Whats the biggest pain to deal with in railroading today? I'd like to split this into 2 sections.
#1 on the operating trains, mechanical, electrical, maintanance etc,,, basically blue collar side.
#2 on the white collar side of operating the business.
Modeling the "Fargo Area Rapid Transit" in O scale 3 rail.
The answer is probably right up the middle: balancing your two sections!
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The biggest pains, eh?
TRAINMEN & ENGINEERS: Accurate train lineups. For employees working in pool freight service where crews work first-in/first-out, it is often difficult to figure out when an employee is going to work. Example: at 2100 a guy learns his board standing and train lineup either by telephone or by home computer. The figures suggest that he stands for an 0800 call the next morning. At 2230 it's lights-out. Ninety minutes later the phone rings with a call to go to work. That kind of unpredictability is completely inexcusable!
TRAIN DISPATCHERS: Mixing heavy, underpowered, yet more profitable manifest traffic (trains that are moving with minimal horsepower per trailing ton) with overpowered, less profitable prestige traffic like piggybacks and doublestacks. Throw in a few unit grain, unit ore, and unit coal trains into the mix, plus an Amtrak schedule or two, and the job becomes pretty difficult. If all trains were limited to 50-mph and powered-up about the same it would cause a supremem service reliability performance that most managements couldn't handle.
THE FANTASY: Class 1 railroads like to brag that they have a 92% locomotive availability, and that very well may be so. But consider this: that 92% availability figure suggests that for every three trains out there - one powered by a 3-unit consist, another by a 3-unit consist, and yet another with a 4-unit consist - one of those trains likely has a unit that is about to go "piston-in-prarie." And if the train with the rock bottom horsepower per trailing ton is the train that loses a unit due to low oil, ground relay, turbocharger seizure, cooling fan failure, fluid pump failures, plugged filters, or a whole host of other maladies the whole railroad is sewn up. With each class 1 having hundreds of road locomotives in storage due to the recession and diesel fuel being priced at half of what it was last year, there's no excuse for powering any freight train razor thin.
Bob-Fryml'The biggest pains, eh?' TRAIN DISPATCHERS: Mixing heavy, underpowered, yet more profitable manifest traffic (trains that are moving with minimal horsepower per trailing ton) with overpowered, less profitable prestige traffic like piggybacks and doublestacks. Throw in a few unit grain, unit ore, and unit coal trains into the mix, plus an Amtrak schedule or two, and the job becomes pretty difficult. If all trains were limited to 50-mph and powered-up about the same it would cause a supremem service reliability performance that most managements couldn't handle.
'The biggest pains, eh?'
Are you saying that dispatchers are difficult to deal with because they make these decisions to combine different manifest and thus reek havoc on the system or that the dispatcher job is difficult to do?
When I was a dispatcher, I didn't have say in the amount of power on a train nor did I have say in what made up the consist. I was only responsible for getting a train from point A to point B. Yes, sometimes trains, like Amtrak, took precedence for getting the main, but I was more worried about getting a crew to their destinations before they hogged it.
As far as trains being limited to 50 mph and powered the same, while that sounds reasonable, it can't happen due to track conditions and what would be a very bad practice of limiting how many cars your train is going to pull which translates into profit margins. After all, isn't it that profit margin that drives any business.The more you pull, the more you make. Of course, I am sure it is more like metric ton/mile more than the number of cars per train. (I really need to go back to school and study economics.)
It also seems your point of view is that management, if presented with a perfectly running system wouldn't know what to do with themselves. If there were such a system that could be realistically employed, I am sure management would be very thin as so many of them wouldn't be needed.
I am interested in how how trains are powered. At the power desk where I worked, that person decided not just how much power to put on a train, with terrain and percentage of grades being some of the factors in those decisions, but also how to get power back to where it was needed. I am glad I could just focus on dispatching. What else do the power people have to consider?
Do the dispatchers were you work, (worked) chose the power? Did they call the crew? We had to keep track of crews and then go to the crew caller and say, call a crew for this train. But I don't think that was the way it worked at the other railroads.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts to the posting.
tina
Now this is getting beyond griping, and so is becoming a little more interesting -
Which comes first - the chicken or the egg - I mean, the 'power assignment' or the train make-up and tonnage ?
To illustrate - Suppose the service level for a certain manifest / general freight train is determined to justify assigning about 2.0 HP/ Gross Trailing Ton so that it can get over the division in an appropriate time. [For context, that would be good for about 58 MPH on a straight and level track, 22.6 MPH on a 1.0 per cent grade that is compensated for curvature, and 12.7 MPH on a similar 2.0 per cent grade - based on Al Krug's ''Train Forces Calculator'' at - http://www.alkrug.vcn.com/rrfacts/RRForcesCalc.html ].
Suppose further that this train typically runs at about 6,000 gross tons trailing, but that can vary by plus-or-minus as much as 2,000 tons on any day, depending on the traffic available, the day of the week, the economy, etc. So this train would typically need 12,000 HP = 4 SD40's or equivalent - but that could vary with the tonnage by 4,000 HP, or from 8,000 to 16,000 HP - note too that 'fractions of units' would now be likely required to get to the exact power level.
Now, does the Power Desk just say, ''Here's your 4 SD40s, put whatever you want behind them, but I've given you enough for normal train'', or does he consult with the YardMaster [or whomever] first to see what that day's train is going to look like for tonnage ? And how can the YM know that figure fairly closely very far in advance, before the all the connecting and local trains have come in and their 'new' cars have been entered and weighed, until the train is actually made up and ready to go ? Or does the YM just add cars - giving due regard to those with priority, such as those with 'fence posts' [inside joke for Johnny Deggesty] - until he reaches the magic figure of 6,000 tons or so, then that's it ?
Or instead, does the YM call the Power Desk a few hours in advance and say, ''AL-PI looks like it'll be about 7,000 tons today, so I'll need an extra unit if you can'', and then the Power Desk guy has to scramble to fill that unexpected need ?
I'm sure you get the picture of what I'm trying to ask here. Any corrections and insights will be appreciated.
- Paul North.
I think Paul, the answer is "D" all the above. All situations can happen on any given railroad on any given division on any given day. Theoretically there is the "marketed" train: up to so much tonnage on a given schedule and a consitant daily power assignement. Then there is the merchandise mixed, which could be under marketing or not but more likely is composed of what ever shows up each day; hopefully this can be predicted 12 to 24 hours in advance and enough power is made available or because the reverse move may need the power, a decsion is made. Units that go bad enroute or are delayed or are otherwise sidelined or red tagged at a given terminal can of course change everything in one minute. Trainmasters, Road Foreman of Engines,Yardmasters, Superintendents, dispatachers, chief dispatchers, Master Mechanics (or whoever is charged with maintaining and assigning a locomotive fleet) all have to sometime or somehow confer and concur about the next 24hours every hour.
henry6I think Paul, the answer is "D" all the above. All situations can happen on any given railroad on any given division on any given day. Theoretically there is the "marketed" train: up to so much tonnage on a given schedule and a consitant daily power assignement. Then there is the merchandise mixed, which could be under marketing or not but more likely is composed of what ever shows up each day; hopefully this can be predicted 12 to 24 hours in advance and enough power is made available or because the reverse move may need the power, a decsion is made. Units that go bad enroute or are delayed or are otherwise sidelined or red tagged at a given terminal can of course change everything in one minute. Trainmasters, Road Foreman of Engines,Yardmasters, Superintendents, dispatachers, chief dispatchers, Master Mechanics (or whoever is charged with maintaining and assigning a locomotive fleet) all have to sometime or somehow confer and concur about the next 24hours every hour.
I do remember there was lots of discussion between the Chief Dispatcher, the power guy and the yard masters and it was constant. I also know that what made a dispatcher successful was the ability to think 24 hours ahead. My husband, then my fiance, would go in early just so he could get a grasp of what his segment had been doing, was going to do as soon as he got on the desk, and what the trains in his section needed to do by end of the next dispatcher's shift. I was really amazed by his ability to grasp all that. Of course, I still find him amazing.
I wasn't aware of the formulas used to calculate the amount of power needed. Perhaps if I would have grasped all this better back then, I would have lasted more than two months on the desk. I do know that if I had continued to remain on the desk, my piece of the railroad was going to grind to a halt. It really is a lot more complicated than just getting trains from point A to point B.
Thanks all, this is getting very interesting and enjoyable.
And to get back to original posting, what I found a pain to contend with was the service laws. While they appear to protect the rest of the crews, (dispatchers included,) it wasn't uncommon to find some of that rest spent traveling between your hogged out train and your hotel, which naturally cut into your sleep.
Bob-FrymlTHE FANTASY: Class 1 railroads like to brag that they have a 92% locomotive availability, and that very well may be so. But consider this: that 92% availability figure suggests that for every three trains out there - one powered by a 3-unit consist, another by a 3-unit consist, and yet another with a 4-unit consist - one of those trains likely has a unit that is about to go "piston-in-prarie." And if the train with the rock bottom horsepower per trailing ton is the train that loses a unit due to low oil, ground relay, turbocharger seizure, cooling fan failure, fluid pump failures, plugged filters, or a whole host of other maladies the whole railroad is sewn up. With each class 1 having hundreds of road locomotives in storage due to the recession and diesel fuel being priced at half of what it was last year, there's no excuse for powering any freight train razor thin.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
'TOL' = 'Track Occupancy Light' = means it's 'ON' when it shouldn't be on the dispatcher's console, which really means that the signal system is either reacting to something similar to a train being there, or is malfunctioning in some other mysterious way.
As others have said - ''Moving the cars sholdn't have to be a big project unto itself''; ''Every day's an adventure''; and of course, ''It's not just a job - it's an adventure''. Oh, yeah . . .
- PDN.
Does the policy of getting a locomotove assigments reflect on time performance?
oltmanndBob-FrymlTHE FANTASY: Class 1 railroads like to brag that they have a 92% locomotive availability, and that very well may be so. But consider this: that 92% availability figure suggests that for every three trains out there - one powered by a 3-unit consist, another by a 3-unit consist, and yet another with a 4-unit consist - one of those trains likely has a unit that is about to go "piston-in-prarie." And if the train with the rock bottom horsepower per trailing ton is the train that loses a unit due to low oil, ground relay, turbocharger seizure, cooling fan failure, fluid pump failures, plugged filters, or a whole host of other maladies the whole railroad is sewn up. With each class 1 having hundreds of road locomotives in storage due to the recession and diesel fuel being priced at half of what it was last year, there's no excuse for powering any freight train razor thin. It ain't just the choo-choos. It's everything the conks out unexpectedly. Signals, track, frt cars, vehicles, employees, computers, et.al. The RR is full of these random disasters and each has a impact on operations but there is nobody who know what the sensitivity of the network is to the frequency and duration of these "disasters". We just cope with them as "business as usual" not knowing how much improvement in reliability would get us on the network performance end. Ho-hum, another TOL, burst air hose, stop for a hot box detector.....
All of the failures listed by "oltmannd" do happen, but power failures on line of road are by far and away the most frequent. If, during these times of stored units, the secondary trains were powered up sufficiently to where they could afford to lose a unit due to mechanical failure and still keep moving, the total operation would run a lot smoother.
mbkcs Bob-Fryml 'The biggest pains, eh?' TRAIN DISPATCHERS: Mixing heavy, underpowered, yet more profitable manifest traffic (trains that are moving with minimal horsepower per trailing ton) with overpowered, less profitable prestige traffic like piggybacks and doublestacks. Throw in a few unit grain, unit ore, and unit coal trains into the mix, plus an Amtrak schedule or two, and the job becomes pretty difficult. If all trains were limited to 50-mph and powered-up about the same it would cause a supremem service reliability performance that most managements couldn't handle. Are you saying that dispatchers are difficult to deal with because they make these decisions to combine different manifest and thus reek havoc on the system or that the dispatcher job is difficult to do? ANSWER: The train dispatcher's job is difficult to do. Train dispatchers don't dictate power requirements, they just inherit what various service design departments, terminal managers, and operations control people cobble together. When I was a dispatcher, I didn't have say in the amount of power on a train nor did I have say in what made up the consist. I was only responsible for getting a train from point A to point B. Yes, sometimes trains, like Amtrak, took precedence for getting the main, but I was more worried about getting a crew to their destinations before they hogged it. COMMENT: Exactly true! As far as trains being limited to 50 mph and powered the same, while that sounds reasonable, it can't happen due to track conditions and what would be a very bad practice of limiting how many cars your train is going to pull which translates into profit margins. After all, isn't it that profit margin that drives any business.The more you pull, the more you make. Of course, I am sure it is more like metric ton/mile more than the number of cars per train. (I really need to go back to school and study economics.) ANSWER: The profit motive is a wonderful incentive, and I don't deny its validity; but, sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money. Each time a freight operating with razor thin horsepower per trailing ton ratios (HP/TT) makes it from origin to destination, the railroad wins one. My point is that when you figure that maybe as many as a third of the freight trains we see are experiencing some kind of power trouble, if that razor thin guy goes "piston-in-prarie," he's going to take maybe three to five trains down the "Hoglaw Toilet" with him. Now throw in the resultant waste of fuel due to units idling unnecessarily, lost equipment productivity, additional crew overtime, additional crew manning costs, and lost customer goodwill, and you'll begin to understand that the failures to anticipate the what may be the biggest category of on-line breakdowns is inexcusable. It also seems your point of view is that management, if presented with a perfectly running system wouldn't know what to do with themselves. If there were such a system that could be realistically employed, I am sure management would be very thin as so many of them wouldn't be needed. I am interested in how how trains are powered. At the power desk where I worked, that person decided not just how much power to put on a train, with terrain and percentage of grades being some of the factors in those decisions, but also how to get power back to where it was needed. I am glad I could just focus on dispatching. What else do the power people have to consider? ANSWER: When Company policy dictates that a specific train symbol shall not exceed a certain maximum HP/TT, woe be the manager who violates that policy. He better have a good reason why he's violating the ancient, sacred, voodoo tenets of the Operating Department because he's putting his career on the line. Same with the poor "train management guy" working in a warm, far-off bunker who limits train size due to a forecast of severe below zero weather. A 125-car unit coal train composed of brand new equipment may not experience any air brake problems, but the 125-car mixed merchandise surely will. There will be microleaks throughout the trainline and it will be difficult to keep the air pumped up. Set the brakes once while descending a long grade, and the locomotive may never be able to pump enough air to get the brakes to release. That train stops and so does everyone else behind him. If the guy orders some train size reductions to 75-cars, the forecasted weather hits, and the trains experience minimum problems, his decision is disdainfully dismissed as being "lucky." If, however, the weather suddenly takes a turn for the better and the guy has already sent out those smaller sized trains, he'll be mightily chastised and earn a viscious "verbal cauterization" of his hemorrhoids. But if he honors the standard playbook, the weather gets bitterly cold, trains freeze up, and hours-of-service relief costs skyrocket, NOBODY but NOBODY in train management will every be blamed for not anticipating the subsequent service failures. What a way to manage a railroad, huh? Do the dispatchers were you work, (worked) chose the power? Did they call the crew? We had to keep track of crews and then go to the crew caller and say, call a crew for this train. But I don't think that was the way it worked at the other railroads. ANSWER: Train dispatchers do not choose power. Some Operations Control type or a far off Power Desk makes that decision. Train dispatchers do prompt crew callers to call people to work at standard crew change locations or for Hours-of-Service relief. Thank you for sharing your thoughts to the posting. ANSWER: You're welcome. And I apologize for my delicate, politically correct, and diplomatically sensitive answers.
Bob-Fryml 'The biggest pains, eh?' TRAIN DISPATCHERS: Mixing heavy, underpowered, yet more profitable manifest traffic (trains that are moving with minimal horsepower per trailing ton) with overpowered, less profitable prestige traffic like piggybacks and doublestacks. Throw in a few unit grain, unit ore, and unit coal trains into the mix, plus an Amtrak schedule or two, and the job becomes pretty difficult. If all trains were limited to 50-mph and powered-up about the same it would cause a supremem service reliability performance that most managements couldn't handle.
ANSWER: The train dispatcher's job is difficult to do. Train dispatchers don't dictate power requirements, they just inherit what various service design departments, terminal managers, and operations control people cobble together.
COMMENT: Exactly true!
ANSWER: The profit motive is a wonderful incentive, and I don't deny its validity; but, sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money. Each time a freight operating with razor thin horsepower per trailing ton ratios (HP/TT) makes it from origin to destination, the railroad wins one. My point is that when you figure that maybe as many as a third of the freight trains we see are experiencing some kind of power trouble, if that razor thin guy goes "piston-in-prarie," he's going to take maybe three to five trains down the "Hoglaw Toilet" with him. Now throw in the resultant waste of fuel due to units idling unnecessarily, lost equipment productivity, additional crew overtime, additional crew manning costs, and lost customer goodwill, and you'll begin to understand that the failures to anticipate the what may be the biggest category of on-line breakdowns is inexcusable.
ANSWER: When Company policy dictates that a specific train symbol shall not exceed a certain maximum HP/TT, woe be the manager who violates that policy. He better have a good reason why he's violating the ancient, sacred, voodoo tenets of the Operating Department because he's putting his career on the line.
Same with the poor "train management guy" working in a warm, far-off bunker who limits train size due to a forecast of severe below zero weather. A 125-car unit coal train composed of brand new equipment may not experience any air brake problems, but the 125-car mixed merchandise surely will. There will be microleaks throughout the trainline and it will be difficult to keep the air pumped up. Set the brakes once while descending a long grade, and the locomotive may never be able to pump enough air to get the brakes to release. That train stops and so does everyone else behind him. If the guy orders some train size reductions to 75-cars, the forecasted weather hits, and the trains experience minimum problems, his decision is disdainfully dismissed as being "lucky."
If, however, the weather suddenly takes a turn for the better and the guy has already sent out those smaller sized trains, he'll be mightily chastised and earn a viscious "verbal cauterization" of his hemorrhoids.
But if he honors the standard playbook, the weather gets bitterly cold, trains freeze up, and hours-of-service relief costs skyrocket, NOBODY but NOBODY in train management will every be blamed for not anticipating the subsequent service failures.
What a way to manage a railroad, huh?
ANSWER: Train dispatchers do not choose power. Some Operations Control type or a far off Power Desk makes that decision. Train dispatchers do prompt crew callers to call people to work at standard crew change locations or for Hours-of-Service relief.
ANSWER: You're welcome. And I apologize for my delicate, politically correct, and diplomatically sensitive answers.
Everyone has commented on a number of problem areas of railroading, however, what has been discussed thus far is more about the structural problems of the industry, not the pain in th A..
The PIA is the air hose.....when it bursts, the train stops .... when it comes uncoupled the train stops .... when the train stops the Dispatcher has to start replaning the railroad, when the train stops the train crew has to get on the ground and find out why the train stopped. A pain for all concerned. Routine, but a pain!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
BaltACDThe PIA is the air hose
I commented about this in another thread several months ago. I observed that it didn't deem like a good idea to run 15,000 ton trains with the brakes connected together with cutting edge 19th Century technology. Surprisingly no one jumped in with a complete history of the hose and its' coupling (gladhand). Maybe this time.
AgentKid
So shovel the coal, let this rattler roll.
"A Train is a Place Going Somewhere" CP Rail Public Timetable
"O. S. Irricana"
. . . __ . ______
Why is the age of the technology relevant? The flanged wheel on the rail is even older. Agriculture was invented 6,000 years ago, I think.
What's relevant to me is whether it does the job economically. And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input.
RWM
Railway ManWhy is the age of the technology relevant? The flanged wheel on the rail is even older. Agriculture was invented 6,000 years ago, I think. What's relevant to me is whether it does the job economically. And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input. RWM
Bob-FrymlAll of the failures listed by "oltmannd" do happen, but power failures on line of road are by far and away the most frequent. If, during these times of stored units, the secondary trains were powered up sufficiently to where they could afford to lose a unit due to mechanical failure and still keep moving, the total operation would run a lot smoother.
Not on my RR. Here's a recent summary of the "bad things" that caused significant delay that were reported for a day:
3 - car train line failures
2 - kickers
one each of:
yard derailment
hand brake left on - car set out
WILD detector - car set out
TOL
weather/washout/mudslide
broken rail
lading not secured
EOT failure
hot wheel - no defect
locomotive dyn brk failure
locomotive air brake failure.
Only 2 of 16 are locomotive related. 9 of 16 are potentially air brake related.
Biggest pain in railroading? Since professional railroaders have dubbed us "foamers", then perhaps it is us!
What's a ''car train line failure'' ? [as in oltmannd's post above]
Is it the same as - or different/ more than - an ordinary air hose 'gladhand' coupling becoming separated for some reason ?
And if that's what it is, then these statistics would lend some support to the previous post above that this is an area of the railroad technology that could stand some improvement . . .
Nor on mine. I don't have a nice breakdown, but signal failures, weather issues (including washouts, downed trees, mudslides), grade-crossing collisions, tripped detectors, and temporary speed reductions are the overwhelming cause of train delay. Locomotives are really very reliable now.
Paul_D_North_JrWhat's a ''car train line failure'' ? [as in oltmannd's post above] Is it the same as - or different/ more than - an ordinary air hose 'gladhand' coupling becoming separated for some reason ?
Railway ManAnd I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input.
I find that really amazing. In this time of believing that technology can solve almost all problems I am surprised that no one has been working on an improved system. Every winter from 65/66 to 84/85 my father, while he was a train dispatcher, had stories of failures and delays related in some way to air brake failure. The one single anecdote I recall from these winters is once a superintendent, who actually had been a buddy of my Dad's back when they were both Operator's, said in a way off the record comment after a long spell of -30 degree weather, that they couldn't rum trains any longer than they did back in steam days. And they were using SD40-2's by then.
Admittedly any solution would be as difficult to roll out as this ECB system, but I don't think it would cost as much. And it would have to be an all or nothing proposition, you couldn't just do it for high revenue unit trains.
I enjoyed hearing all the items that can still go wrong on today's railroads. It brought back a lot of memories. My Dad didn't experience many delays caused by mudslides working the East End though, Calgary to Swift Current, SK (insert mp3 file of The Who's "I Can See For Miles" here)
OK, thanks. I wasn't sure if in this context 'train line' was understood broadly enough to include everything from one 'gladhand' to the other, or if instead it is a little narrower to be comprised of the rigid 'brake pipe' [only] portion of that system.
Next question, then: Since those train line failures are 'the largest single cause of train delays' [spoken in the same tones as your local newscasters when reporting on the heinous crimes of the day ] - and that was the general point of your 1st list of 'PITA's' a few posts back, if I understood it correctly - would that then indicate that car trains lines and air brakes need more/ better maintenance than they're now getting - more so than the apparently reliable locomotives ?
Recall that John Kneiling often claimed that one reason that railcars are not reliable - in terms of being able to depend on them to 'complete the mission' [= deliver the cargo without a mechanical failure of some kind] - is that there are so many cars that any reasonable pool of maintenance money is so spread out and diluted among and between them that a high level of maintenance is unlikely and unaffordable. Any truth to that, do you think ?
Railway Man [snip] What's relevant to me is whether it does the job economically. And I don't think anyone is even close to inventing a replacement for the air hose that delivers more economic output for less economic input. RWM
I'm going to try to be a 'devil's advocate' here, though I'm not sure I can pull it off. Nevertheless, here goes:
No question that the air hose does the job [= 'economic output'] - most of the time - pretty darn well, at what is likely the conclusively lowest possible 'first cost' level and with ongoing direct 'maintenance costs' that are pretty hard to beat [= less 'economic input']. But is that the critical - or best - question or criteria to evaluate them with ?
Because what that statement appears to ignore is the indirect costs that are also accrued on account of brake hoses as the result of unnecessary train stops due to'break-aways'/ disconnects, shorter trains due to excessive leakage in cold weather, delays in brake application due to the 'lag' time of the decreased pressure wave propagation from front front to rear, poorer train handling and performance due to a sharper pressure gradient from the front of the train to the rear due to the same cause, and the resultant slack 'run-ins', etc. While these are not direct 'economic inputs', they nevertheless do represent actual costs that are incurred by the conventional air brake hose system technology.
Conversely, other air brake system connectors - such as the fully automatic Scharfenberg* coupler - could provide some 'value-added' benefits and savings, above and beyond the bare minimum of connecting the air brake pipe between 2 cars. [For clarity, note that fully automatic couplings are those that make all connections between the rail vehicles (mechanical, air brake and electrical), without human intervention, in contrast to autocouplers which just handle the mechanical aspects.] To be intellectually objective and honest about this, those potential savings - 'economic outputs' - ought to be taken into account as well.
[EDITED FOR PLACEMENT] * I acknowledge that the Scharfenberg coupler does not have the 'draft' or pulling capacity of the traditional Janney coupler.
Paul_D_North_JrTo be intellectually objective and honest about this, those potential savings - 'economic outputs' ought to be taken into account as well.
Perhaps other freight railroads would take a different view; but CSXT would not be receptive to technology that reduces the amount of force that couplers can withstand, regardless of how intellectually objective and honest the advocates of that technology might be.
Right you are, Jay. Unfortunately, I had to 'log off' before I'd finished formulating and completing my thoughts on this here, as follows - and this venue isn't too kind to 'footnoting' things in quite the way I'd like to or intended [see EDIT above now]. Nevertheless -
Said another way [= acknowledging that I haven't done the best job with my 1st attempt above ], the technology needs to be viewed from a 'holistic' or systems perspective. Focusing on the conceded economics of just the air brake hose misses also taking into account the associated collateral costs that are imposed elsewhere in the cars and the actual operations - such as comparatively frequent disconnects and failures, and 'opportunity cost' of other benefits that are being precluded and passed by because this system can't accommodate them.
On the other hand, that there hasn't been such a movement to a better system effectively says that either -
- The railroads view the present air brake hose technology as optimum, or at least as at an acceptable compromise; or,
- They're not thrilled with it either, but the costs and complexities of any transition to something better are so daunting as to essentially lock them into the present technology, absent a rational method to transition to the next generation - really, the same 'backwards compatibility' problem of computer software, but here in the context of railroad hardware instead.
The glacially slow - but now partially underway - implementation of ECB = Electronically Controlled Brakes by BNSF and NS illustrates most of these points.
Getting a few thousand people to pull in the same direction.
Paul_D_North_JrI wasn't sure if in this context 'train line' was understood broadly enough to include everything from one 'gladhand' to the other, or if instead it is a little narrower to be comprised of the rigid 'brake pipe' [only] portion of that system.
Paul_D_North_Jrand that was the general point of your 1st list of 'PITA's' a few posts back, if I understood it correctly - would that then indicate that car trains lines and air brakes need more/ better maintenance than they're now getting - more so than the apparently reliable locomotives ?
PDN: The only experience I've had is two hoses leaking. Both times it was because the hose was too low and dragged on grade crossings (?), gradually opening a hole in the hose, and finally the locomotives could not hold the air. Trains stopped in front of my home. Drove to the front with car number, brought the conductor back with a new hose which they tied up to a proper height and took conductors back to locomotive, and off the trains went. One hose I got was almost new and maintenance evidently not good as conductor told me same car had another incident 100 miles north of Atlanta.
blue streak 1 Paul_D_North_JrI wasn't sure if in this context 'train line' was understood broadly enough to include everything from one 'gladhand' to the other, or if instead it is a little narrower to be comprised of the rigid 'brake pipe' [only] portion of that system. Paul_D_North_Jrand that was the general point of your 1st list of 'PITA's' a few posts back, if I understood it correctly - would that then indicate that car trains lines and air brakes need more/ better maintenance than they're now getting - more so than the apparently reliable locomotives ? PDN: The only experience I've had is two hoses leaking. Both times it was because the hose was too low and dragged on grade crossings (?), gradually opening a hole in the hose, and finally the locomotives could not hold the air. Trains stopped in front of my home. Drove to the front with car number, brought the conductor back with a new hose which they tied up to a proper height and took conductors back to locomotive, and off the trains went. One hose I got was almost new and maintenance evidently not good as conductor told me same car had another incident 100 miles north of Atlanta.
Add the two instances together and you have the cause of the most common air hose parting on trains. Air hose bracket damaged in some way during switching, doesn't move as the designers intended and thereby comes undone under the right conditions of curvature and slack movement.
If the rail sysetem was only populated by 40 foot box cars and 80 ton hoppers the incidence of parted air hoses would decline dramatically, however, so would the ton miles and profitability of the carriers.
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