Smoke, sparks, fire & scary noises.

[broncoman]

[Often there is a flapper over the intake, held open by a quadrant. Flip the pawl and it shuts off air to the engine. I have seen engines continue to stumble after asphyxiating them, they will suck oil from blower seals, valve guides, anywhere! and keep running!

[Anonymous]

Come to think of it, it is a standard item. There's the ones that are in a vertical riser that turns 90 deg. to a horizontal plane with a circular cross section, and there's the ones that are low profile, a wide plate on top of the blower, with two large butterflys, much like a fireplace damper.

[Randy Stahl]

I remember the first time I saw a "train". I grew up along the East Troy RR. I lived about 100' from the tracks. I remember the electric car , M-15 pulling cuts of cars back and forth between the SOO interchange and East Troy. Us kids mostly knew the train crews pretty well and they knew us and our familys. My grandparents on both sides had property along the RR so I had alot of contact with the little electric RR daily.
In 1972 a RR museum moved to town and free rides for the residents of East Troy was in order. This was my first train ride, North Shore line # 757. All of us kids payed close attention to any "new '" additions to the operations and were pretty exited when something different would show up on the RR. It was quite a few years before we got another train ride , 1976. Free rides !!! This time I was a little older (11) so I knew what was going on. I was disappointed to miss the NSL # 763 , so I had to settle for another ride on the 757. The conductor was a fellow named Don Liestikow, he told us that the cars were staffed by volunteers !!! I was intrigued, it seemed that I could join this group and "work " on the RR. The dues at the time were $10.00 I baled alot of hay that summer and scraped up 10 bucks.. They accepted my money I WAS IN !!!! Now I got free rides all the time!!!! I spent ALOT of time riding the plat forms of the North Shore cars, it never got old. I was allowed to run the cars and was not bad considering I was only 12 years old. The first train I operated was the NSL 411.
I met and became friends with alot of retired railroaders. This became my classroom and I chose my career because of the RR stories and tutalage given me by these fine people. I will always have fond memories of the Milwaukee Electric Ry & Light Co. equipment and the good ol North Shore cars. I chose to be a locomotive electrician at 12 years old because of them, and had all the basics down.
I recently accepted a job with the Montreal Maine and Atlantic RR as a manager of locomotive maintenence. I plan on being there by Oct 1st.
Randy

[jeaton]

Randy

Just can't give up winters. Right? Good luck there and stay in touch.

Jay

[Anonymous]

Out of the freezer and into the cryogenic, stay warm.

That must have been soooo cool to get to actually operate a train when you were a kid. When I was a kid, I came running for every train and could not even imagine that.

[Randy Stahl]

I have many RR stories that are difficult to relate, simply because cleaning up the language is a big job.
When I got my first REAL RR job with the Milwaukee, my coworkers had me terrified of the equipment. I was often sent out to assist the electricians with loadboxing locomotives, this was a scary job. Alot of the time engines were put on the loadbox to find the problems. One such occasion we were loadboxing a Fairbanks, the locomotive was reported smoking and throwing oil.... Typical for a Fairbanks but they wanted the problem solved. Alot of times we would put the FMs out side and put em in throttle 8 to blow the crap out of them. This FM was put on the loadbox and we proceeded to load her up. The cab was full of machinists and was pretty crowded, I was sitting on the floor behind the firemans seat. The FM was doing good in notch 8, all sorts of BIG chunks of carbon blowing out the stacks !! Not long into it the RPMs began increasing.. and increasing. The crowded cab began to empty out as Machinists jumped and ran off the loconmotive. The electrician I was working for pointed and told me to stay put. The engine was clearly running away, I was scared. My journeyman grabbed the CO2 fire extinguesher and calmly walked down the running boards, I couldn't hear him but i could see his mouth moving and not good words were coming out. He pointed the CO2 into the air filters and let it go, the engine RPM dropped off and the locomotive died. I asked him what that was all about , ( here's where you may insert bad words ) he said..."This fine machine is a little wore out and is started sucking lube oil out of the crankcase". Scared the @@@@ out of me !!!
Randy

[jrw249]

Randy,
Did you ever see an engine blow , turbo shatter , flyweel or fan fly apart, etc------.
If so, must have been a horrible experience.

[Randy Stahl]

Fires & other mishaps is the topic of this thread, basically the stuff I remember after all these years, like feeling helpless standing up in the office watching a locomotive roll into the turntable pit after some idiot forgot to set a hand brake, or load boxing a locomotive for a customer while he's standing nearby and blowing up a turbo. you name it I've either seen it or done it. What really makes me jumpy though is getting zapped by my own test equipment. Using a meggar to test for grounds and charging up the AR10 capacitors, then touching the test leads and getting blasted with 1500 volts.
Randy

[Randy Stahl]

Tools of the trade:
On the Milwaukee road we were not issued many tools. The little tool pouch that I had , contained an 8" cresent wrench, a needle nose pliers, a pair of Klien crimpers, 2 screw drivers, one Phillips and one slotted, and a pair of linemans pliers. The test equipment that we were isued consisted of a hand ful of alligator clips, a spool of wire, a lamp socket and a little light bulb, a lantern battery and a doorbell buzzer.
The Milwaukee preferred that when trouble shooting locomotives they be worked dead , I always preferred working live engines but I had to bend to avoid problems. Any problems in control circuits were worked with the doorbell buzzer. You could find most problems with broken wires and bad interlocks quickly and easily. If a low voltage ground was expected it was short work with a 72 volt light bulb connected to ground to locote the problem. The FM locomotives were almost always infested with grounds of one sort or another.
The locomotive shop had a piece of test equipment that was called "the bomber" . This tester had 3 settings: hipot, thump and burn. when a locomotive came in with a ground relay problem the first think you would do is use one of the shop meggars to find out the general condition of the electrical system, sometimes a meggar will find a hard ground with out going any further. If a meggar cannot tell you where the ground is then you move the locomotive into the shop and apply the bomber. The hipot setting works much like a powerful meggar, you still must isolate circuits and narrow down the problem to a specific part of area. The thumper setting sends a high voltage pulse throughout the high voltage system and the problem can usually be heard or seen. The burn setting will do exactly what is says it will do. You will find the problem , but most likely it now cannot be repaired.
The FMs were in bad shape by the time I got there. For many years the high voltage grounds have been repaired by sliding little bits of wood under the offending cabling, by the time I got there the cableing was raised a good 8 " off the generator room floor. They crap would pile up under the cabling and you would just raise it up a bit more to get it off the dirt.It was easy to tell the Milwaukee had little interest in running these engines much longer.
Randy

[Anonymous]

Detroits will suck oil and keep stumbling even with the air intake blocked. I have seen them overspeed before, once in the tight confines of a bilge - pretty scary. It must be a two-stroke thing.

When I was going to school for diesel technology, in an injection class, I learned that the injectors are only putting out about five percent at high idle (maximum rpm,no load). This gives you a pretty good idea of how quickly an engine can possibly take off. It also gives you an idea of how important load testing is to really expose problems ( just because an engine is running at max rpm, is still at a fraction of load).

I think your average guy might be wondering what a meggar is. I know they are used for testing resistances of very high value. The ones that I have seen in the navy were very old and hand cranked.

[adrianspeeder]

Oooooo, a meggar, i would like a picture please.

Adrianspeeder

[ericsp]

If I remember correctly, megger is slang for megohmmeter. According to Electrical Motor Controls, 2nd Edition by Gray Rockis and Glen Mazur (American Technical Publishers, ISBN 0-8269-1675-9), a megohmmeter is "a device that detects insulation deterioration by measuring high resistance values under high test voltage conditions."

[Randy Stahl]

That is correct. My personal meggar is a yokogawa battery model, it can be found in many catalogs on the subject.
Randy

[Anonymous]

So how would you connect a meggar to a circuit to detect a ground fault?

[Randy Stahl]

One lead goes to ground ( locomotive frame ) the other goes to the high voltage, like a bus bar , reverser etc.
Randy

[AlcoRS11Nut]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Limitedclear

QUOTE: Originally posted by AlcoRS11Nut

Any Stories about ALCo's?

They smoke, they leak, they break, they get scrapped. The Alco story...

LC

Ouch....that hurts.[B)] [:D]But what about those ALCo's shortlines use......they can't break that much because if they did the small budget of the RR could they afford to fix them, or could they?

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by M.W. Hemphill

QUOTE: Originally posted by Limitedclear

QUOTE: Originally posted by AlcoRS11Nut

Any Stories about ALCo's?

They smoke, they leak, they break, they get scrapped. The Alco story...

LC

Uh, LC, popularity contests at railfan meets you must not plan to win, do you!

Mark-

It's that darn real world experience. It just kills the fun everytime. Ever had to change a radiator on an RS18u with only two guys and a big forklift?? Oh, yeah, it was leaking. And after we got it to the shop and got it back installed, we found out it didn't fit because the shop idiots recored it backwards. SO, we had to do it ALL OVER AGAIN...

Damn Alco JUNK...

LC

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by AlcoRS11Nut

QUOTE: Originally posted by Limitedclear

QUOTE: Originally posted by AlcoRS11Nut

Any Stories about ALCo's?

They smoke, they leak, they break, they get scrapped. The Alco story...

LC

Ouch....that hurts.[B)] [:D]But what about those ALCo's shortlines use......they can't break that much because if they did the small budget of the RR could they afford to fix them, or could they?

They can and they do. Not too many short lines using them anymore. A few...

Most Alcos and MLWs are pretty worn out these days...

LC

[Randy Stahl]

With all the recent questions on alot of the locomotive tech, I thought I would revive and old thread.
Randy

[rvos1979]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Randy Stahl

With all the recent questions on alot of the locomotive tech, I thought I would revive and old thread.
Randy

Keep the answers and stories coming, Randy!

Speaking of sparks, it's always cool to clean the carbon out of locomotives at night!

The Other Randy

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Randy Stahl

This is a general pinout on EMD locomotives, some RRs have added trainline ground reset, slowspeed control,etc.
Pin#1 not normally used, some RRs are using this for slow speed control.
Pin#2 train line alarm, rings the bell in all the units.
Pin#3 governer D valve, for trainline shut down and engine rpm
Pin#4 control negative
Pin#5 emergency sanding
Pin#6 generator field
Pin#7 governer C valve, engine rpm
Pin#8 foreward, pin out pin 9 on the front pin 8 on the rear
Pin#9 reverse. pin out pin 8 on the front pin 9 on the rear
Pin#10 train line wheel slip light
Pin#11 not used,,
Pin#12 governer B valve
Pin # 13 control positive
Pin #14 not used
Pin#15 governer A valve
Pin#16 engine run relay
Pin#17 dynamic brake setup,( if equipped )
Pin#18 not used
Pin#19 not used
Pin#20 trainline brake warning light
Pin#21 dynamic brake setup controls rpm in dynamics
Pin#22 compressor syncronisation(if equipped)
Pin#23 trainline manuel sand
Pin#24 dynamic brake train line potential, 0-72 volt
Pin#25 MU headlights
Pin#26 some times used for mu ground relay reset
Pin#27 not used
most of these pins are allocated by the AAR but the ones that are not can and are used for many different things, for example the Santa Fe used the pin 19 as an extra control negative, the Milwaukee road used it for a positive to ring the locomotive bells, guess what happens when you MU them?
Randy

i got a question about this. . .

on the older first gen's ( gp9s come to mind ) above the round MU box. . is a square one. . whats this for? i was told somthing with the dynamics but? can you clear this up ?

[Randy Stahl]

This was know as field loop dynamic brake control. I have seen field loop on engines as new as SD-40s. Instead of using pin 24 as trainline potential, a seperate train line loop was used to control DB exitation.
Randy

[Anonymous]

I want to thank everyone in this thread, especailly Mr Stahl... these stories are GREAT and the information is wonderful. Thank you!

[chad thomas]

Hey Randy,
I find the different uses of unassigned pins interesting. Could you give us a rundown of railroads using these pins and what for?

[Randy Stahl]

Generally all railroads use the same pinouts. some exceptions are noted, however , one has to discover differences themselves.

[Anonymous]

Another note on meggars. A GE field service engineer once wrote a trip report from Brazil that said that Brazilian electricians make the same noise as American electricians when they get across a meggar

[Anonymous]

Waaayyyy too funny Randy!

Norma

[gacuster]

Mr. Stahl,
What fascinating stories! I was wondering if you ever worked on a old Soo Line GP-30 that used to come to Manitowoc, I believe it was the 700 and was in the red & white paint with WC stenciled on the cab. I saw this unit leaving town once with thick white smoke pouring from the stack, I think it was paired with a GP-40. The next day in the paper there was a story about several grass fires this locomotive had started along the ROW near Valders. What was wrong with this engine to make it smoke like that?

[Randy Stahl]

The big problem maker on the WC was the 703, we "stored" those GP-30s many times for the last time. with 703 we discovered that the inertial filter blower motor was unplugged, the locomotive air filters plugged up and the rich air fuel mixture caused a buildup of carbon in the turbo stack, this was our fire starter. The other problem with these engines was the radiator shutters were getting really balky, on cool or cold days the locomotives would never get up to operating temperature causing unburned fuel out the stack, hence the white smoke.
Randy

[gacuster]

Many thanks for the reply Randy, someone posted a picture of that locomotive earlier this year at its new home at a museum somewhere with a fresh coat of paint in Soo Line colors, so maybe its fire making days are over. Please keep the stories coming!