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Cultural Challenges

Just as important as technical problems, we get into cultural challenges like language, demographics, the sheer distance of going places, etc.

A classic example of a language challenge is in Estonia where our train crews are Russian speakers, our managers are Estonian and Russian speakers, and the owners are English and Estonian speakers. This should be the Tower of Babel as far as a railway company is concerned. We’ve figured out ways to work together and work well together, but I would argue that this is as much of a challenge as operations in terms of how to make companies work, especially when you are doing business outside of your own country.

An interesting aspect of the Estonian Railways is that 50% of our employees are women, which is a legacy of Soviet times. This is as much of a cultural challenge for Americans to go to a country where women have a pervasive role in the daily operation of the railway. This is something the Americans have to get used to, not vice versa.

Case Study:  Guatemala

Next I’ll provide a graphic example of our most challenging project which is the Ferrovias Guatemala project.

click to enlarge

1996 – Abandonment
Like I stated earlier, the railway was abandoned in 1996 and, in fact, the only rail service running was this private sector light rail operation. Since I’m an avid reader of Modern Railways magazine, I should probably state this a different way – this is an example of Dynamic Thrusting Private Sector Management. The Vigor of the Private Sector is no where better manifested than in this light rail operation — which has the side effect of making sure the rails were not stolen. As long as there are people with an economic interest in seeing the rails stay in place, they will.

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click to enlarge

1996 – Abandonment (cont.)
This is what our main line looked like. These are residential squatters, as opposed to commercial squatters.

1997 – Accelerated Deterioration
This is what happens when a government decides that they’re going to let a railroad be abandoned and let the Magic of the Marketplace bring it back. The fact is, if you’re not running regular inspections and not maintaining the railroad and if there is a washout or some other problem, it does not get fixed and eventually stuff goes away. This picture was taken in 1997, and now this bridge is actually 20 feet lower than when the picture was taken because the river has continued to take it lower. I would not be surprised if the bridge is now buried under layers of river sand. This is on the Pacific side, the side that we have not yet been able to get back into operation.

1998 – Rehabilitation Begins
In 1998 we were able to raise capital in the local markets, and in conjunction with our local partners, we were able to finance rehabilitation of this railroad which involved using manual labor to install sleepers made of locally harvested trees. This was 98% local content and it was the cheapest way we could find to open the railway. The goal was to open the railroad and test the market before we went back and double tracked it and electrified it.

1998 – Rehabilitation (cont.)
This bridge was rebuilt with 50 manual laborers and a manually operated cement mixer.

1998 – Hurricane Mitch
Hurricane Mitch was not in the business plan and what you see here is one of our more important bridges that rolled 1/3 mile down from where it was supposed to be. Needless to say this was a big problem for us because we had already spent half of the budget on the creation of two railroads – the Northern Railroad and the Southern Railroad, bisected by this missing bridge.

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1999 – More Storms
And even as we worked there were more floods on the Motagua River that took out other pieces of our main line.

1999 – Creative Engineering
Pictured here is a Guatemalan solution. On the left is a dirt ramp and the bridge section is being dragged on this dirt ramp. There is a front-end loader in the middle that is putting more dirt on the front of the ramp. The idea is to drag the bridge 10 feet, add 10 more feet to the ramp, drag it another 10 feet until it’s in position and then remove the ramp. This is certainly not a North American engineering practice and I don’t think I’ve seen this done in the UK, but this is how to get things done in different environments. It worked and we certainly learned something from this.

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