UI visit gives official insight into pavement, rail research

A top-ranking U.S. transportation official visited Rantoul, Ill., recently to see what the University of Illinois has been cooking up in pavement and high-speed rail research, the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette reports. Peter Appel, the U.S. administrator of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration, toured the 60,000-square-foot facility known as UI's Advanced Transportation Research and Engineering Laboratory located on the former Chanute Air Force Base.

"I just wanted to
come here to not only see what you’re all up to, which is great," Appel
said, "but to really point out that you’re way ahead of the game in where
we need to be in transportation workforce development."

The federal government
allocated $8 billion for high-speed rail projects in January 2009, of which $1
billion will go to Illinois for a rail line from St. Louis to Chicago, said J.
Riley Edwards, a lecturer for the UI’s railroad engineering program. The St.
Louis-to-Chicago rail line will be designed for trains to run up to 110 mph
initially. The rail line’s infrastructure should be in place by the end of
2011, Edwards said.

Appel confirmed that an
additional $2 billion would be given by the federal government to high-speed
rail development in the future.

Edwards and Mauricio
Gutierrez Romero, a graduate research assistant in railroad engineering, work
consistently with Unit Rail, a railroad supply company that supplies fasteners
and crossties to the ATREL facility, to determine the effectiveness of the
system after trains run on the track.

Edwards and Romero showed
Appel a railway’s fastening system and how it operated during Appel’s tour of
the facility.

Appel was also introduced
to the equipment ATREL uses to prevent accidents caused by sinkholes in the
road and learned how a UI doctoral student, Chaiwat Na Chiangmai, can mix
ingredients to make asphalt.

"I’ve seen a lot of
great innovation and research at the University of Illinois," Appel said.
"It’s what we do at the U.S. Department of Transportation."

ATREL director Imad
Al-Qadi planned the visit so Appel could have the most interaction with the
university students working in the transportation engineering program.

"To get a good
working relationship with him is very important," said Al-Qadi, "when
he decides where the research should be done."

Said Appel, "This
particular university stands out in an area that is one of the most important
priorities we have in the department, which is transportation workforce
development. What do we mean by transportation workforce development? We mean
anticipating what we as a nation need in our transportation workforce to get
where we need to go.

"We’re talking major
investments in high-speed rail," Appel said. "We’re talking about
major improvements in our use of our marine highways, our efficiency in
air-traffic control. And all these systems and all these types of
transportation are going to be dramatically different 10 years from now, 20
years from now."

Appel said much of what
he saw addressed additional goals for workforce development – environmental
sustainability.

"Not only does
transportation workforce for the future need to be able to work with different
kind of technology that might be driving transportation today, but we need to
do it in a dramatically more environmentally, sustainable way."

Appel noted that railroad
engineering needed to be instructed at all levels of education and that UI was
advancing in the subject more than any other college in the nation.

"Railroad
engineering has been disappearing from a lot of academic programs in this
country. University of Illinois is a very notable exception," he said.

Appel said the
Transportation Department was planning to work with the university in a serious
way to advance the transportation workforce.

"What is going to be
different about transportation in the future and what do we need to do to
prepare for it?" he asked.

"There’s no better
example of feeling like that, than with rail transportation and what’s going on
at the University of Illinois."