EOH 2007 - RailTEC

Engineering Open House 2007 – “Inspiring Innovation”

Engineering Open House (EOH) is an annual event organized entirely by engineering students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is held each spring semester, and draws estimated crowds of 20,000 people including, students, teachers, parents and families, from all over Illinois (and beyond). The Railroad Engineering Program participates in EOH each year by working with major railroads who to set up various exhibits and displays of railroad technology. In 2007, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National (CN), and CSX Transportation each had displays in Newmark Civil Engineering Laboratory. These including a full-size locomotive simulator, a freight train air brake simulator, full- scale railroad track construction exhibits, and a computerized railroad network dispatching and train control system. The BNSF Railway presented a seminar on their implementation of Electronic Train Management System. Photos of the railroad displays at EOH 2007, taken by Railroad Engineering Program Graduate Student, Athaphon Kawprasert, are shown below, along with links to photos of the participating railroad displays and the EOH website.

Dan Peltier (UIUC grad student) and Mike Smith (CN) explain CN’s dispatching system to a classroom full of students.

Dan Peltier makes a point about how railroad train dispatching works.

CN provided special railroad EOH t-shirts for students visitors to their train dispatching demonstration.

Steven Conover (CN) explaining railroad safety to a student.

CSX Represetatives, Lonnie Harris and Chris Ramsey set-up their display.

The CSX display featured various track and signal technologies and included a full-size section of railroad track and demonstrations of track construction techniques.

Lonnie Harris of CSX’s REDI Center explaining railway signaling.

Lonnie Harris explains railroad track design and construction to a group of students.

The Norfolk Southern Locomotive Simulator Vehicle was station just outside of Newmark Lab.

Students in the Locomotive Simulator could sit at a locomotive control stand and operate the train while video images of an actual NS route they were operating on were projected in front of them.

Using Norfolk Southern’s train brake simulator, students could observe computer animations of changes in the state of the train’s air brake system components as different brake applications were made. Pictured here are Jerome Rhymes and James Blackwell of NS.

Larry Milhon presented a seminar on BNSF’s Electronic Train Management System (ETMS), their new, wireless, GPS-based system for monitoring train location and preventing collisions.

Nearly 50 students, faculty, and EOH visitors attended the BNSF ETMS seminar that was presented in the Grainger Engineering Library as part of the William W. Hay Railroad Engineering Seminar series.

Darwin Schafer (L), John Zeman (R), and Dan Peltier (pictured in CN’s photo’s above) were the principal student organizers of the railroad engineering displays for the 2007 Engineering Open House. In addition to the displays by Class 1 railroads, University of Illinois Railroad Engineering students displayed posters describing their recent research on various railroad engineering and technology topics. Darwin and John are shown (above left) discussing the posters and John (above right) hanging his up.