CONNECTING INDUSTRY – DELIVERING VALUE
ISSUE 2 • VOLUME 9 • 2013
CHICAGO SOUTH SHORE & SOUTH BEND RAILROAD
Emergency responders
representing various
departments participate
in South Shore Freight’s
Tank Car Safety
Training session.
Tank car safety training offers valuable insight
Emergency response crews representing various agencies participated in South Shore Freight’s Tank Car Safety Training program, which was offered during a series of sessions in June.
“The primary reason for the training was to provide emergency responders with specifics on how to respond to a HazMat incident or derailment and familiarize them with not only how tank cars function, but also their safety features,” said Superintendent
Mike Shore. “We’re appreciative of everyone’s effort to get up to speed
about tank car safety.”
He said the Michigan City Fire Department, Indiana Department
of Emergency Management, Porter County Hazardous Material Team,
LaPorte County Hazardous Material Team and U.S. Coast Guard were
among training participants. He also extended kudos to TRANSCAER®,
the organization responsible for providing the training tank cars.
New bridge construction at Trail Creek will require a section
“The nice thing about TRANSCAER is it provided a variety of tank
of the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District main
cars that had different types of safety valves and safety equipment,”
line between Michigan City and South Bend, Ind., to be shut down
Shore said.
Oct. 20-Nov. 1.
The cars provided the opportunity for emergency responders to learn
South Shore Freight has a contingency plan in place for
about items for which to be on the lookout, such as the way cars are
customers that cannot function without rail service during the
placarded, how to identify a high-pressure car versus a general-purpose
prescribed mainline outage time frame.
tank car, recognition of various safety valves and how they function,
“The way our railroad is set up, the main line between
and mechanical features of how the train is made up.
Chicago and South Bend is actually owned by NICTD, a com
“We also shared information about how these cars work, from brakes
muter rail agency,” said Marketing and Sales Director Andy
to specifics about the locomotive; how the locomotive works; and things
Laurent. “They own the main line, so they maintain it.”
to be concerned about with a locomotive,” Shore said.
He said NICTD has performed major capital
Continued on page 3
Contingency plan in place
during mainline outage
Five Star Sheets partners
with South Shore Freight
One of the key tenets of business success is listening to
customer needs and ensuring their needs are met. Adhering to
that principle has allowed South Shore Freight to craft a fruitful
partnership with New Carlisle, Ind.-based Five Star Sheets, a large
corrugated cardboard producer.
“The success story we want to talk about is the fact we have
doubled our volume with them in the past year and their production has grown as well,” said Marketing and Sales Director
Andy Laurent. “That’s the result derived from working with
Five Star Sheets to determine how we could help them maximize
their rail utilization.”
While he conceded there were bumps in the road along the
way, partnering with Five Star Sheets has been a mutually beneficial endeavor.
“Their mindset was if our service was more frequent, they
would utilize our services more often,” Laurent said. “We increased our service frequency from three days a week to five days
for December as a test. The plan succeeded, and their volumes
have continued to grow. Five Star Sheets has continued to order
product in by rail, and we’ve gone from an average of 70 cars per
month to about 140 cars per month.”
He believes keeping the lines of communications open is essential to South Shore Freight staying on task and helping clients
reach their desired goals.
“By creating a better service product, we have been able to
enhance the process of meeting customer needs,” Laurent said.
Service
Anniversaries
March 10
May 5
May 19
May 19
“By creating a better service
product, we have been able
to enhance the process of
meeting customer needs.”
- Andy Laurent, marketing and sales director
“At the end of the day, that’s what this business is all about. It’s
a service industry. We’re not manufacturing or making anything.
We’re moving other people’s products and goods. The better we
do that, the happier they are and the more they’ll use us. In order
to make that happen, we have to listen, then take action.”
He emphasized that providing stellar service remains
paramount.
“The railroad business in general can be inflexible,” Laurent
said. “But as a short line, we pride ourselves on customer service.
Our partnership with Five Star Sheets has been a good success
story, with the bottom line being serving the customer, listening
to what they want and then doing it. In the course of that process,
we have literally doubled our business with a good customer. In
our business, it’s all about economies of scale. The more business
you have, the more efficient it becomes to serve an industry.”
Jake Nekvasil
Brenda Runnels
Mike Steinhiser
Leighton Smith
10 years
5 years
5 years
5 years
A message from Andrew
I’m pleased to announce 2013 is shaping up to be another impressive year for South Shore Freight. One building block of this success
has been our ability to buck the industry’s decreasing coal business
trend. While many railroads continue to see a diminishing market,
we’re experiencing an increase, specifically with our NIPSCO and
ArcelorMittal customers.
Despite this success, we continue to diversify our traffic base
away from coal dependence. This is being accomplished by encouraging “same store” growth with our existing customers as well as
through the industrial property we’re marketing in New Carlisle and
LaPorte, Ind., and the new industrial parks developing along our lines,
such as the Space Center development in LaPorte and Kingsbury, Ind.
Lately, there has been much in the news about the significant
upcoming changes to the management of Illinois International
Port. Although we don’t yet know what will occur, South
locomotive engineer
clerk
locomotive engineer
conductor
Fox
Shore Freight will continue to provide
dependable, safe and cost-effective
rail service to all of our Illinois port
customers.
As always, we appreciate our customers’ continued support and loyalty. I also
wish to extend thanks to our world-class
employees whose commitment to serving
our customers continues to be the foundation of South Shore Freight’s success.
They are setting records every day for safety and productivity.
Sincerely,
Contingency plan in place during mainline outage
Continued from page 1
improvement projects during the past few years;
including this year replacing a bridge at Trail Creek,
on the east side of Michigan City, Ind. To install
the new bridge and build new track on top of it
requires a 12-day outage.
“We’ve been keeping our customers in the loop
about when this was going to happen and have been
planning for it,” Laurent said.
An alternate means of conducting business
has been designed with Five Star Sheets, Unifrax,
Helena Chemical and PSC Metals in mind.
“They have told us they can’t go 12 days without railroad service,” Laurent said. “We learned
Five Star Sheets and Unifrax especially couldn’t
go without rail service for that extended period of
time.”
South Shore is bringing the companies as
many cars as possible during the week prior to the
outage to be stored for use.
“Any cars they have the night before the out-
age, we will bring as many as we can to the other
side of the bridge with a locomotive, so when the
bridge comes out, we will in essence have an isolated pocket of railroad with all of these inbound
loads for them,” Laurent said. “We will switch
them on a regular service schedule to keep that
material flowing.”
“We’ll have those cars staged on the other
side of the bridge so our crews can access them,”
Laurent said. “It’s an unusual circumstance, but I
believe it’ll work great.”
South Shore has experienced similar bridge
outages on a smaller scale in the past.
“We are confident the coordination among
NICTD, ourselves and customers will pay dividends, and this will be a smooth event,” he said.
From a long-term view, the new bridge places
South Shore Freight one step closer to increasing its
shipping capacity from 263,000 pounds to 286,000
pounds, which serves as the industry standard.
New bridge construction at Trail Creek will result
in a mainline outage Oct. 20-Nov. 1.
South Shore Freight moves
390,000-pound transformer
South Shore Freight recently
played a vital role in safely moving
a 390,000-pound transformer, its
largest single shipment in recent
memory.
An emergency project with
the Northern Indiana Public
Service Company required the
railroad to move the transformer
from Burr Oak to Stillwell, Ind.
“It was a three-railroad move
The 390,000-pound NIPSCo transformer is delivered at
with
Norfolk Southern, Canadian
Stillwell.
National and South Shore,” said
Marketing and Sales Director Andy Laurent. “We were the last leg in the journey. It
went off without a hitch.”
He said the transformer was placed on a railcar at the NIPSCO transformer yard,
navigated the rails and then moved a couple miles down a state highway on a trailer
for the last leg of the trip.
“We take pride in being able to handle unusual shipments such as this,” Laurent said.
He said roughly 30 people were involved in the process on moving day, including
South Shore, NIPSCO and rigging personnel who moved the transformer from the
railcar to its final destination in the transformer yard.
“When you have shipments this big, you want everything to go well,” Laurent
said. “As a 390,000-pound load, this was about twice the weight of a normal one in
the same footprint. We handle roughly one of these a year, but this was the biggest we
have moved. There was a lot of coordination with the other railroads, the company
doing the shipping, rigging company and our existing customer, whose track we were
using. We had to move all their cars out of the way to get the transformer in there.”
South Shore Freight’s involvement in the transformer move required one day, with
the crew taking great satisfaction in seeing the job through to a safe completion.
Employees celebrate safety achievements at the ACE safety barbecue.
Celebration highlights
ACE safety achievements
Family, food and fun were the order of the day during
the South Shore Freight ACE safety barbecue.
“We wanted to celebrate the 2013 safety achievements, and acknowledge the Actively Caring Employees
program and its members,” said Superintendent Mike
Shore. “Everything was organized by the employees, who
did a terrific job.”
Key employees involved in planning and coordination were Locomotive Engineer Don Buford, Conductor
Brian Krueger, Carman David Luchene and Customer
Service Representative Brenda Runnels.
Shore said ACE’s impact resonates throughout the
organization.
“It’s a safety program geared toward employee development and peer interaction,” he said. “The premise
behind it is to have employees empowered to take responsibility for themselves in correcting and intervening
with regard to one another’s workplace practices. ACE
members will observe other employees. If they happen
to see them doing something incorrectly, it’s more of an
impromptu training session, if you will. The philosophy is
peers look out for one another, which is where the success
of a true safety program is defined.”
Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad Company
505 North Carroll Avenue • Michigan City, IN 46360-5082
219.874.9000 • Fax: 219.879.3754
www.SouthShoreFreight.com
Chicago South Shore &
South Bend Railroad Company
505 North Carroll Avenue
Michigan City, IN 46360-5082
PRSRT STD
U.S. POSTAGE
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MAIL U.S.A.
Trainman Ryan Hochstein operates one of the new derail
stands at South Shore’s Carroll Avenue Yard.
Capital improvement
projects provide new
equipment
South Shore Freight has replaced derail
operating stands and high stand switches as part
of the capital improvement projects initiative.
“Upgrading the rail operating stand is
in the best interest of employee safety,” said
Maintenance of Way Manager Stevan Gropp.
“We upgraded 23 of the most heavily used stands.
It greatly enhances our safety goals, and they’re
much easier to operate.”
Superintendent Mike Shore echoed his
sentiments with regard to ease of use.
“Last year we identified all the locations
where we had derails operated with a lever,” he
said. “They are heavy and can be difficult to
manipulate in the winter months when things are
cold and frozen. The high stand switches, also
called back savers, allow the operator to stand up
and be in an ergonomically correct posture when
opening and closing the derail.”
Shore said 39 ergonomic switch stands
recently were installed, replacing ground or
flop-over handles.
In addition to the derail operating stand
and high stand switch replacements, Gropp said
three grade crossings were enhanced and 1,000
crossties were changed out at various locations.
New hires welcomed
South Shore Freight recently welcomed two
new employees to the fold.
Ryan Hochstein joined in June, while
Bill Broesamle came aboard in July. Both are
student conductors and will serve as conductors
once their training is completed.
Hochstein attended the National Academy
of Railroad Sciences and was hired shortly after
graduation. Broesamle has eight years experience as a conductor and locomotive engineer.
Newly acquired crane enhances safety, efficiency
A newly acquired crane will eliminate
the need to use a forklift and boom assembly
to remove the tops from covered coil cars,
thereby enhancing safety and efficiency.
In the past, employees often were required to remove the cover or lid from a car
with a forklift and boom assembly to gain
access to the interior for cleaning or repairs.
“The machine was almost taxed to
its limit to lift the lid off of the car, and we
weren’t able to travel with it,” said Chief Carman Mike Stantz stands with the Mechanical
Mechanical Officer Bruce Kehe. “We would Department’s 15-ton Shuttlelift crane parked on the new
lift the hood off the car and physically pull the concrete pad installed for lifting coil car hoods.
car from underneath the hood, then place the
hood on the ground. We couldn’t travel or drive with it or set it somewhere else.”
He said the crane will make that problem a thing of the past. The decision was made
to purchase a machine with additional lifting capacity. In addition, a new concrete pad was
poured outside the shop to accommodate the crane’s operational footprint.
“The crane is part of the capital improvement project and has a 15-ton lifting capacity
that will allow us to not only lift the lids, but move them and place them somewhere else if we
need to,” Kehe said. “The forklift we previously used had an 11,500-pound capacity, which
limited what we were able to do.”
The crane also will enhance versatility.
“It potentially can be used by other departments, such as Maintenance of Way, to pick up
and load track material,” Kehe said. “It’s going to be a versatile machine for us. If we need to
pull a hatch or roof section off a locomotive, we now will be able to do that. Changing radiators or hoods on the locomotives will be much easier. It’ll greatly improve our flexibility.”