Frogs, Glue and Rails - Unitrac puts it all together
By Greg Householder
(September 15, 2008)

If you live in Karns, you have probably driven by it a thousand times. Situated across Byington-Solway Road from Karns High School is a little company that works with big stuff.

Driving by or through a business park such as Westbridge, how many times have you wondered just what goes on in those big metal buildings?

Unitrac Railroad Materials invited the Shopper-News (www.shoppernewsnow.com) over for an inside look at its operation. Not a large company, with only 84 local employees, it works with some heavy materials using high-tech equipment. It’s a neat place to visit, and one gets the feeling that it’s an even neater place to work. There is definitely a family-like atmosphere present at Unitrac.

Unitrac is in the railroad business. No, the company doesn’t run a line of trains. They leave that for their customers. Unitrac makes track components.

For many who perhaps don’t deal with railroads except when a train is crossing the street they’re driving on, the rail industry may seem "old school." The image is one from the history books – Chinese and Irish immigrants laying down track with sledge hammers as the ribbons of rail stretched across this country more than a century ago. Or perhaps that image comes from old black and white movies, when, if one wanted to go to Atlanta, they rode a train versus driving down the interstate or taking an airplane. A lot of folks think that railroads are a dying industry.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

The railroad industry is alive and well and growing according to Phil Pietrandrea, senior vice president for sales and marketing for Unitrac.

"It’s actually booming right now," he says. "In my own personal opinion, truckers have their place and we have our place. Truckers are probably more reliable if you have to have it there tomorrow. You ship it by truck. Where the railroads have an advantage is for longer hauls. It’s cheaper to ship heavier loads and longer hauls by rail."

And business is good for Unitrac. A walk through the plant shows every machine in operation as well as every worker.

Unitrac’s workforce is, at first glance, a male only operation. Of the 84 employees in the Karns facility, only four are women.

However, upon closer examination, the company is quite diverse, both ethnically and vocationally. Occupations range from engineering and computer types, sales executives, trade and craftspeople to laborers.

And there is none of that corporate "unwritten human resources rule" business of hiring youngsters out of college or trade school on the cheap. Some of Unitrac’s most recent new hires are in their 50s and 60s. The company seeks folks with a good work ethic and likes to promote from within.

Scott Calhoun, general manager of manufactured products and product development, gave a tour of the facility. The first stop was to Unitrac’s "million dollar baby," a high-capacity, high-tech computerized numerical control milling machine. A design operator uses a computer to design the component, usually to specifications given to Unitrac by the customer. The data is transferred to the computer linked to the machine.

And it goes to work. It mills the heavy steel rail or other cast product down to extremely close tolerances.

"It eliminates a whole lot of human error," says Calhoun. So why so much high-tech for railroad parts? Some applications, especially for Class 1 customers like Norfolk-Southern, CSX and the transit companies, require precise tolerances because of the speed of the trains. A switch that doesn’t mesh exactly right could cause a fast moving train to derail.

Next stop on the tour was the older building. The building housing the "million dollar baby" was completed earlier this year. In the older building, some of the machines are not so high-tech. Workers still use jigs and sledgehammers to work the casts into some of the machines.

These applications are used for customers such as railroad contractors who are building spurs into a plant, like an auto manufacturing facility. Tolerances are more relaxed since trains moving on these stretches of track are not traveling at the speeds of a transit line in New York or a freight line across the Midwest.

In one part of the older building, workers were preassembling a "frog". No, it was not a reverse of the dissection you did in high school biology. A frog in railroad parlance is the section of track that switches the train to another track. Generally, it is X-shaped. The frog is preassembled to make sure it all fits properly, disassembled, and then a fiberglass mesh material is inserted between the parts and finally, all glued together.

Glued together? Yes, glued together.

Using fiberglass and adhesive eliminates some of the vibration that is the bane of the railroad industry. Vibrations cause components to wear out more quickly. However, rest assured that our nation’s railroads are not merely glued together. Large, high tensile strength bolts are also used.

Unitrac is a progressive company that provides good jobs for its workforce. It is a family owned business with facilities all over the U.S.

Now you know what they’re doing in those big metal buildings.

For original article as it appeared in Shopper-News Now, visit Frogs, Glue and Rails (7,510KB)