Intermodal Cars Going Over Hump At BRC's Clearing Yard?

[JoeBlow]

I know that in Europe it is common practice to use a hump yard to classify loaded intermodal cars. I heard that in America this is only at the Belt Railway of Chicago's Clearing Yard. Is this true?

[greyhounds]

If intermodal shipments are in Clearing it means something has gone wrong.  You could hump and old 89' TOFC flatcar.  But can you send an articulated car through a hump?

Intermodal tends to be a seperate operation from carload.  I know the FEC runs trains with carload and IM in the same consist, but other RRs operate seperate trains for their IM business.  One big advantage of doing so is that the trains bypass classification yards (hump or flat) and avoid the resultant delays and freight damage.

FEC has no hump yards.

[cx500]

You can find both types of traffic in one train on both Canadian railways.  Of course, they are not humping those trains, and they are handled as two separate blocks within the train.  The premier trains mostly only have autoracks in addition to the intermodal.  At the final destination the COFC block will go to the intermodal facility and the rest to a classification yard.  There is no longer any TOFC.

[CShaveRR]

We could classify empty stack cars over our hill at Proviso.  Loads, however, had to be grabbed in a lower retarder, then either shoved to rest on a classification track or shoved "out the back", which basically meant being taken to Global II.  

If any container carried a hazardous placard, it could not be allowed to roll on its own...it had to be shoved over the hill into an unneeded retarder.

Knowing that Proviso was different from many other humps (different from all other hump yards in classification method...manually-controlled switches and retarders), it was safer to do things that some other yards wouldn't dream of allowing.  The hill itself was an abrupt enough vertical curve to allow some longer-drawbar couplers to disengage, but evidently posed no problem to articulated stack cars, either in clearance for the wells or in allowing the articulated connections to go over the vertical curve.