How far are we from automatic uncoupling?

[BaltACD]

Euclid

 

BaltACD

The only thing that is wanted is the autonomus money machine.  All it does is create money without the need for capital expenditure or maintenance expenditures.   

An autonomous money making machine would be very popular except it would create massive inflation.  But in any case, autonomous trains, while they may lower operating costs, they are hardly something that can done without capital expenditure or maintenance. 

Not when the ultra elite are the ones that possess the autonomous moneymaking machine - they don't buy the products that create inflation among the masses - they only buy politicians which have been out of the price range for us mere wage earners for centuries.

[Euclid]

BaltACD

The only thing that is wanted is the autonomus money machine.  All it does is create money without the need for capital expenditure or maintenance expenditures.  

An autonomous money making machine would be very popular except it would create massive inflation.  But in any case, autonomous trains, while they may lower operating costs, they are hardly something that can done without capital expenditure or maintenance. 

[BaltACD]

The only thing that is wanted is the autonomus money machine.  All it does is create money without the need for capital expenditure or maintenance expenditures.  

[Euclid]

While I say that loose car railroading is a fundamental obstruction to technological upgrades of rolling stock standard components; I should clarify that I also think that replacing loose car operations with dedicated trainsets is just as improbable as the rolling stock upgrades.  Adding automatic parking brakes is equally improbable, except for the likelihood of having them forced onto the industry by government mandate.  

 

As I mentioned, the conversion to autonomous trains is the most likely improvement that I see.  For trains, just the operating function alone is a walk in the woods compared to autonomous trucks or private automobiles.  The big challenge that autonomous operation poses for railroads is in the programing that can process and correctly respond to all of the operating requirements as a train moves over each division.  I am referring to the train control provided by the dispatcher such as meeting other trains, crossing over, etc.  Even if this was all programed in prior to running the train, it will all be subject to changes over the progress of the run.  Much of these changes cannot be anticipated, so the computer will have to play a giant chess game as the train moves over the road.   

[BaltACD]

tree68

 

Euclid

I only cite the need for getting away from loose car railroading because it is a fundamental necessity to unblock many technological improvements.  

There are many who agree with you, however there is still a lot of loose care railroading.  I think the rule of thumb is one railroad car translates to three trucks.  The trucking industry is having problems with current capacity - putting three hundred more trucks on the road per 100 car manifest freight is probsbly a logistical impossibility.

And, when you get down to it, even contrainer traffic is a form of loose car reailroading.  

For the railroads - Intermodal with both trailers and containers has become the loose car railroad network of the 40's and 50's - replacing the 36 foot and 40 foot box cars of that era.  Many of the commodities that were loose cars in those long gone era's no longer exist in the 21st Century - coal for home heating, autos in boxcars, grain in box cars and a whole host of others.

Some of what were loose car commodities in the era gone are now 'bulk' commodity unit train type commodities in the 21st Century - grain in trainload lots of 100 ton capacity covered hoppers, vehicles in multi-level auto racks are two that spring to mind.

[tree68]

Euclid

I only cite the need for getting away from loose car railroading because it is a fundamental necessity to unblock many technological improvements. 

There are many who agree with you, however there is still a lot of loose care railroading.  I think the rule of thumb is one railroad car translates to three trucks.  The trucking industry is having problems with current capacity - putting three hundred more trucks on the road per 100 car manifest freight is probsbly a logistical impossibility.

And, when you get down to it, even contrainer traffic is a form of loose car reailroading.  

[Euclid]

I don’t think there will be any technological improvements to rolling stock if the improvements are such that they require all cars to have them in order to be operationally compatible.  This includes improvements such as ECP brakes, changes in couplers, and automatic parking brakes.

 

I only cite the need for getting away from loose car railroading because it is a fundamental necessity to unblock many technological improvements.  That is not because the improvements cannot work with loose car railroading, but rather because the standardization of loose car operation requires a full changeover to new equipment all at once in order to maintain compatibility. 

 

The standardization has frozen the technological practice for better or for worse.   The problem is the minute you change one car to a new system that is incompatible with the existing standard, the converted car cannot be used until the rest are converted.  That is because every car in the standard system is expected to be compatible with all other cars in the standard system.  

 

So, it is not the cost of the new equipment that is the main issue.  It is the cost of the logistics and operating delays caused by the disruption of changing all of the nationally standardized cars to a new standard.  To keep the cost of that disruption down, the work of conversion has to be done very fast.

 

It is similar to fully operational early railroads deciding to change their gage over the course of just one weekend in order to cause the least complications to their continuous operations.  That same principle would apply today for improvements such as converting to ECP brakes.  It applied to earlier improvements such as converting to automatic couplers and air brakes.  There was a long transition period in which trains operated with some cars having air brakes and some without. 

 

In this state of standardization freeze, the only way a radical improvement can be justified is by government mandate.  And that can only be triggered by a large amount of serious mishaps that injure or kill people.  The closest current issue to triggering that sort of response is the Canadian government pushing the need for automatic parking brakes.  They seem to imply that a mandate for the parking brakes is coming unless someone can figure out how to end the rash of runaway trains in Canada. 

 

A need for safety is also being offered as the basis for this improvement of hands-free couplers.  This proposal is coming from the FRA, so it also has the implication of a mandate attached to it.  The FRA says that this improvement is needed because implementation of the device will eliminate the need for crewmembers to access unsafe areas of the train to perform tasks, such as coupling and uncoupling, opening and closing knuckles, connecting air and electrical lines, etc.   So, once again, safety is leveraging a government call for technological improvement. 

 

One big improvement that does not suffer from the need for compatibility of rolling stock is autonomous freight trains.  Railroad management seems to be considerably interested in that new concept.  The people marketing that idea will have to spend a lot of development effort on the operational details that vary among different trains.  They will do that because of the business potential of selling the systems to the industry.  It will be interesting to see what they come up with.   

[Bruce Kelly]

Remote uncoupling between cars could be many years away, if ever. But remote uncoupling of helper locomotives from trains has already been a thing for more than a decade. It's called Helper Link.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/devights/3697085292

http://burningjournal.activeboard.com/mobile.spark?p=topic&topic=40697885

 

 

[SD60MAC9500]

 

Euclid

There is one issue about this hands-free “Tri-Coupler” being proposed by the FRA that I don’t see addressed.  That is the alignment of the car couplers.  Car couplers can become misaligned to the point where they will fail to make coupling when shoved together.  Then some manual labor is necessary to adjust one or both coupler positions, and try the coupling again. 

 

For the Tri-Coupler concept description, the following features are needed:

 

1)   Remote control angle cock.

2)   Remote control pin lifter.

3)   Automatic coupler for the brake pipe air connection.

4)   Automatic coupler for the electrical connection. 

 

Overall, the point is to keep workers away from the dangerous proximity to the coupler operation. 

 

But, what about misaligned car couplers?  How do you automate the manual labor needed to adjust a car coupler position before coupling, if necessary?

 

The real issue is.. How do you plan on getting the 1.64 Milllion railcars that are privately owned equipped with this tri-coupler?

 

 

[Backshop]

It's not that it can't be done.  It's that it can't be done economically.  You'd have to retrofit hundreds of thousands of cars.

[pennytrains]

Lasers and archimedes screws.  That's about the only way I can think of to make couplers smart.   They have automated docking systems on unmanned supply vehicles arriving at the ISS.  Why not automatically adjusting couplers?

[Euclid]

There is one issue about this hands-free “Tri-Coupler” being proposed by the FRA that I don’t see addressed.  That is the alignment of the car couplers.  Car couplers can become misaligned to the point where they will fail to make coupling when shoved together.  Then some manual labor is necessary to adjust one or both coupler positions, and try the coupling again. 

 

For the Tri-Coupler concept description, the following features are needed:

 

1)   Remote control angle cock.

2)   Remote control pin lifter.

3)   Automatic coupler for the brake pipe air connection.

4)   Automatic coupler for the electrical connection. 

 

Overall, the point is to keep workers away from the dangerous proximity to the coupler operation. 

 

But, what about misaligned car couplers?  How do you automate the manual labor needed to adjust a car coupler position before coupling, if necessary?

[pennytrains]

We're heading towards autonomous intelligent driverless trucks.  Probably similar systems in railroading too.  If cars and trucks, and even short strings of trucks, can be made to avoid one another on roads and highways, the same can be done with short consists of motorized railbourne containers or cars that carry shipments too heavy for asphalt.  At that point you achieve a fully automated system and the need for motive power diminishes.  Of course, all this works best on an overhead power configuration running with the pants up.

[BaltACD]

SD60MAC9500

One tenet of PSR was suppose to be the simplification of the loose car network. Hence driving margins higher on manifest traffic..Which modal competitive traffic can't provide.

PSR is actively working for the ultimate simplification of the loose car network - its elimination on Class 1's.  If their service can drive customers to other forms of transportation PSR will have achieved its real goal.

[SD60MAC9500]

 

tree68

We're a long way from getting rid of loose car railroading.  Unless you want to get rid of a lot of the business railroads currently do.  The Class 1's have largely moved loose car handling into the realm of shortlines, but those cars still have to go from point A to point B, via the Class 1's.  Virtually all railroading, with the exception of true unit trains, like coal, coke, or certain liquids, is still loose car - even intermodal.

 

I'll go even deeper.. While the C1's hate to switch cars. Loose car (carload freight in general) is still the traffic that provides the highest margins. Intermodal is expensive due to all the moving parts involved with it; Dray cost, lift cost, switching cost, chassis availability, and other high operational cost.. Last but not least, because intermodal is modal competitive means it produces less revenue.

One tenet of PSR was suppose to be the simplification of the loose car network. Hence driving margins higher on manifest traffic..Which modal competitive traffic can't provide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[[e-mail]]

From a Union standpoint who pushes the button to opeearate automatic uncoulpler? Engineer or Conductor? Can't have cross crafting with seperate unions BLE vs TCU

[BEAUSABRE]

Back in the late Sixties, NJ Transit (or whatever it was called then) put on an exhibition of their new Jersey Arrow MU cars. As a teen model railroader/railfan, that settled what I was doing that Saturday. I was impressed - modern, clean, comfortable, air conditioned - a far cry from the communter coaches I knew. But the thing that impressed me the most was that it had true automatic couplers. A rectangular box was beneath the knuckles, containing the brake pipe, signal pipe and MU couplings. The next Friday, when I was at the model railroad club, I told people what my impressions of the new cars were and I must have been very enthusiastic about the couplers. One of the old heads - I mean he was on a first name basis with Bill Walthers and Al Kalmbach - who had grown up riding interurbans in Ohio in the Thirties informed us that the technology was nothing new and he used to ride on cars equipped with such devices. So the technical problems have long since been solved. However, even at my tender age, I realized that equipping well over a million cars continent wide would be hugely expensive. My older friend pointed out that adoption of such a system as standard would be the biggest change to railroad cars since the Safety Appliance Act, and it would probably take a similar mandate to achieve. 

[Overmod]

Various quite constructable designs capable of this have existed for over a century -- consider how easy it would be to make a Scharfenberg coupler remotely operable.

If you have the 220V trainline for ECP, a two-motor system would be reasonably hackproof: one motor swings the 'coupler servo' into position and locks it; then the coupler servo manipulates the cut lever as brake foundations are actuated independently of the manual 'securement'

I believe the Europeans have some cockamamie overdesigned automatic coupler that could be designed to separate blocks of cars, including autonomous railcars if anyone wants to throw money at, or down a hole regarding, that 'potential market segment'.

[tree68]

We're a long way from getting rid of loose car railroading.  Unless you want to get rid of a lot of the business railroads currently do.  The Class 1's have largely moved loose car handling into the realm of shortlines, but those cars still have to go from point A to point B, via the Class 1's.  Virtually all railroading, with the exception of true unit trains, like coal, coke, or certain liquids, is still loose car - even intermodal.

As for automatic uncoupling - one VERY important safety feature of the current arrangement is that if a brake hose parts, it dumps the emergency brake application.  You have to find a way to maintain that functionality while at the same time alowing for Lionel-like automatic uncoupling.

The current arrangement is a vast improvement over link-and-pin, or even European buffers (which is really just link and pin).  It's reasonably simple, and it works.  As we've seen with discussions of ECP, adding a level of complexity in the form of remote control of anything, is a stumbling block few want to tackle.

[Euclid]

In regard to the hands-free couplers:

 

Also needed would be a remote controlled angle cock to complete the air coupler functionality.  Also, I cannot see the details of the air/electric coupler, but when its two halves are coupled, the two halves must be locked into perfect alignment with each other, in order to assure the integrity of the air/electrical connections.  So each air/electric coupler must be mounted to the car coupler on a flexible mechanism that allows the air/electric coupler to pivot on both a horizontal axis, and a vertical axis.  Otherwise there would be enough differential movement in the two car couplers to interfere with the integrity of the air/electric connection. 

 

Moreover, in each car joint, each air/electric coupler, each mounted to its respective car coupler by its dual axis motion linkage, must move at one with its mating air/electric coupler.  So together, the mated pair of air/electric couplers must move as one in a way that allows them to accommodate the constant bouncing and rocking that is jostling both car couplers independently of each other.

 

Also, every time the slack runs in or out, the helical coil springs must compress or extend in order to accommodate that slack motion, so the air/electric couplers stay pressed firmly together.  Also the spring pressure will change as the springs are compressed or released to extend.  The spring force cannot be allowed to rise too high or fall too low.   

 

All of these mechanical relationships strike me as being tricky to get right, and maybe tricky to maintain so the mechanism remains reliable. 

[Euclid]

jeffhergert

I doubt with current equipment and operations that it will ever be "worth it."  It's something that might be more viable when equipment and operations are almost entirely semi-permanently coupled train sets that rarely uncouple. Jeff

Yes I agree that something like these hands-free couplings, ECP brakes, or automatic parking brakes will never be adopted for loose-car railroading.  This is because every such improvement will need to be applied to every car in a short time, and those cars will vary in how much benefit comes from the improvement.  

Once loose car railroading starts to give way to dedicated trainsets, that opens the door to vast improvements such as ECP brakes, powered train securement, derailment detectors, and trains without slack. 

[Lithonia Operator]

jeffhergert

Sometimes it isn't whether something can be done, but is it worth it?

Obviously, so far, it hasn't.  I doubt with current equipment and operations that it will ever be "worth it." 

 

I agree. A lot of cars to retrofit ...

[jeffhergert]

A lot of schemes have been proposed over the years.  Sometimes it isn't whether something can be done, but is it worth it?

Obviously, so far, it hasn't.  I doubt with current equipment and operations that it will ever be "worth it."  It's something that might be more viable when equipment and operations are almost entirely semi-permanently coupled train sets that rarely uncouple.

Jeff

 

[Euclid]

CSSHEGEWISCH

There is one minor issue that you failed to address.  How would you make or break the air line connections remotely?

 

The “Tri-Coupler" makes the air brake pipe connection when the couplers are pushed together to make the coupling.  It then breaks the air connection when the coupler breaks its coupling connection.  It breaks the coupling connection when the coupler pin is pulled as it does with standard practice today.  The only extra feature that is needed is a remote control to pull the pin instead of using the existing manual pin lifter lever. 

 

The pin could be lifted by a person on the ground or by someone in the cab. 

 

If you look at the illustration of the Tri-Coupler, you can see the air coupling on top.  You can see the plug panel with air ports and electrical connections.  It is mounted on compression springs, which load as the knuckle coupler makes, and thus hold and maintain the integrity of the air connection. 

 

You can also see the cone on one side and a corresponding pin on the opposite side.  When cars are coupled, the pins enter the cones.  That feature/claim goes back at least 100 years.  It is used on some transit couplers.  The pins and cones are needed to gather the air couplers into perfect alignment of the air/electrical connections. 

 

The car couplers themselves also have similar guide features to gather the couplers into alignment when being pushed together during coupling operations. 

 

From the link:

 

Opportunity/Problem: 

The development of the Advanced Tri-Coupler was in response to the need for a knuckle coupler capable of performing both an air (for brake lines) and electrical (required for ECP brake systems) connection, as the process for coupling and uncoupling cars can be both hazardous and time consuming when performed manually.

 

Description: 

 

Further field testing of the Advanced Tri-Coupler prototype is being conducted to evaluate its reliability when subjected to on-track and temperature extremes. The device provides automatic mechanical, pneumatic (brake pipe) and electrical (electronically controlled pneumatic brake) coupling using the current F-type coupler.

 

Objective(s):

 

• Test and verify the functionality and environmental robustness of the Tri-Coupler design

 

Rail Impact:

 

• Implementation of the device will eliminate the need for crewmembers to access unsafe areas of the train to perform tasks, such as coupling and uncoupling, opening and closing knuckles, connecting air and electrical lines, etc. 

[[e-mail]]

Transit trains have airlines built into the coupling knuckles.I believe that the FRA website deals with this

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

There is one minor issue that you failed to address.  How would you make or break the air line connections remotely?

[anglecock]

It works in model trains so why not in real life?  Lionel had a system that pushed the pins apart and detached the cars. What I am proposing here is that there would be a magnectic device that would uncouple cars and a control panel at the head end were the engineer would type in the car number and detatch the car. I know that the FRA has plans in the works on their website for this.. https://railroads.dot.gov/rolling-stock/current-projects/advanced-tri-coupler