Thank you very much.
It's great to be here.
When I joined the railway as a young engineer in the seventies, my friends thought that was kind of crazy. At that time, of course, a locomotive would pull into a station and the locomotive engineer would pick up a piece of paper. That was his authority to move to the next station. It seemed fairly antiquated, and who would have thought you could make a 30-plus-year career out of that sort of thing? How wrong my friends were.
I have had a lot of fun over the years, being an engineer, working in an industry that always had an inherent ability to use technology. Of course, with trains there's a lot of potential for automation. I'll talk a lot about the potential for diagnostics, and of course the inherent energy benefits from steel wheel on steel rail. Obviously Warren Buffett understands all of that.
All we really needed was the 1996 Canada Transportation Act to give us revenue adequacy and allow us to invest in these various potentials, and that's exactly what the railways have been doing. We've been investing in next-generation technologies that have made us the North American leader in safety, and will continue to be; that have given us the service reliability that our customers are willing to pay for; that have continually reduced the dollars per gross tonne kilometre, which has enabled Canada to be competitive in global markets, on bulk commodities in particular; and that have given us the capacity to grow with the growth of Canada's business.
I'm going to talk about four prime technology streams that we are working on and are very excited about. The first one is trains with locomotive power distributed throughout the train. The second is automated inspection technologies that are turning our finders into fixers. The third is predictive technologies and the data management that goes with it. The fourth is electronic instantaneous application of brakes.
First, talking about predictive technologies and data management, this is the modern way to predict problems before they develop. We are trying very hard to produce an environment where we know signs well in advance of things happening that may require us to schedule to move a freight car into a depot, a locomotive into servicing, or a work order to dispatch a crew to do work on a section of track. We are trying to find things before they become service disruptions. We are trying to find things in particular before they might ultimately produce an incident.
We're doing a pretty good job of that. CN and CP are the most aggressive together of North American railways. We have 13 different types of wayside inspection detectors. Between us we represent 40% of the intelligent detection network in North America. These detectors provide early warnings of weaknesses and monitor the network for any sort of a developing condition requiring maintenance.
There are many examples. We have detectors that can detect overloaded cars or unbalanced loads. We have detectors that can tell us if a wheel is too hot or too cold—in other words, if the brakes are being applied too hard or the brakes aren't functioning as they should on any particular axle. We measure impacts of wheels on multiple locations across the property. Those give us early warning signs of potentially damaged wheels. We can measure wheel wear at track speed. We can measure brake shoe wear.
Of course, we have always been able to measure whether bearings are getting hot and potentially going to fail, but now we're a lot smarter about that, because we network these together. We have prediction algorithms that allow us to predict when an incident might occur. It gives us lots of time for planned maintenance.
These real-time data streams together in our network management centres and in our maintenance depots give us what we call a “digital railway”, where data flows continually to guide preventive maintenance and fluid railway operations.
The second technology I am going to talk about is distributed power. Distributed power means our ability to put locomotives in two to four positions within a train. It gives us much better control on that train, much better overall control of forces, the longitudinal forces that go back and forth between the train, and also reduces the stress state in general of the railway.
We find this is a very important technology for us, particularly in the Pacific gateway, because we need to lift trains through three mountain ranges to get down to the port, whereas some of our global competitors have a much gentler time of it. They release the brakes and away they go. But because of that, by necessity, we have become experts in the world in the use of distributed power remotely controlled from the lead locomotive.
It means our trains are more productive and less destructive. It gives us enhanced locomotive and labour productivity. Very important for Canada is that it enables cold weather operation, because locomotives at different points in the train help us to recharge our brakes, thereby reducing the likelihood of sticking brakes and potential broken wheels. It also improves fuel efficiency and creates capacity for us.
A final one I won't have time to talk to is ECP braking. That's the instantaneous application of brakes throughout the train. That technology is very promising. It gives us shorter stopping distances, it can help us in capacity, and it has a fuel consumption lift.
Now over to Dwight Tays of CN.