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SD70Dude It depends. I have no idea how BNSF's operating rules and American regulations work, so I'll tell you what we would do on CN in Canada. Our current rules require that handbrakes be applied anytime equipment is left unattended on the main track, the minimum number of handbrakes being determined by the tonnage/grade chart in Rule 112. CN defines "unattended" to mean anytime an employee is not within arm's length of the cars, so handbrakes would be required in your example. Before the Lac-Megantic disaster and all the resulting rule changes we were allowed to leave cars unattended without handbrakes as long as there were more than 10 cars, they were left in emergency or full service and vented from a full charge, and were left on a grade of 0.7% or less. Under that rule no handbrakes would be required in your example. In reality, if you leave a train of properly maintained cars in emergency from a full charge in weather that is not bitterly cold, the air brakes will hold it for days, maybe weeks or months. Applying handbrakes in your example is just a formality to comply with the rule, it is not actually necessary to keep the train from moving.
It depends. I have no idea how BNSF's operating rules and American regulations work, so I'll tell you what we would do on CN in Canada.
Our current rules require that handbrakes be applied anytime equipment is left unattended on the main track, the minimum number of handbrakes being determined by the tonnage/grade chart in Rule 112. CN defines "unattended" to mean anytime an employee is not within arm's length of the cars, so handbrakes would be required in your example.
Before the Lac-Megantic disaster and all the resulting rule changes we were allowed to leave cars unattended without handbrakes as long as there were more than 10 cars, they were left in emergency or full service and vented from a full charge, and were left on a grade of 0.7% or less. Under that rule no handbrakes would be required in your example.
In reality, if you leave a train of properly maintained cars in emergency from a full charge in weather that is not bitterly cold, the air brakes will hold it for days, maybe weeks or months. Applying handbrakes in your example is just a formality to comply with the rule, it is not actually necessary to keep the train from moving.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Paul MilenkovicLeaving out the should-a, could-a, you mean to tell me that there are planes departing congested airports that are so weighted down with their payload and fuel that they routinely need to request permission to break the local speed limit near an airport that they can climb to their assigned departure altitude without stalling the plane and crashing?
And let me introduce you to the concept of mandatory noise abatement turns...
You mean to tell me that the air brakes cannot be counted on to hold a train carrying flammable or any kind of cargo for all it matters, and that there are rules for crew setting a minimum number of hand brakes (this is the 21st century, and railroad crew have to walk out along the tracks and crank on handbrake wheels), and that the safety authorities, after a horrific accident, still haven't come up with safer procedures than what led to this accident?
One might argue that relying on obsolescent, corroded, ungaugeable handbrakes as a critical part of safety procedures is dangerously shortsighted -- Euclid certainly and repeatedly does. And so do I. The first problem is that replacing just the 'parking brake' functions with power or even 'application metadata' wireless connection is an enormous expense, in an area where mid-Victorian shortsightedness about 'value for money of braking' is still likely in bean-counters' assumptions. The second problem is that any technical improvement has to become pervasive to do much guaranteed good ... and coming to rely on magic solutions that sometimes invisibly fail is a BAD idea eventually.
You will never get a nonrobotic one-man crew to even approximate a proper handbrake securement set on a heavy PSR-style consist, let alone on a poorly-maintained ballast shoulder at zero-dark-thirty in bad weather. Yet that is where much of the industry is trending, even as they kvetch about ECP and conveniently forget to check or grease handbrake gear on stored cars. There isn't money for enough inspectors to regularly 92-day or whatever inspect every handbrake on every interchange car for correct operation, certainly not going forward into the massive shortfall that this pandemic has put into recovery. You could mandate it, but in a world that ignores SPAFs how far would you expect a handbrake mandate to be respected?
SD70Dude, why are ten or more cars coupled together considered less likely to roll away than a smaller cut?
Bear with me people, this is not off topic.
Over at the Professional Pilots' Rumor Network (pprune.org), there was a discussion of a twin-engine "heavy" cargo jet (a Boeing "triple 7") that came near falling-out-of-the-sky by approaching a stall condition, that the crew countered by taking it out of autopilot and descending to pick up speed. They were plenty high enough that they were not at risk of crashing, but they could have crashed if the situation had gotten out-of-hand. They had air traffic control nagging them, "(name of airline), are you able to climb?" as a way of saying, what's with you guys that you are descending instead of climbing to your assigned altitude, but air traffic control could have kind of figured that they were in some minor trouble by having slowed down too much and they were descending to recover some speed to save themselves.
There was the usual back-and-forth from the pilot know-it-alls about what the crew should-have-done, much like the railroad people in this place, and the biggest, baddest, Boeing 777 know-it-all-of-them-all commented on his You Tube "channel", posted as one of the comments.
Just like videos posted of railroad "incidents", there is this guy who posts the radio transmissions and flight-path reconstructions of aviation "incidents" -- someone making an emergency landing after losing power on and engine and so on. In listening to the those You Tube videos, I had no idea what a "high-speed climb" meant. Did it mean that one of the "heavies" (used to be the 4-engine 747, but the 2-engine 777 and Airbus A350 are almost as big) has such power engines that the crew can show off by climbing really quickly?
I just found out that it means something very different. In congested airspace, such as surrounding JFK International in this incident, planes are restricted to "250 knots", a tad faster than 250 MPH in this nautical reckoning used in air traffic control. It turns out that a "heavy" that is heavily laden with fuel for a trans-Pacific crossing or other long-distance flight can barely stay in the sky at 250 knots.
So when one of these planes requests a "high speed climb", or is authorized by air traffic control for a "high speed climb", that means that the aircrew is given permission to break the 250 knot speed limit so their weighted-down plane can get enough lift from the wings to climb to the altitude directed by air traffic control. The engines are powerful enough with modern models, yes, but the wings aren't big enough when these planes are at the full load the engines can propel without getting permission to break the local speed limit.
Know-it-all-777-qualified-You-Tube-blogger commented that "these guys should have asked for the high-speed climb before they retracted their take-off flap setting on being 'handed over' from the Tower to Departure Control."
Leaving out the should-a, could-a, you mean to tell me that there are planes departing congested airports that are so weighted down with their payload and fuel that they routinely need to request permission to break the local speed limit near an airport that they can climb to their assigned departure altitude without stalling the plane and crashing?
It seems that just as with the 20th century transportation technology, the 19th century transportation technology hasn't yet been quite figured out. Yeah, yeah, it is the pilot-in-command's responsibility, it is the locomotive engineer or the train conductor's responsibility, but it seems we are at the knife edge of a lapse in concentration of one or perhaps two people from disaster?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Murphy Siding We got 2 cars of lumber in yesterday. Usually they arrive on the local, just behind the engines. Things might have been a little hectic on BNSF as the cars showed up an extra day late, at the head end of a loaded ethanol unit train. I presume that the crew has to tie down some brakes on cars once they break the train? On flat ground, with a mile long loaded train, how many brakes would normally have to be set?
As many as the TTSI for the territory require.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
We got 2 cars of lumber in yesterday. Usually they arrive on the local, just behind the engines. Things might have been a little hectic on BNSF as the cars showed up an extra day late, at the head end of a loaded ethanol unit train. I presume that the crew has to tie down some brakes on cars once they break the train? On flat ground, with a mile long loaded train, how many brakes would normally have to be set?
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