Bob Whitlock – The Belt Railway Company of Chicago

Bob Whitlock was standing in a friend’s kitchen in Iowa, nowhere near a classroom, when he picked up a stack of paper he was never supposed to be able to read. It was a mainframe listing, dense with code, sitting on the table while his friend prepared for an accelerated computer programming course. Whitlock had no college degree, no formal training, and no real reason to understand what he was looking at. He started reading it aloud anyway. His friend went quiet, then stunned, because the listing was not meant to make sense to anyone outside the program. The next day, an instructor handed Whitlock a fresh printout and asked him to do it again. He did. Within days, that instructor was walking him into the dean’s office to talk about admission, degree requirements or not. Whitlock started a new job and that program on the same morning, January 10, 2000, and he has been translating complicated systems into plain language ever since.

Bob Whitlock | The Belt Railway Company of Chicago | IT Director

Today, that talent sits inside one of the most consequential rail operations in North America. Whitlock is the IT Director for The Belt Railway Company of Chicago, known throughout the industry as BRC, a critical interchange hub that sorts and redirects rail traffic for carriers across the country. BRC operates on roughly 700 to 800 acres near Midway Airport, with 28 miles of mainline threading through Chicago, and it runs what Whitlock calls the largest dual-hump operation in the world, capable of humping and sorting trains moving in both directions at once. Its importance is not measured by size alone. Chicago sits at the center of the national rail network, and BRC sits at the center of Chicago.

Whitlock’s road into technology began during material-handling work in Iowa, installing pallet racking and shelving around the time of Y2K. He had no clear career direction until that chance visit exposed an unexpected fluency for code. He completed a two-year computer programming degree over three and a half years, graduating in 2003, and never wrote a line of code professionally. Instead, he became a test engineer, then moved through development, operations and project recovery work, absorbing warehouses, print rooms and packaging floors along the way. That operational grounding, more than any single technical skill, became the foundation of everything that followed.

Learning to read the whole railroad

Whitlock’s career-defining moment arrived when a signaling project in Brazil, tied to work with MRS Logistica, Wabtec and Xorail, offered him a chance most engineers overlooked. MRS Logistica needed positive train control built into a broader signaling implementation, and Whitlock, who had previously worked on only the onboard piece of PTC, wanted to understand the entire system: communications, dispatch, onboard technology and signaling working together in one live environment. He moved to Jacksonville, Florida, built a five-person team and spent hours watching data run across the network until he understood every message passing through it.

“I knew every byte of every message,” he says.

That depth of knowledge made him one of the earliest people in the world to understand how a complete PTC system behaved in operation, well before most U.S. Class I railroads activated their own. When he returned to the United States in 2014, he helped BNSF, Denver RTD, Metrolink and CN Railway work through their own PTC startups, arriving with answers most consultants could only guess at.

At CN, that expertise expanded into disaster recovery after a generator failure exposed a dangerous gap. A transfer switch failed during a power outage, the backup generator ran for 24 hours before exhausting its fuel, and no one had a key to refuel it. Whitlock used the incident to build a backup dispatch site roughly 40 miles from CN’s primary center, along with generator monitoring and a second backup facility near Edmonton. The investment paid off almost immediately.

“It saved CN’s bacon,” he says.

When COVID-19 hit, CN could split dispatch operations across locations rather than risk losing control if one site suffered an outbreak. Whitlock even secured a special cross-border exemption to keep supporting the work between the U.S. and Canada throughout the pandemic.

When the mailbox got hacked

Whitlock joined BRC in June 2022, recruited for his PTC expertise as the railway worked to maintain interoperability with Metra and Amtrak crossings. He describes BRC’s core function simply.

“It’s like a mailbox,” he says. “Rail cars come through our property, get sorted, and go back out toward their next destination.”

That description belies the stakes involved. A serious disruption at BRC would not stay contained to Chicago; Whitlock is candid that it could ripple across rail traffic in the United States, Canada and Mexico-connected freight lines. Shortly after he arrived, that vulnerability became real when BRC suffered a cyberattack, an event Whitlock had already warned leadership was a matter of when, not if. The incident reshaped how the organization approached technology risk. Whitlock rebuilt BRC’s network to modern cybersecurity standards, worked alongside specialists he considers among the best in the field, and pushed training across the workforce, because the vast majority of cybersecurity failures trace back to people rather than systems.

Teaching the machine to see

Whitlock is now applying that same translator’s instinct to artificial intelligence. He is midway through the University of Chicago’s Booth Chief AI Officer program (CAIO), a 10-month course he expects to complete in October, and he is already exploring how AI could strengthen BRC’s more than 200-camera video network spread across its sprawling property. He envisions systems that flag unsafe behavior, trespassers or free-rolling cars before they become incidents, shifting the operation from reactive to proactive.

He compares the moment to earlier technology shifts he has already lived through.

“I can walk into an IT room and talk acronyms, then walk into a room of CEOs and explain the same thing their way, then walk onto the floor and explain it again,” he says.

Whitlock, well past 55, says he can see himself working into his seventies, and he spends much of that remaining runway on mentorship, particularly for professionals without traditional degrees. He understands their position because he once occupied it himself, and his advice is consistent: take the assignments others avoid, stay close to the operation, and learn to speak every language in the building.

Outside of work, Whitlock unplugs completely, trading server rooms for rivers on an annual fly-fishing trip through Montana and Idaho, chasing trout on the Missouri, the Beaverhead and the waters near the Tetons. It is a fitting reset for a man who has spent a career reading systems other people found unreadable, then teaching the rest of the room how to read them too.