ZTR Control Systems

ZTR Control Systems is a privately held company based in London, Ontario Canada and with an office in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. ZTR has been providing monitoring and control systems for the railway and industrial off-road equipment markets for over twenty years.

Founding

ZTR Control Systems is a privately held company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, with a second location in London, Ontario, Canada. ZTR has been providing monitoring and control systems for the railway and industrial off-road equipment markets since 1987.

History

ZTR Control Systems was initially established under the name TRAC Rail on October 28, 1987. Five former GM Diesel employees came up with an idea for a control and monitoring system to make locomotives run more cleanly and efficiently. [2] TRAC stands for Trip Recording and Control, which was exactly what the company's systems were originally intended to do.

The first test of a microprocessor based retrofit control system was done on a Santa Fe SD40-2 in April 1988. During this test, the fundamental concepts of the controller were successfully proven. This led to the first installation, also with the Santa Fe Railroad, on a newly rebuilt SD40-2 in December 1988. After three months, the unit was released for full revenue service including a high priority intercontinental mail service and highly variable weather conditions. On one route the locomotive went from sub zero blizzard conditions in the Rocky Mountains, to 50 degrees Celsius in an Arizona desert within a 24 hour period.

1989 marks the birth of ZTR’s NEXSYS Control System. ZTR began a test by successfully installing a NEXSYS Control System on the Santa Fe Unit #5032 for five. This test resulted in the development of a tool to allow users to troubleshoot and diagnose the failures on-site known as IDEAS (Integrated Diagnostic and Expert Analysis System). It was an advanced concept because the reports were structured with simple English, enabling anyone to diagnose and troubleshoot problems.

Despite ZTR's innovative approach, the company had difficulty breaking into the retrofit market. They had to find someone with a retrofit contract and sell them on the system. Ziegler Inc., the Midwest Caterpillar dealer who established Generation II Locomotives (Gen II), focused on rebuilding Locomotives with Caterpillar engines. Their management heard about the Santa Fe testing and approached ZTR. They were interested in testing the microprocessor controls on some rebuilds they were working on for Burlington Northern Railroad.

The first test took place in the northern regions of Minnesota and ZTR impressed Gen II with the results. Gen II moved forward with ZTR's control system on the next 10 locomotives that were built for CP’s SOO Line.

During the installation of these control systems, ZTR introduced an automatic shutdown and restart system called SmartStart®. SmartStart, an automatic locomotive shutdown/restart system, monitored for conditions during shutdown that allowed the locomotive to restart to get them back into spec – essentially a smart thinking system. With increased scrutiny and regulation because of environmental concerns, and the desire of any business to prevent waste and save money, mechanisms to stop unnecessary idling of locomotives were getting more and more attention.

This system has been installed on many different locomotives ranging from Burlington Northern, CP Rail-Soo Line, Wisconsin Central, Gateway Western, and Duluth, to Missabe & Iron Range. A major selling point of these systems was fuel savings. The microprocessor-based locomotive control systems had an open architecture that could go far beyond just an automatic shutdown and restart capability. ZTR expanded SmartStart to include event recording, fan cycling and control, duty-cycle logging, kilowatt-hour recording and high-idle control. Additional features added over time include dynamic tag identification, cellular communications, maintenance flagging, health monitoring, and locomotive diagnostics.

1992 brought more change for ZTR: Ziegler, a Midwest Caterpillar dealer, utilized ZTR’s expertise once again, but this time in the remote monitoring and control of standby engine generators. ZTR then got into the graphical software development with this system, creating a user interface to replace hardware based dials, meters, gauges, and buttons found at the site. Through the 1990s, ZTR continued to expand its product and service offering.

In 1995, ZTR applied the first BOA locomotive anti-wheel slip system to a CP GP9. This control product was used to improve the pulling power of a locomotive by detecting and correcting any slippage the metal wheels may have on the metal rails.

Drawing on its strengths in control systems, ZTR developed a product that focused directly on landfill gas recovery operations. In 1994, the monitoring and control of unmanned methane power generation sites was added to ZTR’s product and services. The systems are installed to monitor and control generating facilities located at landfill sites where methane gas served as the fuel for engine turning generators to generate electricity. The systems originally used a graphical user interface to display information being monitored at the site and alerted service personnel via pager, when any alarm conditions exited. With over a dozen installations across North America, these facilities provided a valuable source of green-friendly electricity to the communities in which they were located. These dangerous facilities could then be safely automated with minimal human intervention.

In 1995, ZTR applied the first BOA (Bolt On Adhesion) locomotive anti-wheel slip system to a CP GP9. This control product was used to improve the pulling power of a locomotive by detecting and correcting any slippage the metal wheels may have on the metal rails.

The first large contract with the BOA system was for TranzRail in New Zealand in 1997. This opportunity challenged and stretched ZTR's product support capability to be global. Today, ZTR Control Systems provides control and monitoring system solutions to the global railway and power systems industries.

International Expansion

In 1998, ZTR embarked on a completely new track, leveraging product offerings by providing services to the customer that would allow them to make use of the mountain of information that the monitoring & control systems were able to collect for them.

By 2001, ZTR was organized into two divisions – Railway and Industrial. This provided the company with greater focus and prepared it to handle the continued growth both in business and in people.

In 2002, Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) attempted to lower their fuel consumption and reduce noise and air pollution by adding advanced technology to their locomotives. The technology involved an innovative combination of Kim Hotstart’s DDHS (Diesel-Driven Heating System), which keeps engines block temperature above 100 degrees F and the batteries charged, and ZTR's SmartStart. BNSF claimed it could save up to 12 million gallons of fuel per year just by shutting down idling locomotives when the temperature dropped below 40 degrees F, and was looking to cut fuel consumption that year by 3% (about 38 million gallons). BNSF later planned to equip more locomotives with the ZTR Control Systems Hotstart/SmartStart combination, which they described as “one useful arrow in the quiver that we use to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.

In the Industrial equipment market, ZTR was working to provide application solutions for landfill operators, waste water treatment facilities and distributed power generation equipment. Up to this point, ZTR had been providing these solutions almost solely through the Midwest Caterpillar Dealer (Ziegler Inc), which lead to a joint venture between ZTR and the Electric Power Division of Caterpillar Inc. Through this relationship, ZTR created the PointGuard brand of system monitoring and management solutions for North American CAT dealers and their customers.

Due to the unique operations and speed that the PointGuard business needed to run at, it was later mutually determined that PointGuard needed to become an independent organization, rather than a joint venture. In 2006, ZTR took over complete control and ownership and, with Cat Power Systems continued endorsement, PointGuard was able to complete sales with almost every North American Caterpillar dealer.

By 2005, ZTR’s railway division created and launched the next generation of their control systems products known as NEXSYS II and SmartStart II. These products provide railroads with advanced control systems for locomotive performance upgrades and idle reduction. The NEXSYS II even enabled the Belt Railway to increase the tonnage that locomotives could push over the hump to 16,000 tons. An increase of over 10% since the NEXSYS II was installed.

Until 2007, ZTR’s industrial division focused on providing wired and wireless remote monitoring solutions to the Power Generation Markets. In 2007 they expanded their focus to provide remote monitoring (telematic) solutions to the mobile and portable off road industrial OEM markets. ZTR then introduced the next generation telematics hardware known as the M10G. The M10G had enhanced features that allowed ZTR to continue to differentiate their solutions, including enhanced recording capabilities and a J1939 communication interface.

Recent Changes

In 2009, InReach, the brand of OEM focused remote asset monitoring solutions (telematics), was launched with the latest in end-to-end equipment monitoring capabilities. This InReach platform was also leveraged by the Railway Division with the release of the new SmartStart SAVER system, which gave railroads the ability to remotely and automatically report on fuel and emissions savings, as well as lost savings opportunities.

In 2010 the M5G Telematics Control Unit was lunched, targeting off-highway equipment fleets with a basic, low cost, run hours and location based system. Continued development of the product portfolio included a number of satellite based solutions.