Photo By Keith Hayes | Each step of the way from railcar to railcar to offloading ramp, to the ground, rail...... read more read more
The rail operations center aboard the Yermo Annex of Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow is a beehive of activity these days as U.S. Army units moving to and from training at Fort Irwin, Calif., ship in and out by rail.
Chad Hildebrandt, Rail Operations supervisor aboard MCLB Barstow, conducts rail operations classes for military units from all over the Department of Defense.
“We teach military units how to load equipment onto rail cars, we teach them how to tie down vehicles, and we teach them how to inspect to make sure the load is properly secured on railcars,” Hildebrandt said.
He said the current class he is teaching is from Fort Riley, Kan., and to finish with their learning experience they have to conduct the uploading of the railcars with hundreds of military vehicles used in training at "the sandbox" at Fort Irwin.
“(The Fort Riley personnel) are so deep into the class that they’re taking over and running the railheads as part of their final evaluation,” he said.
There are also civilian corporations such as Tapestry Solutions, which deal in logistics, training their employees at the rail ops class, Hildebrandt said.
“We’re teaching them from the ground up how we actually do our operations and by them learning that hopefully they’ll be able to develop a better way of getting the job done,” he said. “They’re going to use MCLB Barstow as the test bed for the entire DoD for a new automated tracking system for railcars and equipment on railcars.”
Besides American military units, Hildebrandt said the class also instructs American allied military units in how to load, secure, transport and unload their various rail operations.
“We have a British unit coming in next month that we’re going to train and teach how to do it,” he explained.
“That’s the Royal Dragoons, the British marines. They’re a Scottish light reconnaissance unit.”
Army Second Lieutenant Matt Jacobson, a native of Blaine, Minn., is with the 152nd Movement Control Team from Fort Carson, Col., the unit currently unloading their railcars at the operations center to train at Fort Irwin.
He praised the upload to download aspect of the rail ops class.
“It’s a lot of hands-on and a lot of manual labor,” he said. “You have to load build (what order equipment is loaded onto railcars), all the way up to actually loading the railcars, tying everything down, and going through
inspections before they can ship,” he said.
For Jacobson and his soldiers, the process begins all over again when the Fort Carson group finishes their training rotation August 26 and has to upload all the equipment for shipment back to their home unit.
Hildebrandt is justifiably proud of the class MCLBB rail ops created on their own.
“We started this class without any direction from anybody. We developed it in house between our rail ops people and the 171st Movement Control Company (the rail safety group) out of Fort Irwin. We have the only rail
ops school in the entire Department of Defense,” he said.
The rail ops class is a continuously changing, adapting entity that is critiqued and developed with every class, Hildebrandt explained.
“That’s the great thing about it being a local school is we’re able to teach real world current operations. As changes come down from the rail community we’re able to adjust our curriculum so that we are teaching the most up to date, current techniques,” Hildebrandt concluded.
| Date Taken: | 08.17.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 08.24.2016 12:23 |
| Story ID: | 208040 |
| Location: | BARSTOW, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 501 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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