Decades ago, before he was director of safety and analytics for Union Pacific Railroad, a young Ed Adelman first started working for the railroad.

He tells this story from the stage at Drone Focus Con 2016, recounting how they showed him maps and cars, and then pointed to a tower up atop a mountain. It was the communications tower.

“Do you want to see it?” they asked young Adelman.

The tower stood 75 feet tall. Workers had to climb them, yes even in icy winter, in order to inspect them. Adelman remembers looking up at the tower and thinking, there’s got to be a safer way.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could take our people out of harms way, so when they inspect hundreds – thousands – of radio towers, instead of having somebody climb up in a truck or ladder, we have a platform that allows us to do tremendous things?” he said.

Enter the drones. With increasing ability for flight control, data analysis and camera quality, Adelman and Union Pacific are embracing the new capabilities of drones for inspection.

Drones are beneficial not only in terms of safety for workers, but efficiency as well, he said. Unlike with cars or airplanes, trains can only go this way, or that way.

“If we have a disruption it can very quickly back up all the way to the Mississippi or all the way to the West Coast,” he said.

While Union Pacific is using drones to inspect the towers now, Adelman said this is just the beginning.

“We are in the infancy of using these devices,” he said. “They have tremendous promise.”