PITTSBURGH — Seven years ago, Cattron, a Mercer County company that traces its roots back to Motorola, began preparing for the day when mainline U.S. railroads could use remote control devices to supervise their trains. European railroads had been using them since the early 1970s, while Canadian railroads started buying them in the early 1990s, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
Safety concerns — and perhaps more importantly, union concerns over yet another loss of jobs to technology — kept the Federal Railway Administration from acting. Until the agency moved, Cattron had to be content with selling remote controls to industrial companies, including some that operated railroads inside their plants.
When the federal agency finally issued guidelines for using the devices in February 2001, the timing couldn’t have been better for Cattron. The Sharpsville-based company had purchased German-based Theimeg, the largest supplier of remote controls to European railroads, just a few months earlier.
“Until the [Federal Railway Administration] made their decision about what they were going to do, there wasn’t a market here,” said J.C. Robertson, Cattron-Theimeg’s president and chief operating officer.
Since the FRA announcement, watching Cattron-Theimeg has been like standing by the rails and watching a train go by at 80 mph. The company’s Sharpsville offices are a hectic blend of the old, the new and the under-construction. About a dozen employees have been added in recent weeks, bringing employment to 150.
Selling remote controls used in industrial plants and mines still accounts for about 60 percent of the privately held company’s revenue. But railroads are the growth engine.
“That’s the biggest plum out there right now,” said Senior Vice President James Kingerski, who heads Cattron-Theimeg’s rail business.
The boom marks a new chapter for a company founded by Jim Cattron in 1946. Cattron was Motorola’s first service station for installing and maintaining two-way radio systems used by police and fire departments.
Cattron followed along in the 1960s, when Motorola began making remote controls for industrial cranes that operated on a radio frequency.
By the mid-1970s however, the business wasn’t meeting Motorola’s growth targets, says Robertson, a Motorola employee at the time. Cattron bought the patents and manufacturing rights to the products in 1976 and Robertson joined him a few months later.
Since then, Cattron has focused on the industrial and railroad markets, accepting a few more exotic projects in between.
The company’s remote controls operated minesweepers in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Robertson says they also appeared in the Toronto production of “The Phantom of the Opera,” after a mishap with a remote-controlled boat used in one of the scenes.
The radio signal that operated the boat was crossed with the radio signals for the security guards assigned to then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who was in the audience.
Robertson says that instead of following the script, the boat headed for Mulroney.
“The next day, we got a call up there,” he said.
Whether you’re controlling a stage prop, a crane carrying several tons of steel or a 125-ton rail car, the technology is basically the same. The remote control includes an encoder that converts an order into a radio signal, then transmits it to a receiver.
The receiver decodes the signal and sends the order to the appropriate equipment, whether it’s the throttle or the brake.
Railroads use the remotes in rail yards to take apart and put together long-haul trains. Robertson says the competition for the mainline railroad market is nowhere near what it is in the industrial market, where Cattron-Theimeg has about 60 competitors.
The opposition in the rail market includes CANAC, a subsidiary of the Canadian National Railway that’s based in RIDC Industrial Park in O’Hara.
Theimeg’s controllers were designed to serve European railroads, which Robertson says are a less demanding breed. In Europe, railroads are used primarily for passengers instead of freight.
Cars are smaller (50 to 70 tons vs. 125 to 130 tons in the United States) and trains are composed of fewer cars than they are in the States, he says. So Cattron is adding some of its own technology to Theimeg’s controllers. Its customers include CSX Corp., which is using Cattron-Theimeg systems in 42 locations.
“What we’re seeing is extremely encouraging,” said CSX spokesman Bob Sullivan. “We’re anticipating having about 60 by the end of the year.”