Question about flushing

[Anonymous]

Can anyone tell me why ,in bygone passenger service,they had signs that said "please do not flush while train is in station'? I'm hoping it's not why I think it is!

[Nora]

QUOTE: Originally posted by toyomantrains

Can anyone tell me why ,in bygone passenger service,they had signs that said "please do not flush while train is in station'? I'm hoping it's not why I think it is!

It is.

[pmsteamman]

Do you want to step in it??

[csxengineer98]

in the days befor the EPA..... when you flushed a crapper on a train..it dumped it right onto the rails... now if you flushed in a station.... the waste would be thier for someone to step in...or better yet...on a nice hot summers day...for eveyone to smell...
csx engineer

[Anonymous]

EEEEEWWWWWW!!!!!!! What about the track gangs?! Nasty! I'm sure regulations don't permit that these days- so how do they handle the problem? Do they have a 'super-sucker' that comes trackside to handle it?

[Anonymous]

and he notes -

Prior to the chemical holding tank era, toilets flushed directly onto the roadbed. At passenger train speeds, the excrement was spread over several hundred yards which biodegraded very quickly, posing no hazard to track workers, (who would be wearing gloves and boots anyway).

I remember asking a railroad baggage man in my home town about this fifty or so years ago when I started railfanning and was told that I had no business on the right of way. I pressed the question with a quick calculation that over a hundred years of busy mainline traffic, I surmised that there must have been thousands of tons of this stuff dumped on the tracks. He shrugged and said that it was mostly water and what the birds didn't get, the ants did. He suggested that I walk on the side of the tracks.

I guess he was right. If not, main lines would have been buried ages ago...

[eolafan]

The reason for not flushing while in stations is the same reason (only magnified many, many times) for airlines to have holding tanks in their planes and not simply dump the waste in the air (even though they are up over 30,000 feet). Can you imagine how much windshield washer fluid you would have to use if they dumped while in the air....WOW, is that disgusting.

[Modelcar]

...As a passenger train at speed passes and it is in a rain...can't one picture as the turmoil of wind currents and water boiling up behind the last car as it creates a low pressure area...and just reflect for a moment, that would have been where some of the dumpings of the toliets would have ended up. So the back portion of the car would have accumulated a "coating" not too desirable nor healthy. So the current regulations on that subject came not too soon.....[:-^][:-^]

[mudchicken]

RE: THE DREADED BLUE AMCRAP (Hear the whine? Fear What Comes Next!)

Carpy: Gloves & Boots don't help at 90 mph as the stuf atomizes as it joins the outside world....Don't help you in mountain country or in tunnels...

Thank God for Microphor! (http//:www.microphor.com)

Toyo: You learned to live with it, but never liked it. (still better than tallow cars & packing plants)

Mudchicken[:O][:O][:O]

[rrnut282]

As I recall, Amtrak didn't start using retention toilets until one day in the late 70's when a judge and his friends were fishing in a boat anchorded under a bridge (causeway) in Florida when some unsuspecting passenger chose that moment to hit the button! Of course, the lawsuits took several years to 'flow' through the system.[xx(]

Those were the modern toilets, at the time. Even earlier, around the turn of the century, in passnger cars, like some of the passenger equipment we use, the toilet was a seat over a hole in the floor. It's a VERY DIFFERENT sensation peering down between your legs and watching ballast and ties go by! And without a crapper flapper in the way, the faster the train was going the stronger the breeze you felt.[:0][:D]

[oltmannd]

There is more wildlife "dumping" on the environment than ever could come from passenger trains!

BTW - it looks like a small puff of steam when somebody flushes at 79 mph.

[BentnoseWillie]

Most if not all VIA stock still uses straight-dump toilets. Retention tanks have often been proposed, but with no budget...

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by eolafan

The reason for not flushing while in stations is the same reason (only magnified many, many times) for airlines to have holding tanks in their planes and not simply dump the waste in the air (even though they are up over 30,000 feet). Can you imagine how much windshield washer fluid you would have to use if they dumped while in the air....WOW, is that disgusting.

... to say nothing about depressurizing the flight cabin.

[Mookie]

QUOTE: Originally posted by oltmannd

There is more wildlife "dumping" on the environment than ever could come from passenger trains!

BTW - it looks like a small puff of steam when somebody flushes at 79 mph.

ewww - I don't want to know how you know! [:(]

[eolafan]

QUOTE: Originally posted by cbt141

QUOTE: Originally posted by eolafan

The reason for not flushing while in stations is the same reason (only magnified many, many times) for airlines to have holding tanks in their planes and not simply dump the waste in the air (even though they are up over 30,000 feet). Can you imagine how much windshield washer fluid you would have to use if they dumped while in the air....WOW, is that disgusting.

... to say nothing about depressurizing the flight cabin.

OUCH, MY ACHING POSTERIOR![censored]

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by BentnoseWillie

Most if not all VIA stock still uses straight-dump toilets. Retention tanks have often been proposed, but with no budget...

When I used to ride on the Royal Hudson back in the early to mid 90s, (I was just a young kid) when I went to the washroom I had to flu***wice, the first time I thought, is what's happening really what I think?

Sure enough when I flushed the second time I could actually see the ties all blurred up through the small hole at the bottom of the toilet.

Those were the old CP Maroon passenger cars.

They would lock the toilets 15 minutes prior to us getting into the station, for obvious reasons.

[vsmith]

I can remember the same surprised effect when traveling via theUP back in the 60's as a kid. Hitting the flusher and seeing the track below streaming by...Quite a surprise for us kids!

[DSchmitt]

On a documentry about the Trans-Siberia Railroad, the comment was made that in Russia (the Soviet Union at the time) the toilets were locked while in then station, but in China they weren't locked.

Passenger didn't change cars at the border. The trucks under the cars were changed. Russia's standard gauge is 5', China's 4'-8 1/2".

[rixflix]

The stuff isn't toxic!!! It just seems to be a human foible that it's so nasty. Other animals seem to enjoy it for recreational, i.e. quality of life purposes, or need it for survival, i.e. "My next meal just went thataway". Some critters just wolf it down. Nature works on the stuff relentlessly and in a few hours it is set upon by air, sunlight, rain and the critters, until the microbes are all packed away or full. But still, When the Reading's King Coal or Schuylkill went by, if we were on the outside of a curve we would watch from well back!!!

Our old (circa 1957} gang of sub- and early-teenage boys shared an interest in the Comp'ny that featured visits to the passenger stations, public library, historical society and relentless, recidivist trespassing on railroad property. You'd see an occasional sun-bleached strand of toilet paper, a severed or sometimes live copperhead or......uh-oh, a two day dead gopher.
Now said gopher was remarkable: belly up and turning purple and green. Walking sticks were de rigeur for us trackwalkers and reckless Butch used his to jab the unfortunate animal in the gut. The explosion was quiet but awful. Butch even got some guts on his arms and face, an eternal badge of courage in our view. And the stink!!! Wow-wow-wow!!! Pee-yooooo!!!
After that the only thing to do was to get a stick into the intestines and drag 'em down the tracks. Couple of hundred yards before we were distracted by the next event.
To paraphrase Captain Nares in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Wrecker", I wish I could have stayed twelve years old.

Rix

[pmsteamman]

I just want yall to know that I am sitting at my computer trying to not laugh out loud. We can go from posting about the best that runs on the rails to the worst thats "all over" the rails. You people are great, I can be having a bad day but as long as i come on here somebody makes me smile, thank you.

[tree68]

Me dear mother delights in telling about how my potty training was delayed as the result of a mid-winter flush during a train trip (early 50's). Think about it, would you get back on a toilet after getting a blast of cold air on your posterior?

I remember nothing of the incident...

[CliqueofOne]

In the spring of 2002 I was installing the rods on a new power switch just west of the station in London Ontario when an arriving Via passenger dumped a load on said switch. What a mess. Calling my supervisor over to show him what I'd be working in, he goes through the spiel about how he has complained about the practise of dumping toilets on the tracks and being told that it had been stopped. As if he was the only one to take exception to it. Gloves, boots and such are of no value when around this stuff. It gets on everything. It spreads like crazy. I tell all the new guys never to put their hands anywhere near their eyes. A signal construction gang when out on the tracks in the middle of nowhere don't have the privilege of washrooms and such. It's a wonder we all don't get more sickness than we do. Maybe the fresh air and sunshine help. Yes I'm concerned about the human excrement deposited on the tracks but I'm even more concerned about the toxins leaking, dropping and flying off the cars as they go by. The tracks have now become the Love Canal on rails. Gene B. Signal Mechanic. Signal Construction. Canadian National Railways. [8]

[Anonymous]

NASTY, nasty, nasty....

LC

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by CliqueofOne

In the spring of 2002 I was installing the rods on a new power switch just west of the station in London Ontario when an arriving Via passenger dumped a load on said switch. What a mess. Calling my supervisor over to show him what I'd be working in, he goes through the spiel about how he has complained about the practise of dumping toilets on the tracks and being told that it had been stopped. As if he was the only one to take exception to it. Gloves, boots and such are of no value when around this stuff. It gets on everything. It spreads like crazy. I tell all the new guys never to put their hands anywhere near their eyes. A signal construction gang when out on the tracks in the middle of nowhere don't have the privilege of washrooms and such. It's a wonder we all don't get more sickness than we do. Maybe the fresh air and sunshine help. Yes I'm concerned about the human excrement deposited on the tracks but I'm even more concerned about the toxins leaking, dropping and flying off the cars as they go by. The tracks have now become the Love Canal on rails. Gene B. Signal Mechanic. Signal Construction. Canadian National Railways. [8]

Yum yum! my seasrch is over, I found breakfast!

[mvlandsw]

QUOTE: Originally posted by mudchicken

RE: THE DREADED BLUE AMCRAP (Hear the whine? Fear What Comes Next!)

Carpy: Gloves & Boots don't help at 90 mph as the stuf atomizes as it joins the outside world....Don't help you in mountain country or in tunnels...

Thank God for Microphor! (http//:www.microphor.com)

Toyo: You learned to live with it, but never liked it. (still better than tallow cars & packing plants)

Mudchicken[:O][:O][:O]

I appreciate the concerns of people working on the ground but Microphor toilets are a terrible solution. It's not very nice to sit in a cab for hours on end smelling the chlorine gas leaking out of these systems. For that matter putting a toilet of any kind next to the cab is a really stupid arrangement. Given the very poor maintenance they receive any waste system ends up putting out foul odors. Most units have no positive ventilation of the toilet compartment and these odors end up seeping or blowing into the cab. If management had to use these things in their offices I'm sure they would not put up with them for very long. NS was derided for their plastic bag method of waste disposal but at least it was removed from the locomotive and not left to cook in the sun baked cab.

[mudchicken]

Placing chlorine in a microphor primary tank is a no-no. These things are anerobic digesters and chlorine kills the "bugs" in the digester that live in the redwood liner in the tank. Sounds like somebody maintaining the potty succeeded in ruining its primary method of dealing with treating waste.[xx(][xx(]

[daveklepper]

Stepping out my role as Rabbi and Cantor in training:

Passengers will please refrain
from flushing toilets while the train
is in the station, darling I love you!

We encourage constipation
while the train is in the station
I love toast and malted milk in bed! Don't you!

Popular ditti for schoolkids and campers on charted train coaches in the 30's and 40's!

Dave Klepper