Life on the Rails

[Malthus]

I've missed this thread ...

[Tonitrus]

Now that the price of coal has recovered, somewhat, Drummond has ordered this system for their new locomotives.

With the small-scale hype about electric semi-trucks, I would think that long-haul freight trains would be thought of as even more conducive to being run off electric.  Simple traffic management, much more centrally managed, interchangeable cars (and you could just fill one or two with batteries and swap those out as needed)...I'd think they'd be further ahead of the curve.

But then...I imagine train management is run pretty old-school, and of course, upgrade costs.

[Savonarola]

With the small-scale hype about electric semi-trucks, I would think that long-haul freight trains would be thought of as even more conducive to being run off electric.  Simple traffic management, much more centrally managed, interchangeable cars (and you could just fill one or two with batteries and swap those out as needed)...I'd think they'd be further ahead of the curve.

But then...I imagine train management is run pretty old-school, and of course, upgrade costs.

Locomotives are actually run by electricity; the diesel engines are there to charge the batteries.

Alstom (plug!) is developing a locomotive that uses hydrogen in place of diesel.  I haven't heard anything about going battery only; I'm really not sure about the feasibility of that.

[Savonarola]

Alstom has two passenger train projects in Toronto; the Toronto Transit Commission or TTC and Metrolinx.  Most of the work on the lines is done out of our Toronto offices; but network and communication is handled out of Rochester, New York office.  They don't have radio engineers, so when need for radio surveys came up on both projects I got assigned.

The first project I went up for was TTC.  In this case we're providing a 5 GHz WiFi train to wayside communication system.  They have the prototype built right now, but TTC wants to expand; so we were going to do a measurement of the existing coverage and then look at new antenna locations.

The first step was to get a work permit for Canada.  In the past Alstom had played fast and loose with the visa rules, and the border guards were getting tired of us.  It didn't help that our invitation letters were obviously lies; no one would believe that we were coming up on Friday afternoons for weekend meetings; especially not with a government agency.  Our people at the border had to wait longer and longer.  No one had gotten sent back yet, but it looked like we were getting to that point, so every American on the project applied for a work permit.

The process is nowhere near as onerous as Brazil; at least not for "Exceptional people."  In the eyes of NAFTA degreed engineers are "Exceptional people," so all I needed was some work and educational documents and I was on my way.  The catch, though, is that you don't get your work permit until you are at the port of entry; so I arrived at Pearson Airport with just an application and I walked upon an enormous line for immigration.

I arrived in August, so most everyone in line was a student, or a guardian of a student.  Almost everyone was Chinese as well.  I stood behind a Chinese girl's conservatory; every one of them had hand carried their instruments.  As the time wore on I began feeling sorry for the brass section as the weight of their horns started taking its toll.

The woman guiding the line spoke both English and Mandarin.  Sometimes the immigration officers needed a translator to Hindi or Arabic, but mostly she supplied the translation.  The interview processes were lengthy, as the officers detailed what sort of work the students could or could not do, how long they could stay, how many hours the guardian could work and the like.  I was surprised when I presented my paperwork to the immigration officer, he thumbed through it, never even looking at the back sides of the pages and then told me it would be one hundred fifty-five Canadian dollars.

My next task was to find the lead communication engineer for the project; Troy.  Troy is out of our Rochester office; he doesn't have a company phone for fear that it will become an electronic tether.  For international travel Alstom supplies a number of project phones.  Troy arrived in Canada only to discover that international project phones didn't have an international plan activated.  Only by borrowing a stranger's phone was he able to get in touch.  Fortunately he's about 6'6", and towered over everyone else at the airport; so I was able to locate him even though we had never met.

We stay at a Holiday Inn just a block or so north of the heart of Toronto, the Eaton Centre.  The hotel is pleasant enough; though aging.  My pass key didn't open my door properly.  After about twenty minutes of elevator trips and dealing with maintenance and security they just gave me another room.  I did get free breakfast for the week out of the deal; but we started so early every day that I didn't get a chance to use it.

Troy had driven in from Rochester with a rented car.  There was a parking garage under the hotel and you put your parking ticket into a reader every time you come or go; except Troy could never remember his parking ticket, so he would have to contact parking maintenance.  Since we were usually leaving around five in the morning there would be no one there.  So he or I would have to chase someone down so we could leave the parking garage every single morning.

My first day there I went through inductions.  Canada does a great deal more in terms of safety training than Colombia; but really there's only a couple hours' worth of things to go over.  The trainer, though, had been told that he had to make the class last for six hours.  So we took field trips to the yard to learn how to safely walk over train tracks.  We took breaks where he showed us the TTC logo and how it had changed over the years.  We learned that staring at arc flashes is a bad idea.  Then we played a full game of TTC Safety Jeopardy.

He did have a Jeopardy style program all about TTC safety.  Since all of us were contractors, no one cared and we just answered the questions.  The instructor told us that everyone in the company has to take the training twice a year; and the Jeopardy game gets heated.  There's no reward or anything for scoring the most points, but that doesn't stop tempers from running high.  He once had to call security on a group; which he found funny since half the group he was training was security.

The instructor referred to the area between a double track as "The devil's strip", so that was the cool Canadian slang I picked up.

One thing I did learn is that Canada, for the most part, uses the US standard gauge for track 4' 8 ½", or 1435 mm.  TTC has a gauge all their own; 4' 10 7/8" or 1495 mm.  This comes from the tram era; TTC didn't want anyone but their own trams running on the tram line; so they created a gauge that no one else uses, and kept it to the present day.

(This isn't as much of a hardship as it sounds.  The wheel base of a train, called "The bogie" can be swapped out.  You can have any cars you want, you just need to put the correct bogie.)

The other weird thing was how they measured track distance.  In rail this is called "Chainage" because it's derived from the surveyor's chains.  Every eighty chains would be a mile, which would be marked by a mile post.  Your milepost, measured from some origin point, gives you your location on the track.  In most countries this is now done in terms of kilometers and distance is referred to as Kpost which is then followed by three decimal digits for meters.  In the United States we use mile posts with three digits for thousandth of a mile.  At TTC they use feet as their standard; there's no decimal, it's just the number of feet you've traveled.  I don't know how widespread that is in Canada, but it seemed like a strange system.

I passed the certification test and was ready to go.  The next day we were back in the yard to set up our plan for the walk.  Then we went to the Alstom project office to pick up the equipment we needed.  Troy has been working on this project for nearly a decade, so he knew everyone in the office.  We had to stop at every last office in order to say hi to every person on the project and have a gossip.  It was like he was running for mayor of the Alstom office.

The next day we did the walk.  I had to go through a site specific training for the safety walk, and was joined by two interns who had been working with TTC.  They had spent all summer in the office, but the instructor promised them they could go out to the yard on their last day.  One of the interns was a young lady, originally from the Philippines, but had lived in Canada since high school.  She was asking me about working for Alstom:

"Do you travel a lot for work?"

I told her I did and some of the places I had been.

"So when you travel like this, does Alstom pay for your hotel?"

"Well, yes, hotel and meals."

"That is so cool!"

Was I really that young once?  In any event we had a track supervisor and Troy's nemesis, the TTC communication supervisor with us.  Troy insists that the comm supervisor is a genuine ogre who is forever plaguing him.  He just seemed grouchy to me; but anyhow we had five people watching Troy and I walk around a train yard; Troy said that was a small number of observers by TTC standards.

Our main test was taking this six meter pole with an antenna on it (to simulate the height of a train) and walk back and forth to see where we saw coverage from the existing system.  I showed Troy how to use the spectrum analyzer; but that meant I was the one carrying the pole.

Our test was successful, and we had budgeted an additional day in case there had been problems.  Troy had planned to work; but I decided to see the Royal Ontario Museum.

"You can take the car, I'll work from the hotel," Troy said.

"That's okay, I'll take the train."

"Are you sure?"

In all his time in Canada he had never ridden on the TTC trains; other than the test trains in the yard.  This, I have found, is common among rail engineers; they always want to drive.

The Royal Ontario Museum is great, by the way, sort of Canada's answer to the British Museum.

[HVC]

So I can blame you when im late now?

[Berkut]

Alstom has two passenger train projects in Toronto; the Toronto Transit Commission or TTC and Metrolinx.  Most of the work on the lines is done out of our Toronto offices; but network and communication is handled out of Rochester, New York office.  They don't have radio engineers, so when need for radio surveys came up on both projects I got assigned.

The first project I went up for was TTC.  In this case we're providing a 5 GHz WiFi train to wayside communication system.  They have the prototype built right now, but TTC wants to expand; so we were going to do a measurement of the existing coverage and then look at new antenna locations.

The first step was to get a work permit for Canada.  In the past Alstom had played fast and loose with the visa rules, and the border guards were getting tired of us.  It didn't help that our invitation letters were obviously lies; no one would believe that we were coming up on Friday afternoons for weekend meetings; especially not with a government agency.  Our people at the border had to wait longer and longer.  No one had gotten sent back yet, but it looked like we were getting to that point, so every American on the project applied for a work permit.

The process is nowhere near as onerous as Brazil; at least not for "Exceptional people."  In the eyes of NAFTA degreed engineers are "Exceptional people," so all I needed was some work and educational documents and I was on my way.  The catch, though, is that you don't get your work permit until you are at the port of entry; so I arrived at Pearson Airport with just an application and I walked upon an enormous line for immigration.

I arrived in August, so most everyone in line was a student, or a guardian of a student.  Almost everyone was Chinese as well.  I stood behind a Chinese girl's conservatory; every one of them had hand carried their instruments.  As the time wore on I began feeling sorry for the brass section as the weight of their horns started taking its toll.

The woman guiding the line spoke both English and Mandarin.  Sometimes the immigration officers needed a translator to Hindi or Arabic, but mostly she supplied the translation.  The interview processes were lengthy, as the officers detailed what sort of work the students could or could not do, how long they could stay, how many hours the guardian could work and the like.  I was surprised when I presented my paperwork to the immigration officer, he thumbed through it, never even looking at the back sides of the pages and then told me it would be one hundred fifty-five Canadian dollars.

My next task was to find the lead communication engineer for the project; Troy.  Troy is out of our Rochester office; he doesn't have a company phone for fear that it will become an electronic tether.  For international travel Alstom supplies a number of project phones.  Troy arrived in Canada only to discover that international project phones didn't have an international plan activated.  Only by borrowing a stranger's phone was he able to get in touch.  Fortunately he's about 6'6", and towered over everyone else at the airport; so I was able to locate him even though we had never met.

We stay at a Holiday Inn just a block or so north of the heart of Toronto, the Eaton Centre.  The hotel is pleasant enough; though aging.  My pass key didn't open my door properly.  After about twenty minutes of elevator trips and dealing with maintenance and security they just gave me another room.  I did get free breakfast for the week out of the deal; but we started so early every day that I didn't get a chance to use it.

Troy had driven in from Rochester with a rented car.  There was a parking garage under the hotel and you put your parking ticket into a reader every time you come or go; except Troy could never remember his parking ticket, so he would have to contact parking maintenance.  Since we were usually leaving around five in the morning there would be no one there.  So he or I would have to chase someone down so we could leave the parking garage every single morning.

My first day there I went through inductions.  Canada does a great deal more in terms of safety training than Colombia; but really there's only a couple hours' worth of things to go over.  The trainer, though, had been told that he had to make the class last for six hours.  So we took field trips to the yard to learn how to safely walk over train tracks.  We took breaks where he showed us the TTC logo and how it had changed over the years.  We learned that staring at arc flashes is a bad idea.  Then we played a full game of TTC Safety Jeopardy.

He did have a Jeopardy style program all about TTC safety.  Since all of us were contractors, no one cared and we just answered the questions.  The instructor told us that everyone in the company has to take the training twice a year; and the Jeopardy game gets heated.  There's no reward or anything for scoring the most points, but that doesn't stop tempers from running high.  He once had to call security on a group; which he found funny since half the group he was training was security.

The instructor referred to the area between a double track as "The devil's strip", so that was the cool Canadian slang I picked up.

One thing I did learn is that Canada, for the most part, uses the US standard gauge for track 4' 8 ½", or 1435 mm.  TTC has a gauge all their own; 4' 10 7/8" or 1495 mm.  This comes from the tram era; TTC didn't want anyone but their own trams running on the tram line; so they created a gauge that no one else uses, and kept it to the present day.

(This isn't as much of a hardship as it sounds.  The wheel base of a train, called "The bogie" can be swapped out.  You can have any cars you want, you just need to put the correct bogie.)

The other weird thing was how they measured track distance.  In rail this is called "Chainage" because it's derived from the surveyor's chains.  Every eighty chains would be a mile, which would be marked by a mile post.  Your milepost, measured from some origin point, gives you your location on the track.  In most countries this is now done in terms of kilometers and distance is referred to as Kpost which is then followed by three decimal digits for meters.  In the United States we use mile posts with three digits for thousandth of a mile.  At TTC they use feet as their standard; there's no decimal, it's just the number of feet you've traveled.  I don't know how widespread that is in Canada, but it seemed like a strange system.

I passed the certification test and was ready to go.  The next day we were back in the yard to set up our plan for the walk.  Then we went to the Alstom project office to pick up the equipment we needed.  Troy has been working on this project for nearly a decade, so he knew everyone in the office.  We had to stop at every last office in order to say hi to every person on the project and have a gossip.  It was like he was running for mayor of the Alstom office.

The next day we did the walk.  I had to go through a site specific training for the safety walk, and was joined by two interns who had been working with TTC.  They had spent all summer in the office, but the instructor promised them they could go out to the yard on their last day.  One of the interns was a young lady, originally from the Philippines, but had lived in Canada since high school.  She was asking me about working for Alstom:

"Do you travel a lot for work?"

I told her I did and some of the places I had been.

"So when you travel like this, does Alstom pay for your hotel?"

"Well, yes, hotel and meals."

"That is so cool!"

Was I really that young once?  In any event we had a track supervisor and Troy's nemesis, the TTC communication supervisor with us.  Troy insists that the comm supervisor is a genuine ogre who is forever plaguing him.  He just seemed grouchy to me; but anyhow we had five people watching Troy and I walk around a train yard; Troy said that was a small number of observers by TTC standards.

Our main test was taking this six meter pole with an antenna on it (to simulate the height of a train) and walk back and forth to see where we saw coverage from the existing system.  I showed Troy how to use the spectrum analyzer; but that meant I was the one carrying the pole.

Our test was successful, and we had budgeted an additional day in case there had been problems.  Troy had planned to work; but I decided to see the Royal Ontario Museum.

"You can take the car, I'll work from the hotel," Troy said.

"That's okay, I'll take the train."

"Are you sure?"

In all his time in Canada he had never ridden on the TTC trains; other than the test trains in the yard.  This, I have found, is common among rail engineers; they always want to drive.

The Royal Ontario Museum is great, by the way, sort of Canada's answer to the British Museum.

If someone described this post to me I would assume it must be terribly boring.

How is it so interesting instead?

Sav, you missed your calling somehow. You need to write more. A lot more.

[Malthus]

If someone described this post to me I would assume it must be terribly boring.

How is it so interesting instead?

Sav, you missed your calling somehow. You need to write more. A lot more.

Heartily agreed.

[Malthus]

Anyway, Sav, if you are ever in Toronto at loose ends, let us know and we can do a Toronto Languish meet-up. 

[Berkut]

Anyway, Sav, if you are ever in Toronto at loose ends, let us know and we can do a Toronto Languish meet-up. 

Give me some notice and I could come up.

Or Sav, if you are in the Rochester office...

[Savonarola]

And I can't even get the Torontonians to bite on the line about the mall being the heart of Toronto.   



Thanks Malthus and Berkut.  I'll let you know if I'll be heading back.  It's going to depend on the type of work that I have if I'll be able to meet up.

At least wait until our system is operational before you start blaming me, HVC.   

[HVC]

I'm efficient, i'll blame you before since past experience has shown my i'll be needing to blame someone

And you liked our museum, so you got a pass on the mall thing

[Savonarola]

A GPS broadcasts an ID and a time message.  Your GPS receiver takes its time and the difference between the once received to determine the distance from the satellite.  Then it takes the ID of the satellite and calculates its position relative to the satelite.  Once it can view four satellites it can determine its location.  With more than four satellites it can calculate the time error from its own internal clock.  This is significant in telecommunications in that we can get the accuracy of the cesium clocks on the satellites for the price of the quartz clock located in a GPS receiver.  Digital communication systems all require some sort of timing synchronization in order to keep multiple broadcasters from interfering with one another.

GPS obviously requires the view of the sky; if there's too many obstructions you won't have enough satellites for timing.  At Union Station in Chicago, for instance, we've had to rig up a repeater system to get GPS in the subterranean loading docks.  Even with some sky view we might not have enough satellites.  In order to verify that we can get GPS signal at a location we do a GPS survey.  This is how my second trip to Toronto started.

Alstom has a project with Metrolinx; the transport service for the greater Toronto area.  Our current project with them is to help update their infrastructure at Union Station.  They're installing two new bungalows along the tracks which will have GPS.  A bungalow is a shelter which has rail equipment in it; you've probably passed by thousands of them and never paid attention to them.  If you go past a railroad crossing you'll almost always see a little hut on one side of the track, that's the bungalow.  In that case the rail signaling that operates the gates is located there.

Alstom is a subcontractor to the rail construction company PNR Railworks.  As with all other rail companies you have to go through inductions in order to be able to go on site.  Inexplicably PNR only offers training on Wednesday evenings.  So I got the Wednesday morning Air Canada flight out of Orlando.  The flight was absolutely deserted; usually flights into and out of Orlando are filled to the brim with screaming kids, but there was only six people on this flight.

Unfortunately the PNR office is in the Port Lands area where public transportation never goes; so I had to rent a car.  In the 1930s the city of Detroit widened all its boulevards; then the city declined so that today it's a city of 500,000 with roads designed for a city of 2,000,000.  Toronto is about the opposite, a city of 3,000,000 with roads that look like they were designed for a city or 500,000.  Once you get off the highway it's a slow go through downtown.  There's no roadside parking either, so the right lane inevitably turns into the temporary parking lane.

The Port Lands are a different world.  I was traveling through the Distillery district with its lovely old buildings, crossed over the bridge onto the island and there was nothing but open fields and warehouses.  In Detroit this is where we'd dump the bodies, stash the weapons and hide the getaway car.

The PNR field office was a series of temporary shelters.  The training, this time, was definitely more blue collar than the TTC training.  The instructor explained where we could smoke (everywhere), but to make sure that we waited for the Metrolinx safety inspector to fire one up before we did.

Most of the people in the training were new hires, and most came from a highway construction background.  The instructor explained the difference between highway and rail construction.  On the highways you start off fresh and at the last hour or two you slow down as you fade.  On rail you dick around for two hours as you deal with the safety and the inevitable changes to the plan; and then have to rush at the end as they get ready to activate the track.

The other thing that was unique to the project is that Metrolinx's end customer is the general public.  Highway construction is too; but there you can just come out and admit you don't care.  Passenger rail isn't like that any issues with the public can result in a public relations disaster; so when the homeless hop the fence and ask you for smokes you have to treat them with courtesy.

I also learned that the rail corridor comes under federal jurisdiction in Canada.  The instructor explained that one night, after bar time, they had a belligerent drunk jump the fence.  He tried to pick fights, but they all went into their trucks, locked the door and called the federal police.  The police came beat the drunk into unconsciousness and dumped him over the fence so the provincial police could deal with him.  The class seemed impressed by that, like I said it was very blue collar.

The next day I made it to our project office.  There isn't a single Alstom office in Toronto; the TTC project office is somewhere in the Chasidic ghetto; the Metrolinx project office is in the financial district; at the top of the CIBC tower.  There must be quite a bit of money in this project as PNR has the rest of the floor.

I was met at the ground floor by the signaling engineers for the project, Wayne and Steve.  They decided I didn't need to get a badge to get into the office, I could just tail gate behind them.  We tried that and shut down an entire bank of elevators.  So we went to the reception desk and fessed up and I got a badge.  The offices are opulent, all granite, marble and tall ceilings; exactly what you'd expect from the top floor of something that calls itself the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.  We were all in jeans and hardhats, so we got some strange looks from the bankers as we got on the elevator.

I saw our old Amtrak project manager at the office, Pete.  My co-worker Glen has joked that the only way off the Amtrak project was to quit, die or move to another country; Pete chose the least painful route.  He asked me how Amtrak was going.  "About the same as when you left," I replied.

PNR sent a van to take us to the job site.  The driver introduced himself by saying "You can call me Chris, or you can call me one-eye, I answer to either one."  On the night of his high school graduation he got jumped outside a bar by some of his former classmates, and they beat him so bad he lost an eye.  They all got probation, but he got over it.

The firs site was fairly close to downtown and in a ditch, so I had some concern that it wouldn't pass.  It turned out okay; because we were on the north side of the tracks.  GPS satellites are almost always between 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south latitude.  So, in most of the northern hemisphere if you have a fairly clear view of the southern sky you will have GPS coverage.

I set up the GPS receiver and showed everyone the satellites on the world map.  They were impressed for about five minutes, and then just sat around and bullshitted the rest of the day.  Hot topics: Who owns Canada's immortal soul, Tim's or McCafe?  (McCafe was the clear winner.)  Would you want your children to go into construction?  (The answer was a resounding "No;" one of the team members noted, "Well, that's why we have to keep getting immigrants.")  And political correctness is tearing Canada apart; there's a type of trackside rail signal called a "Dwarf signal" because it is low to the ground – only they can't call them "Dwarf signals" anymore since that's insensitive to dwarfs, (or perhaps dwarves.)

While this was going on I took the incline of the surrounding clutter.  This is the project I had gotten the surveyors compass for.  I'd position myself at ten degree intervals, and use the inclinometer to gauge the angle of the tallest obstruction in my path.  That determines how much of the sky is being cut off; but since we already had several hours of GPS reading this was mostly just something to make the report to the customer longer.

We did the same thing the next day, but we were in an open field so there wasn't any issues.  We were done by lunch time; so the Patrick took us to St. Lawrence Market, Toronto's historic farmer's market.  It's kind of rickety looking, but has all sorts of vendors with all sorts of goods and produce.   Steve had a favorite pulled pork sandwich vendor there.  If I was really from Florida I'd probably tell you that it was nowhere near as good as real barbecue; but being from Michigan I thought it was surprisingly good.

With my afternoon off I went and saw the Art Gallery of Ontario; which has an excellent collection of the old Dutch Masters, a decent collection of post Impressionists and then there's the world's largest collection of Canadian Art.  The curators seem to want to display all of the latter, so it's room after room after room of Canadian art.  The art is... well... maybe Canada's greatest artistic triumphs lie ahead of her.

I had another early flight out of Toronto.  I left so early that the streets were filled with prostitutes in glittery body-suits and drunken men trying to haggle with them.  The flight home was nowhere near as nice as the one to Toronto; it was over spilling with cranky teenagers, wound up children and frazzled parents.

[Malthus]

You want truly Canadian art, don't go to the Art Gallery of Ontario ... most of the Canadian stuff there is mediocre at best.

Better to travel slightly out of town to the McMichael Art Gallery, which has a big collection of the Group of Seven and lots of native art (if that's your thing).

The best part of the Art Gallery of Ontario is its collection of ship models in the basement, and its one gallery of medieval stuff.

[mongers]

You want truly Canadian art, don't go to the Art Gallery of Ontario ... most of the Canadian stuff there is mediocre at best.

Better to travel slightly out of town to the McMichael Art Gallery, which has a big collection of the Group of Seven and lots of native art (if that's your thing).

The best part of the Art Gallery of Ontario is its collection of ship models in the basement, and its one gallery of medieval stuff.

Yeah the Medieval Canada displays have been an inspiration to Timmay for years.

[Malthus]

Yeah the Medieval Canada displays have been an inspiration to Timmay for years.

They have some amazing carved rosary beads. They even did a show on those, importing others from around the world. Just great works.

These are the size of beads, but the carving is absolutely perfect!