Passenger Trains > NMRA UTA tours

As part of the NMRA convention, I joined two of the prototype tours.  On Tuesday afternoon I took the tour of the UTA Frontrunner shops in Salt Lake, with a quick tour of the Golden Spike Model Railroad club afterwards.  The Frontrunner shops are in what was the UP Salt Lake shops.  There's a photo I remember in one of the books my grandmother gave me of a giant UP turbine hoisted by a crane inside the shops.  So it was great to finally see the inside of that building.  The largest crane isn't in use at the moment, but all of the other craners are operational.  Lots of tracks with various activities inside the buildings to take care of the tasks to fix, maintain, and rebuild the equipment.  UTA is already rebuilding one of the MP36's and installing a new prime mover.  Believe it was a Tier 1 + if I remember right.  Was surprised they were having to do that already, but I guess the first units have a lot of miles on them.  They showed us the turntable that is between the shops and the UP North Yard, but commented that UP uses it on occasion which is more than UTA does.  Stadler used to occupy some of the space in the building but has now moved over to their new facility by the airport.  It was mentioned that UTA only does minor painting at the shops but wants to build a paint booth to allow for a full locomotive or car repaint in the future.  We didn't get to see the dispatcher/control center because a semi had gone off the side of the I-215/I-15 interchange not a mile north of us and damaged both the UTA and UP tracks.  So that was the only bummer.  I'm glad I went; I learned a lot about their operations, training, and maintenance.  And I even go to run on the simulator for a bit.

A side note - the halls at the Frontrunner Warm Springs facility are full of large, fabulous photos of the Frontrunner trains.  We recognized a few from Trains Magazine.  Believe that most, if not all, were from our own Grande Gold!

1 - Looking east with a number of the cranes.  Believe the one at the top, in the back, is the 250 ton crane that's not used at the moment
2 - Inside the beast
3 - View looking west, the train in the back was pulling out to enter service

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/14/19 19:49 by atsf121.

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4 - horsepower galore.  Was told these units have a separate HEP unit so all 3600 horsepower is available to move the train
5 - Couldn't get a good view, but a crew was working on the leading truck of #1
6 - the turntable

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7 - Needed a better zoom, there was a UP freight approaching North Yard from the south
8 - Axles and traction motors for the locomotives
9 - The let me sit in the engineer's seat.  The simulator was a blast to try, though I think I would have failed the test.  We were laughing about trying to make the platform stops, we were either braking too early or too late.  And then some folks didn't know that all of Frontrunner is a quiet zone, but we did have to use the bell for crossings.  Lots of fun!

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Thursday afternoon I went on the Trax tour of the Jordan River Rail Service Center.  I've seen it on my bike rides along the Jordan River, though the trail is on the opposite shore.  I didn't realize that this facility was also an old warehouse like the original Lovendahl Service Center in Midvale.  The Jordan River center was the ZCMI warehouse back in the day.  You wouldn't know it now.  The facility looks like it was built to server light rail from the get go.  

We had a Siemens S70 operating as a speical pick us up at Courthouse station in downtown Salt Lake and take us to the Jordan River center's front door in South Salt Lake, it's just off the Green Line.  We got to watch the control center and the facility is amazing.  There are 3 dispatchers to control all of the 4 different Trax lines in the Salt Lake valley.  And it sounded like one of the dispatchers was dealing with a woman in labor.  The control center has a full backup over at the other facility to support recovery in case of problems at the Jordan River center.  In addition to the controls screens that show the position of every train and switch, there are rows of TV screens to watch key intersections, junctions, and station platforms.  There's even a person in the control center who watches social media to see if there are issues reported by commuters, and they can respond over social media and update the electronic signs at station platforms.  It was an impressive operation to watch.  Unfortunately, we couldn't take pictures.

The maintenance folks were funny, they said we could take pictures of anything we wanted, no matter how boring.  They were fun to talk to and answer all of my annoying questions.  Probably helped when I told them I was local and would ride the system from time to time.  Snow isn't as much of an issue as we thought, they said the worst thing were the leaves in the fall.  But we saw everything from the icicle breakers to the truck of an S70 being moved via the drop table to a ride through the car wash.  Learned a bunch of different little tidbits.  There are 3 S70's painted white for the S Line Sugarhouse streetcar service.  They have a shroud over the front that can be removed and the front half of a coupler quickly installed if the train needs to be moved if it breaks down.  The Jordan River facility covers the 70 odd S70 cars while the Lovendahl covers the 40 odd SD100 and SD160 cars.  Lovendahl is also the paint shop, while Jordan River does the body work and major component overhauls.  For the S70's, the body is all white while the fun read and blue swoops are vinyl wraps.  And there's a contract company who comes in to install the advertisement wraps.  The most amazing thing was that every car that was out on the line, 60 on a busy day when the University of Utah is in session, has to be inspected overnight and be ready to go out the next morning.  Cars start coming in at 10pm with all of them in by 1am.  First cars are out by 4:15am the next morning with all of them out by 6:30am.  The daytime shift is working on out of service cars, rebuilds, etc. They have to fix broken couplers, pantographs, HVAC systems, light bulbs, doors that jam, or body work when a driver turns left (illegally) and hits the trolley.  The nighttime shift are the ones who are crazy busy with the inspections and deciding which cars can be ready to roll the next morning.  It's an amazing operation.

I think any of our elected officials or public who complain about UTA should be required to tour these facilities.  The people who work there are amazing and doing their level best to give us a good, and very clean as many folks commented, public transportation system.  I know I've complained about some of the management decisions - who hasn't - but the line workers deserve a ton of praise!

10 - walkways everywhere to access the roofs of the vehicles
11 - car on the left is having the truck removed, we watched it popup on the left on the trucks/wheelset repair track.  They were swapping it out and the number of connections for wiring was incredible.  
12 - in the back you can see the floor lifted up where the old truck had come up



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/14/19 19:37 by atsf121.

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13 - inspection pit underneath, crew working on equipment on the roof.  Lots of HVAC stuff up there, not sure what they were working on exactly
14 - maybe not as cool as the SP icicle breakers for Donner Pass, but still very important here in the winter
15 - view of the shops from up top

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16 - this is the ramp for wheelchairs.  Unbeleivable number of parts to make a ramp reliably slide out so you can roll into or off the vehicle
17 - a few of the older SD cars awaiting their turn to be rebuilt.  See my earlier post to see what the new car looks like when finished.  It looked good.
18 - An airport bound Green Line train had to pass before we could enter the main.  It's headed for downtown Salt Lake and the out to the airport.  We followed it to Courthouse station where we all exited and headed back to the Little America and the NMRA convention.

Really glad I did both UTA tours, I learned a ton about the trains and trolleys I see all the time and get to ride on occasion.  While the equipement was amazing, the people we talked to are awesome and make it all work.

Nathan

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Great photos, thanks for sharing.

Look how clean and bright the shop is.

Uncle Joe
Seffner,Fl.

Very interesting, thanks for posting.