Beckwith among four Iowa locations getting railway crossover upgrades

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway is upgrading its infrastructure to improve on-time performance of Amtrak passenger service, according to Amy McBeth, director of public affairs for BNSF in Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, North and South Dakota and Wisconsin.

?Beckwith, Iowa, is the furthest east of four locations where we are installing a centralized traffic control crossover,? she said from Fort Worth, Texas. ?BNSF is installing four CTC crossovers on two of our main tracks along the route. These CTC crossovers will be controlled by dispatchers in Fort Worth.?

Beckwith is about halfway between Fairfield and Lockridge. The other three upgrade locations along the tracks are near Osceola, Afton and west of Ottumwa.

McBeth explained that a crossover allows movement of a train from one track to another.

Parts of the crossover structure were lying on the ground at Beckwith Tuesday. Workers will erect the two sides, similar to short towers, with the cross piece connecting the sides, straddling the tracks and allowing trains to pass under.

?With this upgrade from hand-thrown crossovers to CTC, trains will be able to crossover faster,? said McBeth. ?There?s an average of about 41 trains on this route in a 24-hour period.?

CTC is like air traffic control for trains. Speed and efficiency is gained in bypassing local operators and hand-thrown switching and eliminating written train orders.

The train dispatcher, in this case, working in Fort Worth, views trains? locations on a computer screen and controls train movements by sending signals to each train. This enhances safety by reporting any trains on the track, and can prevent trains from entering a track against the established flow of traffic.

CTC provides the same degree flexibility that the manual traffic control had but without the cost and complexity associated with providing a manned operator at every crossover, according to information on the Internet. Communication and signals are transmitted by a pulse code systems using a single common communications link and relay-based telecommunications technology.

CTC displays the status of every block between crossovers where previously this had been effectively a black hole as far as the dispatcher was concerned. The CTC system allows a single dispatcher at a single location to set the flow of traffic over many sections of track.

The CTC system also prevents the dispatcher from giving two trains conflicting signals.

?Grading will be followed by additional work over the coming months,? said McBeth. ?BNSF Railway will complete the installation of the crossovers within about two years. Any new track sections are related to the crossover installation.?

McBeth said the project is funded by the federal government to improve Amtrak passenger trains? efficiencies.

?This work is funded completely by federal funding received by the state of Iowa,? she said.