Part stampede, part geek fest, here’s InnoTrans in four easy lessons

Commuters crowd onto the S-Bahn on their way to InnoTrans. Photo by Jim Wrinn.

BERLIN, Germany – It is not even first thing in the morning but closer to 9:15 when I arrive at the zoo railway station to catch my commuter train, the S-Bahn, to reach InnoTrans, the world’s largest railroad trade and technology show. But the trains are all packed with dark suited business men and women who’ve come from 55 countries from around the world to talk railroading, gadgets, and better ways to run trains, safer, faster, and more efficiently. When I say the commuter cars are packed, I mean shoulder to shoulder. Three trains pass before one comes along with standing room to get to the show at the fairgrounds on the west side of town. The resulting emission of railroad professionals is like a cattle drive.

That’s lesson No. 1 about InnoTrans: It may be about trains, but it is an amazing experience for people, with more than 126,000 of them at the last show in 2012, and attendance probably heading toward 130,000 this time before the event is over on Friday (the trade show exhibition ends Friday, but InnoTrans, having gathered 2.5 miles worth of gorgeous rolling stock for display, smartly opens the trains to the public Saturday and Sunday). The event takes over the city for a week, and you cannot go anywhere without running into someone who is attending InnoTrans. Just last night, at the restaurant next to the apartment where I stay, the table next to mine was a group of railroaders from Switzerland and the table next to that a group from L.B. Foster in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Lesson No. 2 about InnoTrans is this: It’s really about the passenger trains. In North America, with freight being predominant and only seven carriers, the suppliers and customers know each other and talk regularly. Worldwide, though, passenger trains are more important in some countries than freight, and the number of carriers is much larger. A casual glance across the rolling stock exhibit of 145 cars and locomotives and you’ll see many more displays of trams (streetcars), light rail vehicles, and commuter trains that you will see freight locomotives of high speed passenger trains (only one this year, from Italy, but a damn sexy one). My sense is that at this year’s show, European freight railroad equipment makers are offering more equipment for display. I don’t know if that means that business is good, they’re trying harder, or something else, but it is fun to see their versions of equipment we see all the time in the U.S. like auto racks (they’ve obviously solved the problem of people dropping stuff on new cars because they’re open top cars), side dump cars, and coiled steel cars.

Lesson No. 3 about Innotrans: U.S. suppliers are catching on that this is the place to be. This year’s show features 2,758 exhibits, and the USA pavilion this year is the biggest ever. The number of U.S. firms here went from 39 in 2012 to 67 this year, an increase only exceeded by the Chinese, who went from 63 firms to 89. You’ll find other big presences from suppliers in Austria, Poland, France, and Switzerland. The biggest and most prominent of all the U.S. firms are General Electric and Caterpillar’s Progress Rail / Electro-Motive Diesel, which have large exhibits. Interestingly, EMD’s display is a traditional meat and potatoes exhibit with engines and cylinders and a cab mockup (to show off new face and eye recognition safety technology gear to make sure the engineer is alert), while GE’s sprawling exhibit showcases more services and is a bouncy video and graphics spectacle for the eye (GE, by the way, has a GEVO engine outside in a tent and one of its export models on display as well).

Lesson No. 4: Somebody, somewhere, right now is building a better mousetrap. I recently heard someone proclaim that the greatest risk of all for any business is to do nothing. Darken the halls of InnoTrans, and you’ll come away with that feeling too. Among the exhibits, and you’ll find a robot to bleed the air off cars in a yard, a gadget to check switch point integrity, a pushcart that conducts a survey. If you can dream it, it’s probably here. Even Airbus Industries, which is the European aircraft competitor to Boeing, is pushing its lightweight but heavy duty aircraft skin as a great alternative material with which to build trains. Tech geeks, you would love this show!

So, that’s InnoTrans in four easy lessons. There’s much more, of course, and I’ll be writing about some of the individual pieces of rolling stock and some of the gadgets that impressed me with a feature story in our February issue, on sale about Jan. 1. But this will give you enough to go on for now. Oh, and I do have one more thing to add about commuting to InnoTrans on the S-Bahn. Yesterday, at the end of the show, I piled onto one of those crowded trains, and it broke down at the next stop. We waited, and waited before someone decided to send another train to keep things moving. I thought to myself that here were 100,000 people who all know about the future of railroading, and sometimes the need for new technology is just outside your door right now.