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Rail News Home Short Lines & Regionals April 2017 Rail News: Short Lines & Regionals

The transformation of the New Jersey hub from a hump to a flat yard included the installation of electric, remote-control switch machines (as shown in foreground).Photo – Conrail By This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Managing EditorTake a tour of Conrail’s Pavonia Yard and to the naked eye, there isn’t much that appears different compared with other switching yards. But there are certain aspects — some not-that-noticeable yet noteworthy ones — that separate the Camden, N.J., facility from the rest.Pavonia is the only flat switching yard in North America that employs true one-person remote-control operations, without any assistance from utility field personnel, Conrail leaders claim. Moreover, the 1.5-mile-long facility is the only yard that employs wireless GPS devices to monitor all static and mobile assets in real time, they say.Just five years ago, there wasn’t anything unique about Pavonia, which at the time operated as a hump yard. Built in 1883 by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Camden & Amboy Railroad, Pavonia since has undergone a transformation into a highly automated flat switching facility that employs a host of technologies, with the aim of enhancing efficiency and boosting safety.The metamorphosis included a thorough physical redesign of the traditional electro-pneumatic gravity hump and re-engineering of the yard’s processes. Now, with the project nearly complete, Pavonia operates with significantly higher productivity, lower safety risks and fewer assets, and meets service requirements with less variability, says longtime Conrail leader Ron Batory.“We realized we would not see more volume growth at the yard with single-car switching,” says Batory, who retired March 31 as the railroad’s president and chief executive officer. “So, we began to look at one-man crew operations and what we needed to do to get rid of the hump.”Prior to launching the $5.3 million makeover project in 2012, Conrail officials also started to explore the possibilities of leveraging the railroad’s information technology (IT) systems. A service-provider subsidiary of CSX and Norfolk Southern Corp., Conrail since the late 1990s has developed and employed IT systems that operate independently from the Class Is’ IT systems.Conductor Rich Haynes switches cars at Pavonia Yard as a one-person crew using a remote-control locomotive device, and control systems and TV monitors housed in a nearby kiosk.

In-house data warehouses create fact-based information streams on human and physical assets — a data repository approach that opened the door for Conrail to measure the time and motion of all static and mobile assets at Pavonia Yard from both an operating and maintenance perspective, says Batory. Real-time monitoring at the yard is a unique management tool that supports more sound business decisions, he says.

“Without fact-based data, it’s just an opinion,” says Batory.

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