FOUR IN ONE: With the largest staff and the most associa- tion-manage- ment experi- ence of the four co-locating organizations, AREMA spear- headed Railway Interchange “In order to make it work,” said AREMA’s Charles Emely (pictured at left), “every- body had to give up something.”
jority of their engineering people to one event all at the same time,” Emely said. “They never did that before. They would send one group of specialists to one show and one group to an- other show. We were concerned that, even though they want- ed us to do this, they might not support it. We didn’t know if it would be successful.” Railroad industry leaders originally wanted the first joint
event to take place in 2008 or 2009. “I needed to go back to them and say that we all had contractual obligations several years out. The soonest we could do it was 2011, and they under- stood that,” Emely said. “[At AREMA] we still had to change a number of our contracts. We traditionally held our meetings in odd-numbered years in Chicago, and in even years we would sometimes co-locate with one of the trade associations. So we had to change all of our contracts in Chicago to even-numbered years.”
Railroad executives further decided that AREMA, which has
the largest staff and the most association-management experi- ence of the four groups, would coordinate the co-location. The joint event would encompass four distinct components: ARE- MA’s technical conference; a smaller technical conference by Coordinated Mechanical Associations (CMA); indoor exhibits by REMSA, RSI, and RSSI, each in their own delineated space but comprising one big trade show; and outdoor exhibits held in a nearby railway yard. The four organizations began the planning process in Sep-
tember 2007. “We had a number of meetings in person each year and a number of conference calls among staff executives,” Emely