The Canadian National Railway Company (CN)...

with its headquarters located in Montreal/Canada CN evolved in 1999 with the merger of the railroad companies Canadian National and Illinois Central. Originally established in 1832, CN has become one of the biggest North American carriers over the last century. With 22.000 employees worldwide and an annual turnover of approximately $8 Billion CAD, CN services the North American continent east-west from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and north-south from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico transporting many kinds of goods, including petroleum, grain, coal, metals and minerals.

Goods to be transported are generally loaded on freight cars and assigned to freight trains via a production planning system. "Classification Yards", also called "Hump Yards", are used to assemble the freight cars into freight trains. The central point of the classification yard is the marshalling hump with one or two approach tracks and up to 100 destination tracks. The freight cars are pushed up the hump and are rolled down the hill on the other side, and are sent to the correct destination track by electric switches which are controlled by a computer system known as a "Hump Process Control System". CN is currently operating 5 classification yards: 2 in Toronto/Canada, one in Winnipeg/Canada , one in Edmonton/ Canada and another one in Memphis/USA.

The Hump Process Control System (HPCS) application was originally developed by CN on the HP1000 platform (running the Hewlett-Packard RTE-A Real Time Executive Operating System) with the efforts involving approximately 100 man years. Most of the program code was written in Fortran/77, some in C and some in the HP1000 Macro Assembler. When Hewlett-Packard ceased support for the HP1000 platform in 2000, CN strategically decided in 2003 to move the HPCS application away from the HP1000 computer systems to new and modern servers.

After CN had taken the decision to replace the HP1000 computer systems, the project managers were asked to investigate possible migration solutions (replacement with standard application, new development, re-engineering, or migration/conversion) and to select the best fit. Considering the needs, the resources and the available time frame, CN decided to migrate the existing HPCS code base to the HP9000/HP-UX platform by using the OrgaBIT RTE-UX migration tool set and services. This was the fastest and most cost effective migration solution in CN's case. By porting the existing code to the new platform, all the programming investment and efforts could be retained, and the application could be equipped with new features.

The project started in June 2005 and within 6 months, the complete Hump Process Control System was ported to the HP9000/HP-UX platform by using RTE-UX and OrgaBIT services. The hump in Toronto went into production with the "new" HPCS application in June 2006 and the one in Winnipeg in September 2007. A newly built hump yard in Memphis was put into operation using RTE-UX in January 2008.

By porting the existing code to a powerful, flexible and scalable Unix based system, the project team was also able to implement new features into the HPCS application. As an example, the communication with SRS (CN’s database) and Smartyard (the production planning system), formerly based on a serial proprietary TCP-IP protocol, was migrated to the IBM MQ-Series messaging system.

As well as getting all the new features by moving the HPCS application to the Unix system, CN was impressed with the ease of use of the RTE-UX migration tool set and the enormous performance gain with the new platform.