Union Pacific expected to spend nine months rebuilding two decades of emulator settings. WND Terminal imported the existing profiles and keymaps, then kept operations connected during a disaster-recovery test that had previously generated more than 200 help-desk calls.
Before and after
| Before | After WND Terminal | |
|---|---|---|
| Moving 1,900 session profiles and 340 keyboard maps | Estimated 9 months to rebuild by hand | Imported in 2 days, checked in 2 weeks |
| Quarterly DR test | 200+ calls; users reconnected by hand over about 45 minutes | Sessions moved to the backup host by themselves in seconds; 0 calls |
| Named terminals (LUs) for security and printing | Set per PC by hand | Imported, and set centrally by IT policy |
| Dispatchers watching two systems | Two emulator windows, constant alt-tabbing | Two sessions side by side in one window |
| Emulator cost per seat | $230, after a 10% increase | $70, fixed for 3 years |
Twenty years of settings made a switch look impractical.
On a railroad, the mainframe isn't a back office system. Dispatchers use it to manage train movements, crew callers to assign crews, and yard teams to build trains. When it's slow or out of reach, trains wait.
Over two decades, Union Pacific had built up an enormous amount of emulator configuration. Every department had its own session profiles. Many had their own keyboard maps, built around how their people work. Crew management's map puts the most-used PF keys under the left hand, for example. Many sessions were tied to named terminals that the mainframe's security and print routing depend on.
"Every time someone suggested replacing the emulator, someone else pulled up the spreadsheet of profiles, and the conversation ended," Halvorsen says. "Our estimate to rebuild it all by hand was nine months. The vendor knew that, and priced accordingly."
That vendor raised prices 10% at the last renewal and asked for a five-year commitment in exchange for capping future increases. "They hadn't shipped anything meaningful in years," Halvorsen says. "They were charging us for how hard it would be to leave."
Disaster recovery was the other pain point. Each quarter, Union Pacific tests a full failover to its secondary data center. The mainframe side worked. The emulator didn't, because each session pointed at one address. When that address went away, thousands of sessions dropped, and the help desk talked people through reconnecting.
Why WND Terminal
Halvorsen's team started with the hardest test: they dropped a folder of real session profiles and keyboard files onto WND Terminal.
- It imports what you already have. WND Terminal reads session profiles and keyboard files from the major legacy emulators, including host, port, encryption, screen size, code page, backup hosts, named terminal and every key assignment. It shows what it found before saving anything. Anything it can't bring over is listed, not silently dropped.
- Backup hosts that work. Each connection can list backup addresses. If the main address doesn't answer, WND Terminal tries each backup in order, both when connecting and when reconnecting after a drop. The status line shows a Backup tag so people know where they are. Security rules, like requiring encryption and trusting only the same certificate, apply to backups too.
- Named terminals, managed centrally. Sessions can request a specific terminal name or pool (TN3270E), and IT can set those for each connection in policy instead of PC by PC.
- Built for people who live in it. Dispatchers run two sessions side by side in one window, each with its own keyboard focus. They jump between sessions with the command palette and click the PF keys shown on the screen.
"We gave them our ugliest crew management profile, the one with 60 custom keys and a named terminal pool," Halvorsen says. "It came over exactly. That's when I told procurement to stop negotiating with the old vendor."
The rollout
The import took two days. Union Pacific's team then spent two weeks having each department confirm its sessions and keys in WND Terminal, against both test and production systems.
The rollout ran in four waves over six weeks, starting with customer service and ending with network operations. Dispatch moved during a planned low-traffic weekend, with WND engineers on a call with Union Pacific's team the whole time. IT set the railroad's connections, backup hosts and named terminals in one Group Policy, so a new PC is ready the first time someone signs in.
"Working with WND was the opposite of working with our old vendor," Halvorsen says. "We had an engineer, not an account manager. When we found an edge case in one keyboard map, they had a fix in a preview build the same week."
The results
A DR test with zero calls. At the first quarterly failover test after the rollout, the main address went dark and every WND Terminal session moved to the backup host by itself, usually in a few seconds. The help desk, staffed up as usual for the test, took no emulator calls. The test before had generated over 200.
Eight weeks instead of nine months. Importing existing profiles and keyboard maps turned what Union Pacific expected to be a nine-month project into an eight-week rollout, and nobody relearned their keys.
$1.25M a year saved on licensing. At $70 a seat against a $230 renewal quote, Union Pacific saves about $1.25 million a year across 7,800 seats. It did that without a five-year lock-in.
Dispatch works in one window. Side-by-side sessions replaced constant switching between windows for dispatchers who monitor two systems at once.
"The trains don't care what terminal emulator we use," Halvorsen says. "But they care a lot when the mainframe goes away for 45 minutes. Now it doesn't, and we pay less than a third of what we did to make that happen."
What's next
Union Pacific is turning on the license usage dashboard to size its next renewal by actual usage. It's also piloting Explain with its operations support team, using an AI model it hosts itself.
