(The Associated Press circulated the following article on June 20. Brad West and Jay Canaday are members of BLET Division 303 in Morrill, Neb.)
OMAHA, Neb. — When a new Union Pacific engineer starts training, the student practices in a locomotive simulator.
At first, a trainer lets the student drive the virtual train 20 miles without much instruction.
Then the education begins.
The lessons are important because engineers significantly affect how much fuel is burned by the railroad’s 8,000 locomotives. And that adds up quickly, because the railroad burns about 3.25 million gallons of diesel a day.
Brad West and Jay Canaday teach their fellow engineers some techniques that sound familiar to motorists facing gasoline price spikes and concerns about gas mileage.
Strategies such as accelerating slowly, limiting time spent idling and trying to anticipate conditions ahead are just as useful on rails as on highways.
But the most important lesson for engineers is also one of the simplest:
”You let gravity do a lot of work for your train,” West said.
Last year, Union Pacific’s program to encourage engineers to conserve fuel helped the railroad save 16 million gallons of diesel and $30 million. And that’s with only about half the engineers participating.
The first quarter of 2006 saw Union Pacific haul more freight than a year ago while using roughly the same amount of fuel — a first for the company.
The railroad hauled about 2 percent more freight during the first quarter of this year while using 345 million gallons of fuel, which is up only slightly from the 344 million gallons used during last year’s first quarter.
Encouraging engineers to change the way they drive is one part of Union Pacific’s efforts to conserve diesel. The railroad also invested in about 1,900 fuel-efficient locomotives since 2000 and overhauled another 1,300 of its older units to be more efficient.
UBS analyst Rick Paterson said all railroads are taking similar measures because fuel costs can erode profits.
The nation’s second-largest railroad, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., also teaches its engineers techniques to help conserve diesel, spokesman Steve Forsberg said, but it doesn’t offer financial incentives to employees.
The Fort Worth, Texas, railroad has also bought more than 2,500 new locomotives over the past few years, Forsberg said.
To help recover the soaring cost of fuel, Union Pacific has surcharges in most of its contracts. Still, diesel is a significant expense for the railroad, which last year spent nearly $2.6 billion on fuel and utilities. Union Pacific used about 1.35 billion gallons of diesel in 2005.
Railroad customers have complained that the surcharges don’t reflect the costs of individual shipments, and that railroads don’t provide enough information about the surcharge formulas.
Kendell Keith, president of the National Grain and Feed Association, testified at the Surface Transportation Board’s recent hearing on surcharges that railroads ought to be more transparent about what the charges are based on and the formulas should be revised.
”Some shippers are really being gouged by the structure of these surcharges,” said Keith, who represents about 900 businesses involved in storing and shipping grain.
Union Pacific officials maintain that the railroad’s surcharges are not excessive because they recover about 90 percent of the railroad’s costs above 75 cents per gallon.
Paterson said that industrywide, railroads recover about 75 percent of their costs when the price of diesel increases. The industry didn’t start adding surcharges until 2002, so any contracts older than that still don’t have them.
In that 20-mile simulator run used in Union Pacific training, some 80 gallons of diesel fuel can be saved by changing the way an engineer drives.
West and Canaday both spend half their time training engineers in Morrill, Neb., and the rest driving trains back and forth between western Nebraska and the coal-rich northeast corner of Wyoming.
The rolling hills give engineers a chance to use gravity to their advantage by building speed on the downhill side of a hill, but there’s not much engineers can do about long grades. Those still require full power, Canaday said.
The trainers said speed was another key factor in conserving fuel. West said the locomotives, like cars, generally get better fuel efficiency at lower speeds.
”If I know there’s a bottleneck ahead on the way to the mine, I might run 50 mph instead of 60,” West said.
Wayne Kennedy, Union Pacific’s general director of fuel conservation, said the fuel masters program started in the fall of 2003 after monitors were installed along some Union Pacific tracks. Those monitors allowed the railroad to collect and examine run-by-run data.
When Kennedy analyzed fuel-consumption from thousands of runs on coal lines, he found certain engineers were using 50 percent to 60 percent less fuel than others making the same run with similar loads.
”We found that the engineer controlled most of the variability,” Kennedy said.
So the railroad got the engineers who were using less fuel to teach their techniques. Then Union Pacific created an incentive program to encourage conservation.
The railroad offers $100 gasoline cards to the engineers who do the best job conserving fuel, and last month it handed out about 700 of them. The top 15 percent to 35 percent of the engineers get the gas cards.
But conserving fuel is easier on coal runs, where the number of cars and type of cargo stays relatively the same, Kennedy said. In other parts of Union Pacific’s 38,654-mile-long network, there are more variables, which makes the task more difficult.
Kennedy said the railroad wants to save 4 percent to 5 percent annually through the fuel masters program.
Union Pacific also is training dispatchers to make sure engineers know as much as possible about the terrain and traffic ahead.
It’s hard to tell an experienced engineer how to run a train, but showing them the difference in a simulator convinces them quickly, West said.
”It’ll make a nonbeliever a believer in a hurry,” he said.