inch or two or more. Well, if you got a fixed deck bridge off the end of that, your bridge wasn't designed to do that. And uh one of the we've got two or three bridges right now, and one case the bridge isn't that old, but uh we've got issues with it going out of class, and there's a lot of work on that abutment uh just because the track's trying to move and the bridge doesn't want to let it. And so uh we've got to do some different thinking about uh some of our bridge replacements.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

You may know the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance of Way Association, or AREMA, as the quote, keepers of the manuals. You may know them as the quote people behind the largest annual railroad conference in North America. In fact, you may not know about AREMA at all. This podcast is designed, no pun intended, to change your view of who AREMA is and how AREMA has changed the trajectory of many railway careers over its 100-plus year history. Welcome to Platform Chats with your host, Walt Lesser, where he takes a moment to discuss the impacts AREMA has had on the very people who are proud to be called members. Are you ready to roll with AREMA?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

ARE Corporation is a proud supporter of Arima and Platform Chats. If you are looking to take your Railway Structure's career to the next level, or simply start it down the right track, please visit us at ARECorp.com. Please see our brand new job postings on our careers page or on our LinkedIn page.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

Hello everybody, and welcome back to Arima's Platform Chats. Believe it or not, it has been a minute because we are on episode 10. We're actually into the double digits, and I can't believe it. I remember when we did the very first one last January and had no idea where this is gonna go. It is now we're approaching, well, I'm approaching the uh Thanksgiving week at the time we're recording this. It'll be dropped in December, but uh we are definitely heading towards the holidays in a fast and furious manner. Uh no big updates this week on the top railway industry podcasts. I know this is uh one of the main reasons you listen, is you want to know where it is the platform chats on the old charts. We're still hovering there at 11. I'm gonna go ahead and blame the fact that they haven't updated their metrics because I did get the fantastic news that we hit the 2,000 download mark um on the platform that we use to push this podcast to the interwebs and wherever you are downloading your podcast. So 2,000 in the first year, and the first year's not over, is very exciting for Rema. It's very exciting for me. I I'm just so excited people are willing to take the time and listen to these podcasts. And I just hope everyone knows that we're doing our absolute best to create content for you that is interesting, exciting, and makes you want to come back. And there is no better transition. Then my next guest is Brian Lindemod with the Alaska Railroad. And the thought behind today's podcast, or this podcast, is that we're gonna talk about all things winter prep. Uh, yes, Brian is a past president of ARIMA. Yes, Brian's a big ARIMA supporter, absolutely. But my goal is for Brian to tell us more about the Alaska Railroad, uh its humble beginnings to where it is now, and really talk quite a bit on any kind of fun stories he may have as it relates to winter prep avalanche mitigation. Frankly, anything you can probably imagine since we are talking about Alaska. So, with that, Brian, I would love it if you would go ahead and give our guests a uh kind of a background on how in the world you landed into the industry, how you landed in Alaska, and frankly, I guess would like to hear a little bit about your arena involvement as well. So just tell us whatever it is that's uh you want to tell us. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

Uh well, I guess, you know, as as you sort of alluded to, uh, some people find themselves in the industry, and there's those of us that actually sought out the industry. Uh, when I was in high school, um, I got interested in the railroad industry and was really interested in how to get in it. Um, you know, this was back in the 80s before the internet was really widely available. Uh and so working with the guidance counselor and stuff like that, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Uh, you know, I had my thoughts on operations and telling trains where to go and, you know, whatever you think that does. Um and sort of found three or four different schools uh that that had programs that more importantly, that the railroads were hiring out of. You know, in the 80s, it was it was the middle of the the Stagers Act adjustment where they were cutting staff significantly and so forth. So figuring out how to get into industry was not very easy to do. Uh I wound up at North Dakota State University because of the information I had. They were the only university that had two railroads pulling out of them, both the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern, versus all the others only seemed to have one. Uh showed up three days before classes started, um, planned on being a transportation engineer, which is sort of a hybrid between industrial engineering and civil engineering, and and and off I went. Uh my sophomore or junior year, uh, they decided that uh they weren't gonna have that program anymore and said you're all gonna be civil engineers now. I didn't know what a civil engineer was, didn't know what they did. Some would argue I still don't. Um but uh by that time uh I had found um I was I was working as a as a student research assistant with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, working on rail stuff. Um and so I I stuck it out and uh wound up with an internship at the Burlington Northern, a couple other internships with some small short lines, uh, got invited to to stay with the Burlington Northern. Um, but uh was working, had already decided to go and get my master's degree in logistics, in a logistics program that the they were starting. So they said, okay, well, we're gonna kind of do this thing where we share you, you work for us, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Did that. Um, graduated before the program got approved. So they gave me another civil engineering degree, which just what I needed. Uh and during that whole process, uh, the Santa Fe merger occurred, and Burlington Northern decided they wanted Santa Fe more than me. And so that left me kind of wondering what to do. I did have a couple, I did have a job offer from Pacific, uh, but uh I wound up going to work on the consultant side uh with HDR. Uh moved around on the consultant side for 12 years, give or take. 95 to 2006, I guess 11. Um, with HDR Trans Systems and Hanson Wilson. Um wound up coming up to Alaska uh to work on on getting a Hanson Wilson office established here to work for the Alaska Railroad. And after about a year, 15 months of doing that, uh and working with the railroad, the railroad said, we think we'd rather have you work over here than pay you to work over there. And um talked about it with with the senior management at Hanson Wilson at the time, and they were supportive. So uh been there ever since.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

So that was 2006, I'm sorry, just 2006, yes. Okay, so you've been up there for a good 15 years, yeah. Yes, yes, I have.

SPEAKER_03 8:56

So um Arima. Uh I believe I joined Arima in 1988 or 1989 as a student member. Uh, I remember at the time there's like 17 student members. Uh, it was AREA at the time. Um, and you know uh I think for a lot of student members, you know, it was a magazine and and and little more than that, and and a little card that you got in the mail. Uh but uh it wasn't until '95, I think I went to my first AREA conference at the uh Palmer House. They held them in March at the time. Lovely time to be in Chicago. Uh and really uh I saw a lot of I saw a couple people that that I had worked with were there, so it was good to see them. And uh really sort of opened my eyes to all the stuff that a REMA could be. Uh, but I I didn't know the secret sauce at the time. And the secret sauce was when I joined uh committee 14 and committee 24 around 1996-97. Um and the exponential value that has had both in my learning about the railroad industry as well as as you know, just teaching me about railroading, really happens at the committee level. Um, I don't think anybody's getting any value or as much value as they could until they join those committees and really start getting them, and it's more than just joining, right? You need to be involved. And so uh did a lot of work uh with committee 14 and 24 with the IPRE. Uh that's the uh introduction to railway engineering, uh, as well as the practical guide to railroad engineering. Both those courses uh did a lot of work on some of the original intermodal design seminars with uh committee 14. Uh did did some manual development for committee 14, particularly on the intermodal side. Did a lot of work on the intermodal side now that I think about it.

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Committee 14 is what committee and committee four is what committee? Okay.

SPEAKER_03 11:22

Yards and terminals, and that's yards and terminals has always been always been an interest to me. Um, you know, from from the onset, uh, you know, I I've been on the engineering side for most of my railroading career. Uh I really enjoy engineering, uh, but when it boils down to it, I'm a process guy, right? When I was when I was interning at Burlington Northern, I was actually in the operating department. And most of my time at the short lines was more on the operating side. Uh, you know, things like um, you know, I remember looking at a number of issues. We had just at Burlington Northern, we had just implemented the um precision rail system, um, or precision management system, excuse me, where you know, the whole idea was the minute we got the way bill, that that car would have a plan on what train it would be all the way to destination. And and we would measure against how well we did that plan. And you know, we had a lot of terminal soups that were used to, okay, all these cars they are on the next train, all these cars the next train, and getting them to say, okay, that not that one and not that one and not that one, because it wasn't part of the plan, uh, took a lot of education. But I was spending a lot of time looking at yard dwell times, uh, a lot of time looking at over-the-road performance, sometimes looking at uh we had some some crew resource issues where we had a lot of trains going one way, well the crews would get stuck and we'd have to we'd have to drive them back, things like that. Um, you know, the process side was always very interesting to me. And so when you get into yards, particularly intermodal yards, a lot of it's process. Um, you know, I had I had the the good fortune of working on uh BNSF's uh Memphis Intermodal Terminal, uh doing a lot of the pre-mum work, moved up here in the middle of it, uh, got finished off by by some folks at Hanson Wilson. But uh, you know, the track design as far as that yard goes and a lot of intermodal yards is is not super fancy, not super complicated. Uh but when you look at the truck volumes and the property we had had to work with and stuff like that, uh, and and the widespan crane designs does a lot as far as you know manipulating what boxes are available and stuff like that, it became obvious that it was more of a traffic problem on the truck side than it was anything else. And you know, when you're when you're paving an intermodal yard, you're paving for that square foot of pavement, whether you're driving on it or parking on it. And parking on it's got more value than driving on it. And so doing a lot of work with with traffic models and applying that in an intermodal facility to try to maximize the parking space versus running space uh was was very interesting for me.

SPEAKER_02 14:27

Very cool. And I know we're gonna talk all things Alaska Railroad here in a second, but I do want to uh just hit on really quickly committee 24. You did mention that. What what is committee 24 and uh what what do they do?

SPEAKER_03 14:43

Committee 24 is education and training, uh, and they do so much. Uh they uh are sort of the liaisons to the university and the uh the student chapters. Uh they do a lot of education and train training development, uh, you know, sort of outside some of the traditional committee structures. They've got a track alignment design class that they do. Uh the practical guide to railroad engineering, uh, really the first engineering book that was written, soup the nuts, and in decades uh they they assembled uh and did a lot of the writing for. I did some of the writing for it. Um as well as doing a lot as far as the introduction of new members. Uh the other thing that they do is uh they do some behind the machine behind the scenes work on the development of seminars and webinars and stuff like that, as far as making sure that they're technically reviewed uh by the proper folks within AREMA. Um so they they really do a lot. Uh they're frankly one of the hardest working committees I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Okay, fantastic. And from there, it sounds like you did uh you were chair of 14, going back to your intermodal yards and terminals. And then you kind of moved up through the ARIMA ranks from there, uh becoming the president back in 2015-16. Uh okay, fantastic. Well, I guess thank you for your service to Arima. And you're obviously still uh still busy with it, but you know what? Here's the thing. We're we're here to talk about Alaska Railroad. So let's just say uh you and I are at the Palmer House Hilton and we get a nice long elevator ride. Uh I guess what's your in a in a quick nutshell, um what's your overarching biggest issues in the winter uh with the Alaska Railroad? And then let's let's dive into some examples.

SPEAKER_03 16:46

Uh well, as you can imagine, uh it generally boils around two things, cold and snow. Uh and you know, it uh it warms up the snow, so it gives you a sense of what cold is. Um you know, we have uh some fairly mountainous territory that we go through, that we have some significant avalanche work that needs to get done to maintain to to maintain rail service through there. Um, you know, sometimes we measure snow in feet and not inches on the south end of our railroad. Um, but likewise we get cold. I mean, it I'm happy that it's above zero. It's made it all the way up to three here in Anchorage for the first time in a couple days at least. It's a little cold early here, but uh, you know, it drops off, it's 20 below in Wasilla today, and you know, 40 below or even colder than that is is a normal winter temperature for half our railroad. Uh and that that affects a lot of things. Uh it affects uh train traffic. Uh we do once it gets gets significantly cold, we've got a progressive scale as it gets colder, our train links have to get shorter just to keep air through the system. Uh likewise, we start running cold weather patrols. Uh you know, rail as you know, likes to expand and contract whether you allow it to or not. And so when it's when you have rail temperatures of pushing 100 degrees in the summer, but they're 40 below in the winter, something's got to give. And so as part of a rail management plan, our CWR plan, uh, one starts to get cold, we start running patrols. Um you know, we get some we get some interesting things that a lot of people don't think about when it when you have that much differential temperature. Uh when you have, for instance, fixed deck bridges off the end of curves. Uh our curves breathe, for lack of a better term. They'll slide in and out an inch or two or more. Well, if you got a fixed deck bridge off the end of that, your bridge wasn't designed to do that. And uh one of the we've got two or three bridges right now, and one case the bridge isn't that old, but uh we've got issues with it going out of class, and there's a lot of work on that abutment uh just because the track's trying to move and the bridge doesn't want to let it. And so uh we've got to do some different thinking about uh some of our bridge replacements.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

So when people use the term movable bridge, that's probably not what they're referring to.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

Uh it's not moving in in the way that we like it to. No. Um we'll let it move longitudinally. It's the lateral movement that we don't really design for. Uh, but there's things that we can do, uh, just actually giving it a ballast deck versus a fixed deck so that it can work its way through the ballast and and give it room to relieve the lateral pressure on on those foundations. You know, one of the things that um we forget about, uh if you dig into the AAR research, it takes about two and a half seconds for a train to decide to go in whatever direction you're telling it to go. Uh just the the way the vehicle dynamics work, you know, you can take a train from a two-degree curve, run it through a spiral, and get it to go straight again, but it's about two and a half seconds before the train actually decides it's going to go straight again. So you do get a lot of lateral movement back and forth on bridges off the end of curves, which is one of the reasons why we like to give it a little bit more space. Um but sometimes terrain doesn't allow you to do that. And so that's why, you know, within a REMA, we've got the we've got lateral um design guidelines that are used to take that into account. But you know, when the track's not helping you, sometimes you you go outside that envelope.

SPEAKER_02 20:42

Well, let's take a and let's take a quick step back here in case anybody uh that's listening hasn't quite figured it out. Brian is the chief engineer at Alaska Railroad, and he you just threw out a lot of terms that uh want to make sure we get covered here. You talked about continually CWR or continuously welded rail, you talked about uh degree of curvature in the tracks, uh, you talked about ballast deck, open deck. Let's take uh maybe just take it from the top here from some fun facts territory. How long is the Alaska Railroad? How many bridges does it have, roughly? Uh tunnels. Maybe kind of give a listener that's never ever been there or knows nothing about it. What would how would you describe your overall system?

SPEAKER_03 21:27

Uh well, we describe ourselves as the last full service railroad on in the country. We run both passengers and freight. Uh passengers are obviously heavier in the summer when it's nice to be here. Uh, but we do a lot of freight work, particularly supporting oil development on the north side of Alaska, as well as all the industries in between. Um, we have 575 miles of mainline track basically between Seward and Fairbanks. Uh, we've got some additional branch lines beyond that. Uh Uh we have five tunnels, I think. Six. We have six tunnels left. I wish it was five. Uh but uh you know some of those tunnels are fairly long. The Whittier tunnels three and a half miles actually shares that tunnel with roadway traffic, uh fairly unique. Um we've got between 160 and 170 bridges, depending on how you count them. Um of those, probably more than half of those are steel. Uh probably about 25% are concrete, the remainder are are timber. Um we actually operate three port facilities, uh, one in Seattle, one in Whittier, one in um Seward, uh, because we float, interchange traffic back and forth between UP and BNSF, uh between Whittier and Seattle. Uh that barge is once a week. Sometimes we'll throw extras on if traffic gets too heavy. Um other than that, it's a railroad. Uh we've got the south end of our railroad, is we've got three percent grades, 14 degree curves on the main line, uh getting and it's literally off the end of glaciers uh with some tunnels. Uh probably one of the most beautiful parts of the of any railroad ride you're gonna find anywhere. Uh, but it takes a lot of work to keep it going. Um northern northern half of the railroad, we've got a lot of discontinuous permafrost, uh which you know can't can make roadbed maintenance a challenge uh as it freezes and thaws. Uh but it also represents challenges when we're, you know, we've got a bridge up there right now that uh the permafrost has melted underneath the foundation. We're getting ready to replace it, not because the bridge needs to be replaced, but the foundations have basically rotted out underneath of it.

SPEAKER_02 23:58

So interesting. So the I I I've had the luck, I was very lucky to have the opportunity to ride your railroad on the south end. Um one time I think it was 2017 or 18 at this point. And uh as a fan of of uh backcountry skiing myself and and the mountains, and uh I have a teeny bit of avalanche experience. So what do you guys do in that south end of the railroad to keep those tracks uh clear? Because I saw on that railroad ride, I saw some pretty steep slopes and some definitely some failure uh mechanisms and chutes along the way. So is are there are there are there I'm assuming this, but are are there howitzers that are along the way? Are you are you guys have skiers dropping bombs, or or is it all this all the above?

SPEAKER_03 24:52

Uh it's a bit of all the above. Uh we we maintain what we call slide zones, which are those avalanche shoots. Um we actually have our own avalanche expert on staff. Uh and and he's a resource not only for us, but he does a lot of work with the DOT as well. Uh Matt McGee is his name. And uh we have howitzers that uh will go and shoot, but you know, that program is coming to an end here in the next 10 to 12 years. The military is just not going to continue to support it. We also have remote detonation on on a couple of those avalanche slopes, uh, where you know in the summertime we'll go up there and and and and put the charges in the boxes, and and literally he can stand on his deck with his iPhone and set them off. Um but uh we have four different alert levels, or five, excuse me, five different alert levels on on those avalanche zones. Uh this time of year, um, you know, they're loading up, but they haven't really let go yet. Uh, we've got uh a lot of safety precautions in place as far as traveling through those areas uh in a vehicle, stuff like that. We've got the little beacons and so forth for anyone going through them. Um we've got a lot of precursor precautions for when we're doing work in those areas. Uh most of the slide zones we will try to bring down once or twice a year once they start to accumulate versus letting them come down naturally. Um and uh you know it we're we're we got a lot of science. We've got one that uh we have lasers on, it's more of a slow-moving slide, sort of a sheet. So we've got lasers on it. So once it starts to move, we'll catch it and we'll be able to go get in front of it. But some of those zones, uh, we've got one of the big ones down at down at 52. We've got a 70-foot hole next to the track that it lands in, and sometimes it fills the hole, sometimes we'll have 80 feet of snow over the track after it fills the hole. Um and it, you know, it depends on the year.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Yeah, and obviously every year's different and how the snow builds, and the saying out here obviously is October snow is the worst snow uh for Colorado because it oftentimes warms up, and then we get a bad base layer, and now you've got basically ball bearings sitting at the at the interface between a heavy load and uh a pretty steep slope. And so I'm sure that all that goes into Matt's thinkings as he goes through and determines where to where to drop bombs. I I assume that your safety briefings uh must be different for those that are running around in high rails. Uh I'm just gonna come right on and ask you. I mean, have the trains and or high rails been caught in an active slide, or or have they just been there at uh a post slide, if you will?

SPEAKER_03 27:56

Uh well, uh we've got a siding uh named Brookman after Carrie Brookman. Uh slide had come down, and I want to say it was 98 or 99. It was about 20 years ago now. Uh, and that's a shared corridor we have with DOT, and they were cleaning it up, but it was one of I it's called Five Fingers because it's got five different chutes coming into one one area, and they hadn't all come down. And uh Mr. Brookman wound up 300 feet out into the in the tournigan arm. And uh, you know, it's it's not always a good thing when they name a sighting after you, let's just put it that way. Um was he in a vehicle? He was in uh dozer clearing the snow. Oh man. Yeah, okay. Uh but uh we also I want to say in 2005 we had a train hit by an avalanche up at 49. Um don't really know the backstory about why the train was there and the snow was there at the same time, but uh it took us a while to get that cleaned up. Uh and we, you know, as a result of that, I think I've gone back and and cleaned up a lot of the pre-clearances and the pre-checks that we've done that we do prior to those. Uh but uh since then, um I think we're pretty proactive. Um you know, we will we will try to bring things down slowly in a controlled fashion versus letting them come down on their own. Um most of the time, you know, you always get some stuff that comes down unexpectedly, but if we are able to control the volume that that's available to come down, then generally the mitigation is uh less.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

So okay, so based on the different levels, you may or may not choose to have train traffic at that time. It may go at a different speed, it may go at a different length or of consist. Does that does that sound right? Or uh well, you know, there's times where we just won't go, right?

SPEAKER_03 29:53

Sure. And you know, there's things that we won't do. We won't we won't be working an active slide slide zone in the dark, which you know, given where we are on the solar trajectory, that means that you know, and we may only have a few hours to work on it during the day. And if we don't get it to where we're satisfied, the train doesn't go. Okay. That's the bottom line. Um, likewise, there's times of day. Uh, you know, you don't want to, you know, as that sun sits there and cooks the snow in the afternoon, well, maybe going, you know, just as the sun's going down, maybe not be the best time to go. Maybe you want to go earlier. And and that's where maintenance way and and our avalanche experts get together and work directly with operations, trying to make sure all of that's coordinated.

SPEAKER_02 30:39

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And so let me just as I'm processing this, so I guess would you say that avalanches on the south end of your road are a bigger issue or smaller issue than can I use the term sun kink uh or whatever, however, you'd like to describe CWR thermal deviations? Um deviations of the rail, yes, that's very engineering.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

Um I'm not gonna necessarily say one's worse than the others, um, because in all cases, if you plan for it and you mitigate for it, and you've got the right people watching it, uh there are issues that you can um mitigate before before there's any significant danger to to the passing of trains. Um you know, we don't get the sort of thermal variations on on the top end that that you'll get maybe in, you know, I don't know, Arizona or Nebraska or something like that. Um we spend a lot more effort, I believe, on well it's kind of difficult to say because when you're talking about sun kinks, you're talking about basically managing your the neutral temperature of the rail. And we do spend a lot of time doing on that, but you're working both ends, right? You're working the top end as well as the low end. When we're dealing with avalanches, you're only dealing with one end of it. And we do spend a lot of resources on the avalanche side. Is it fair to say that we spend more on that than we do do on managing neutral temperature rail? Probably not.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

Sure. Now, on the north end of your road, I I do know um from some of the stories I heard from the conductors when I wrote it, there's quite a few people that rely on your railroad during the winter to get uh supplies and goods, people that live off grid. So I I'm assuming that there's no section of the railroad that's ever really shut down, um uh like seasonality-wise, right?

SPEAKER_03 32:45

That's correct. Um the uh you're talking about we we run the last whistle stop in the country, uh particularly north of Talkeetna. Uh there are a lot of you know, they're off the road system up there, and their only way in and out is by by the rail. Um, and and yeah, we haul their stuff, we haul their chickens, we haul their food, their propane, all of it. Uh they gotta lug it in and out on us. Um, and and that's a service that we've always provided and continue to do. Uh the Forest Service in the summertime, uh down on the south end has a similar system, sort of a whistle stop. They've got predetermined stops, uh, so you can go backcountry adventuring up in those mountains, you know, walk across a glacier if you want to, feed the bears, whatever, whatever you want to do. Um that's generally more summertime. But uh generally the railroad is is open and available. Uh there are times in the wintertime when traffic on the south end gets a little light. Uh, and we'll we'll keep it warm in so much as you know, we have the ability to open it up in a day's notice if we have to or two, but um it's not necessarily maintained for traffic every day.

SPEAKER_02 34:01

Oh, okay. Did not know that. And then you did talk a little bit about permafrost. That's a term that you don't use in the continental US, so uh at least I don't I don't believe we do. Uh maybe you could tell the listeners a little bit about what that is and how it's eradicated uh uh by you guys.

SPEAKER_03 34:18

Uh well permafrost is is a term for soil that's basically frozen for more than one year at a time. Uh as you go farther north, you don't get um enough degree days, if you will, or warmth to basically keep the soil uh thawed. Uh that permafrost, um so basically you're dealing with a frozen soil mass. Uh, you know, if it's gravel, that's nice because the freezing of the water, you know, it's got somewhere to go. Uh, but when you're dealing with silts and clays, uh, you get a lot of thermal expansion as it melts or freezes. And it's the discontinuous piece of that that's the problem uh because seasonally it'll swell and shrink and swell and shrink. Um there's not a lot that can be done short of significant very expensive subgrade replacements. And when you have permafrost going down 50, 60, 70 feet, uh, you're not going to find the bottom of it. And so things that we do, or things that were done when the railroad was constructed, you know, one of the things that you with permafrost, you can only do two things. You can get rid of it or you can try to keep it frozen. And it turns out the this the foliage that grows naturally through a lot of the north end of the railroad, you know, the scrub, mossy type stuff, does a fairly good job of insulating it. Um, and the first thing we did when we built the railroad 100 years ago is we scraped all that crap off, and then we put nice rock, dark tie, steel, and stuff like that. Well, that just sucks the heat in, and and so you get uh a much more much worse effect as far as melting it. If you do things like dry piles into it, those piles just suck the heat and take it down, and and so you wind up with these thaw bulbs around the pile where the pile's still there, but rather than having any decent lateral support, it's just sitting in in liquid mud. Um, and so we need to design around those sorts of things.

SPEAKER_02 36:33

Um, you know you're talking to a bridge guy. So uh I that does uh tickles my fancy here of uh what type of foundations are are they all driven pile foundations? Are you pouring concrete? What what how are you supporting a structure uh in and around permafrost?

SPEAKER_03 36:54

Well, we've got one bridge that actually has thermosphones on it. Um that is a technology that was developed basically around the Alaska pipeline because they had to build the pipeline through all this stuff, and you have a a tube with pressurized refrigerant in it uh and and fins, and what it does is it is it passively keeps frozen soil frozen or attempts to. Um the only other thing that you can do is yeah, you drives through it, but you drive piles through it, and you're designed design your foundation around the fact that it's not going to have lateral support until it's fairly deep.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

Um and that's where basically, no there's no you can't really count on skin friction of the pile. Correct, because it's all in bearing. Yeah, it's all in bearing. Okay. All right. Well, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna reel myself way off that cliff of uh of bridge talk, and we're gonna come right back to where we started. So, last couple questions I have. This is I could go on for hours talking about this stuff, but um, anything interesting as it relates to you talked about temperature. You talked about some pretty significant cold temps. We've we've covered avalanches, we've definitely talked about permafrost. How about um how is the track switches? And I know people have seen every every winter when I was in New York, they always would show pictures of uh, you know, uh of the of the uh switches and the guy out there with a blowtorch. Um is there anything special you guys do or or do differently to keep sidings open and yards open?

SPEAKER_03 38:32

Uh not particularly, other than you know, when it gets to winter prep, uh we need to make sure that our our snow storage areas are clear. That's one of the areas that uh you know we have to take into account when we're looking at changes to our yards and our terminal facilities and stuff like that, is we're gonna be shoveling a lot of snow. Where's it gonna go? Um, at some point you may have to haul it out, and that's what we have air dumps for, and then we'll go take it somewhere else. But that's an expensive operation that we'd like to avoid if we could. Uh but when it comes to switches, you know, it it's backpack blowers, ice picks, shovels, uh just you know, good old-fashioned 1900s technology. Um and we do a lot of work with that. Um as long but you did mention something about bridges, and one one thing that we do that's fairly unique, that that honestly, if we could do this anywhere, you'd do it, is building bridges off of ice is amazingly simple. Uh, if you can count on a couple months of ice, driving cranes out onto ice and working off the ice versus off of barges or trying to do everything off the shore. Um, yeah, it may be 25 below, but you know, you can mitigate for that. Uh the convenience of being able to build cribbing on on rivers that are frozen, slide stuff out, work off of it. Um it it really gives us the ability to um work on parts of our railroad that we wouldn't have the windows and the abil availability to do it in the summertime. So summertime for track work.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

And yeah, we'd call that a float-in, float-out down here. And uh uh I guess that would be a slide-in, slide out uh for you guys. I didn't even think about that. That's pretty cool. Well, uh I'll tell you one thing. We gotta we're gonna have to finish this, uh wrap this up, and I think it's a little weird that we have not even talked about uh snow blowers. You guys have gotta have some amazing uh snow removal equipment for these trains that come across just your standard one or two foot dump.

SPEAKER_03 40:43

Uh we don't, to be honest with you. Um I would say the back the backbone of our our our snow maintenance fleet, uh at least on the track side, is actually ballast regulators. Um we set those up uh and and they are you know the one, the two-footers, things like that. Um they are the backbone. Um we have once you get beyond that, we have what we call the snow fleet, uh traditional Jordan spreader and a bunch of yellow metal. Um and and that spreader can push out, you know, 25 feet, give or take, uh, with full wing. Uh, but you do have to go back in, you know, with avalanches and stuff like that, that's got a bunch of trees in it and everything else. That that's really more of a yellow metal show, traditional bulldozers and and and excavators and so forth. But that has to be maintained. You can only shove out a few times before you're gonna have to go out to that 25 feet and and start again with with caterpillar type equipment, working, working that stack back so the next time you run through, you got somewhere for that snow to go. So it's it's a constant maintenance operation pretty much through the winter. Um, it's not just clearing the track, but then making sure the next time you have to clear the tractor somewhere for the snow to go.

SPEAKER_02 42:08

Yeah, it sounds like, and that might be how we wrap this up. It sounds like a constant maintenance operation uh year-round, uh, with all the movement. All I I think the word I keep hearing is movement of gauge and uh of track gauge, of uh in curves, of things thawing and freezing, and uh basically living and breathing uh more than the average railroad potentially. So well, Brian, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate your time. I know everyone, all of our listeners do as well. I wish you the absolute best uh upcoming holiday season, and frankly, I really look forward to uh shaking your hand. Uh come Denver uh next August.

SPEAKER_03 42:56

I think we're all looking forward to getting back together again, and I think Denver's a great place to do it.

SPEAKER_02 43:02

Outstanding. All right, well, we'll talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_03 43:04

All right, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Thank you for rolling with Arima on today's episode of Platform Chat. For further information about Arima, please visit arema.org or contact us at info at arema.org.