Related article on how "Hydrochloric acid likely poses little threat to Monument residents" at:
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_17891413?source=pkg
Despite the disarming title, the article reads like the usual "parade of horribles" to me. But as the lone comment to the 1st article pointed out, "It's only HCl". More to the point, high school kids and college freshmen are allowed to 'play' with the stuff (Deggesty & others who are 'in the know" - you should have seen the cloud of steam that erupted when I emptied an only-partially reacted flask of it into a wet lab sink almost 40 years ago . . . ) Heck, I believe limestone will neutralize it - bet everyone out that way knows where to get some of that, right ? You might have a hard time discerning where it actually leaked . . .
I'm often reminded of the scene in the Steve Martin movie Roxanne (1987) where he portrays a Fire Department Chief - one morning he pays for and opens a sidewalk newspaper vending box, scans the headlines, lets out a scream, and quickly jams the paper back in !
- Paul North.
We're still standing by...I'm assuming we have to locate the affected area for claims and remediation documentation purposes. From the hysteria & mis-information cranked out by the media, you'd think this is a replay of Bophal India and the entire contents of the car hit the ground (doubtful)
They are now saying it's a Burlington Northern train on bn tracks. (neither is true, multiple gufaws here...picking myself off the floor eventually.)
Hasn't dawned on these folks yet that BN is dead as a dodo.
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_17890167
Can you share with and enlighten us on what need, purpose, or goal might be served by that ? I can see why a survey crew would be wanted at a major derailment - such as that tragic one on BNSF in Iowa on Sunday morning - to expertly locate, document, and preserve the final positions of the locomotives and cars involved, and also to locate/ confirm the track geometry (curves and grades), features, topography for sight lines to signals or the other train, etc. - pretty much the same as some of my staff and policemen do for accident investigations and forensic work, etc. Those services would take that time-cosuming and tedious burden off the railroad's supervisors and FRA and/ or NTSB investigators, leaving them to devote full-time to their specialized work and techniques, and clearing the wreckage and re-opening the line, etc. But I'm not seeing the same benefits for a tank car leak. Or am I already missing or mis-understanding something this early on a fine day ?
Got a 4:30 AM wakeup call....Acid leak at Monument on the UP/DRGW single track portion of the Joint Line between Pueblo & Denver, 250 homes evacuated, the railroad wants a survey crew on standby.
Der wasser es tief here, but hardly stille! We just had a thunderstorm come through that dumped over an inch of rain in some places.
Back home, with enough data to keep me busy for weeks! Offhand, I think I might have seen at least a dozen private-company reporting marks that I hadn't seen before, and many unusual series under the more familiar reporting marks. Some of these I'd seen in photographs, but now have the experience to call my own.
That is indeed an interesting container, different from those used by the other railroads back then. I'm sure I'd seen pictures of those things in service somewhere, but probably couldn't find them now if I had to! Add my vote to those suggesting preservation.
(I do believe that with this post, I join the elite five-digit family!)
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
http://www.mountvernonshops.com/
Check out the 2nd photo... that be them.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
Paul_D_North_Jr Zug - thanks much for that photo ! Definitely 'one-of-a-kind'. Looks like it's rusting out along the bottom of the near side sheets - though even if that continued, it looks like the 'frame' and those hinges would be there forever ! Really needs to be preserved . . . - Paul North.
Zug - thanks much for that photo ! Definitely 'one-of-a-kind'. Looks like it's rusting out along the bottom of the near side sheets - though even if that continued, it looks like the 'frame' and those hinges would be there forever ! Really needs to be preserved . . .
I know of at least one or two more around here, and I think there's probably a few more hidden within some of the bigger yards. This one pictured is on land that is soon to be developed for non-RR purposes. Don't know what will happen to it.
Here's one for Paul that I talked about a few weeks (months?) ago. One of the PRR (note the lettering) containers now used for storage. I heard these were used in some of the earliest COFC service.
[View:http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/themes/trc/utility/:550:0]
And... a old N&W hopper because I think it is cool.
There are a thousand of those cars total, Dan, POTX 1000-1999. Thanks for the build dates--that's helpful!
Going to be a long, wet drive today, from the looks of things.
CShaveRR Postscript, for Dan: Just caught some POTX covered hopper cars for myself!
Postscript, for Dan: Just caught some POTX covered hopper cars for myself!
The last B786 (all potash) that I saw had some of those POTX cars with build dates of 02/11. Actually a fair amount of them did. Seems like there was a large batch done from 10/10-02/11 and I suspect we're going to see some 03/11's too.
A couple of sources confirmed for me that we're going to only see a few UP coal trains to the Green Bay, WI WPS power plant. Seems the price of coal produced electricity is pretty high compared to natural gas produced power. As a NG plant is running at about full power near Kaukauna, WI so has the demand for coal dropped. The last train north was in February! The train was finally fully unloaded about a week ago and went south - but with CN power.
Dan
Woke up this morning to several more trains art Cresson (including the first Roadrailer train I'd seen go through there). A couple of young railfans staying there with their mother and grandmother were equipped with scanners, cameras, tripods, and really had a good grasp of which trains were which.
This spot is, in my opinion, the busiest stretch of tracks I've seen. I tried something today: as soon as a train went by, I made an attempt to log all of the good stuff from it. I don't think I got more than halfway done with them before another train came through.
I hope someday to make sense of how the helpers work around there--we saw plenty of the pairs of rebuilt SD50s going in both directions by themselves. One coal train I saw had three helper sets: one ahead of the regular power and two pushing.
Today was the mad dash--we covered nearly 400 miles, with only a couple of breaks. One was for lunch in western Pennsylvania, where Nora showed us a nice place for quiche (Pat and Nora) and Fish and chips (me). Nora's doing fine, but is quite busy dealing with work, college, and two growing boys.
We also made a quick stop in Willard, Ohio...first time I've been to this old B&O division point. We found a grade crossing where first a westbound, then an eastbound, then another eastbound all blocked us. And they all stopped! As soon as we gave up on this, a couple of them started moving again. Rumors that their yard here is plugged are believable.
Tonight we're in Tiffin, not too far from Fostoria. Tomorrow we'll go there, pay our respects to the Erie-Sistible, wave into the webcam, and maybe catch a train or five. We may check out North Baltimore's new yard, and maybe Deshler, too. But both of us are getting a little antsy to get back home. So I'm pretty sure that tomorrow night we'll be in our own bed...however long it may take us!
We were down into the 30s overnight, and I thought I felt a couple of wet flakes this morning. We won't get out of the 40s today up here in the hills.
Dan, my grandchildren all enjoy the water, and the youngest has been going to their park district's pool since he was around Aedan's age. Their mother didn't enjoy it so much, but married into a family that practically lives on the water during the summer...so she not only swims well now, but enjoys water skiing and wakeboarding. She also got hired by the park district as a swimming instructor for little kids.
This morning we made our obligatory pilgrimage to the Curve. Pat and I climbed the stairs, as the funicular wasn't ready to start its day yet. We were able to provide a little geographic and technical information to interested sightseers at the top (though I had to explain to Pat that the pushers here aren't DP units). One intermodal train stretched out of sight at both ends of the curve. Some trees have been cleared to increase visibility, but I think more could be done on the part of the curve above the center--that's the most dramatic view of the grade these trains are climbing, in my opinion. We were able to ride down on the funicular.
The three grandchildren will receive railroad books. Kates will get a comic-book version of the story of Kate Shelley that she should be able to read herself, and the other two will get stories that need to be read to them. Nico's book, amazingly, combines trains and dinosaurs!
Oops, there goes another one--PPLX gons and hoppers this time. Yes, Dan, we're having fun! We've really managed to fill this trip with the stuff we both enjoy, and each of us is actively participating in the other's enjoyment.
Sounds like an interesting trip Carl, hope you are having fun.
We have bright sunshine today...but the suns rays of light left the heat behind. It's only 32. Blech...good day to get my Flickr organized. I only have about 800 pics to finish tagging and putting on a map.
Took Aedan to the Y to swim yesterday and as suspected, he seems to have a great affinity for the water. Just like his father! Too little to get him on the leg press machine though...
Well, Carl, glad you are having a good time of it, at least for the most part anyway. You're having much better luck than I am in gaining access to the Lounge! (Must be when you changed the 'keys' over in the new quarter, mine didn't get updated! )I've been reading along, though, bc I subscribe now! Neat how that works! Take care, keep up with your notes and we'll be waiting to hear more.
Nance-CCABW/LEI
“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” --Will Rogers
Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right! --unknown
No cooperation from the weather today...we woke up to rain in Cumberland, and brought it with us into Pennsylvania. It would intensify whenever we needed to go out of the car somewhere, and there must have been a real gully-washer around Roaring Spring (hadn't made the connection with the name before...we didn't see a spring, but we heard the roar of a muddy-looking creek).
(Memo to railfans going to the Holiday Inn in Cumberland...get an odd-numbered room and you'll be fine. Any room on that side of the building will have a view...third floor isn't too far above track level, and you can go up from there! Pat didn't appreciate the lack of some amenities in the room, such as counter space, a coffeemaker that she could brew her own coffee in...)
The Station Inn has already proven itself in the train department. We've been here less than two hours and have had five trains that I remember. The room is smaller than in Cumberland, but we have places for everything here. The trains are noisier, but Pat has already demonstrated that she can sleep through them.
I've exhausted my first full scratch-pad making notes on the equipment I've seen on this trip. I think I have a spare...otherwise we'll walk down the street to Sheetz!
Things are still running slowly here...this is the third time I've attempted to get into the Lounge in two days, and I've either found myself interrupted, or locked out...last time I was given an error message after typing everything up, and had to log in again, but my message wasn't saved.
Dan, I'm admiring your pictures, and wishing I could be up there with you (but not too much...see below).
In that first shot, I was noticing how the track no longer even comes close to the edge of the platform. Did one of the railroads pull it out and away to ease the curve in the foreground, perhaps?
A lot of the potash trains these days have the new little POTX covered hoppers. I haven't seen any of these for myself yet. I think it's due to observing primarily the lines that go west out of Chicagoland, rather than north-on-their-way-to-Canada.
Johnny, it sounds like you have plenty of adventure, even without seeing trains. Our best to Ricki, and may you both remain comfortable and continue to enjoy your trip!
___________________
Tonight Pat and I were in a real Trackside Lounge...at Cumberland, Maryland, in the Holiday Inn. Had a good dinner, and watched Amtrak's westbound Capitol make its station stop. Our room is three floors above the lounge, and the trains on the former B&O main line are readily visible. Not so much after dark, as the street lights don't provide much illumination. But there is a good variety through here. We had one string of auto racks head west behind Wheeling & Lake Erie power--three units, three paint schemes! Even the coal trains are anything but monotonous! These days, CSX runs a mixture of hoppers and coal gons, many of its own cars relettered and renumbered from other reporting marks, and many from private companies, also often secondhand. It used to be that if you had a coal train on the lines serving the ports of Baltimore and Newport News, you could count on everything being Chessie System hoppers.
Yesterday was spent on the C&O side, at Clifton Forge, Virginia. Many years ago I was one of maybe five or six volunteers who basically put out a monthly newsletter and organized an annual convention for a couple hundred members. Since that time, C&OHS has grown to thousands of members, puts out a decent magazine (not monthly any more, but still eight or nine issues a year), has published books, and maintains a headquarters office with a full-time staff and plenty of volunteer opportunities every day. Not only that, they're assembling a Heritage Center that has some C&OHS-owned locomotives and rolling stock (C&O 614 will move here after being done with its exhibition in Roanoke). They've built a replica C&O wooden station, and are working with the city and with Amtrak to move the station stop for the Cardinal here from the shelter by the old station no longer accessible to the public.
Anyway, I went to C&OHS headquarters to meet and discuss the possibility of reissuing the freight car book that I had first put together in 1980 (using an IBM Selectric and press-on typefaces and borders), based on a booklet that C&O had published in 1937, detailing its freight car fleet. We'd added much information about builders and dates, status of the fleet, origins, rebuildings, and so on. C&O reissued its booklet in 1946...so we're now going to incorporate pages from both editions in an enlarged book, covering several thousand more cars (including things previously not seen, such as the composite hoppers, 50-foot box cars, and well-hole flat cars), and basically giving two snapshots of the total fleet. The new book will have computerized layout and typesetting, hard covers, and will incorporate everything unearthed in research since the original was published (and there's plenty of that!).
That was the plan...go in, see what could be done about the book, and get going. But when I got there, I was greeted like a living legend! Many people came and said how happy they were to finally meet me in person, and I was presented with an engraved plaque designating me an "Historian Emeritus". I guess I'm one of three members ever to be accorded this title.
So now I have my work cut out for me...when we get home, I have to dig through old photographs for some good-quality shots of the equipment we need to illustrate. By next month I'll be editing proofs, and the book is expected to be out by early August!
But until we get home, it's nonstop driving, visits to museums and quilt stores, and train-watching whenever. Tonight, Cumberland...tomorrow, the Station Inn! Hoping the weather continues to cooperate!
zardoz Trains WMNB4THRTL: (I'm HATING this new computer more and more with every passing day/hour, something!!! I'm better off with my old antique, even though some of its pieces and parts were from 1996!!! I just typed a fairly long reply and it erased it-- AGAIN!!! GGGRRR!!!!!) We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Might I suggest typing your lengthy replies in a word processor (such as MS Word). Set the program to do an auto-save every few minutes. When completed, simply copy from the word program and paste into the TRAINS forum reply page. I decided to do it this way in this forum a while back when, while typing a long, detailed reply, I accidently hit the 'escape' key which erased everything I had typed.
Trains
WMNB4THRTL: (I'm HATING this new computer more and more with every passing day/hour, something!!! I'm better off with my old antique, even though some of its pieces and parts were from 1996!!! I just typed a fairly long reply and it erased it-- AGAIN!!! GGGRRR!!!!!) We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
(I'm HATING this new computer more and more with every passing day/hour, something!!! I'm better off with my old antique, even though some of its pieces and parts were from 1996!!! I just typed a fairly long reply and it erased it-- AGAIN!!! GGGRRR!!!!!) We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
I decided to do it this way in this forum a while back when, while typing a long, detailed reply, I accidently hit the 'escape' key which erased everything I had typed.
Nance, I sympathize with you on suddenly having your labor lost. While traveling, I use a laptop that will, either while writing a post or in a word processor, suddenly jump to an earlier point in my composition–and, if I am not watching what I am writing, look up and find that I am writing in the midst of what I had already written. Yet, the advantage of being able to keep in touch (somewhat) does outweigh this annoyance.
This was Ricki’s and she gave it to me last year when she became thoroughly annoyed at what she had to go through to be able to read what was on the screen (she needs magnification to read it).
I am also somewhat annoyed in that whereas I use WordPerfect X4, which has navigation similar to that of Word, on my computer at home, this one has Word Perfect 9, which has a much different navigation system (don’t ask me about Word Perfect for DOS, which is Ricki’s true love).
Note, I am writing this without reading anything anybody wrote after Zardoz’s post.
Johnny
Thursday morning–US Airways treated us right.
I started this yesterday–and had no time to write any more until tonight. I have not even looked at my email to see what the rest of you (Carl and Pat, especially) are up to.
The airline personnel gave Ricki every consideration, even to providing a chair narrow enough to fit down the aisle on the airplanes so she could get to her seat. Amazingly, we had no difficulty with the TSA, but breezed through it; Ricki could not walk through the primary inspection, but had to be wheeled around it and then checked to make certain that she had nothing that might be deleterious to the plane or other passengers.
him from Memphis to Chicago last year, and gave us good service, even coming to our room (H) to take Miss.).
It took the car rental company a little time to provide a car that Ricki could begin to get into (we ended up with a 2011 Impala), and even then she could not get comfortable despite much help until we had stopped at a turnaround on a divided highway, and I ws getting back into the car after failing to help her–and a man who was passing by stopped, came over, and lifted her into a comfortable position!
After a late arrival in Chattanooga, we had a good rest, and got away from the hotel an hour after the official checkout time–I had to wash and dry some clothes this morning; I always look for a hotel with a coin laundry.
We had as uneventful trip to Bristol after we ate Krystals for lunch in Chattanooga.
But, the hotel where we had planned to stay had no room with an accessible bathroom available, so I asked that the Courtyard by Marriott be called and asked if there was one available there. Thus, we are here tonight.
Tomorrow, we plan to eat at the breakfast provided for the college alumni who have been out for fifty or more years, visit with alumni friends, eat the official alumni lunch, and then head for Nashville.
No trains sighted since we detrained yesterday.
Been a while since I've been around. Not a whole lot to say...so I'll let my pictures do the talking.
Manifest train winding it's way through Oshkosh:http://flic.kr/p/9yN7q1
Potash train from this morning:http://flic.kr/p/9yK6K6
Off to go trackside...where I belong. Shame I can't access the site via my BlackBerry...must be some forum software as I can with all of the others forums and groups I use.
Johnny, I guess your flooding is in the Red River basin. I've heard that Amtrak will permanently be rerouted around Devil's Lake before too long now, as the water's within about a foot of flooding the track.
__________________
Today we moved from Charlotte to Roanoke, and paid a visit to the Virginia Museum of Transportation. To me, this was a sad place, at least outside the building...the three big locomotives there were all engines that I'd seen live in the Chicago area. Saddest of all was C&O 614--it looks like it's ready to go to scrap, displayed with its main rods missing. I hope that the rods are restored when it's moved to Clifton Forge.
Speaking of which, we go there tomorrow, just to see how the C&O Historical Society is doing on their interpretive center (and work in the Archives).
The rest of VMT was all right, but needs a bit of sprucing up. The "Rail Walk" between VMT and the O. Winston Link Museum (in the old station) looked inviting; I wish I had more time to spend there. The old headquarters building, the shops, the Hotel Roanoke (not where we're staying, unfortunately), and everything else in that area show just how big the N&W was to that city. I didn't see the car shops, which I understand are being kept very busy by Freight Car America.
Forging ahead tomorrow...wish us luck!
Carl, I glad you got to the seat of the county in which I grew up, and found the L&C interesting.
A quick update on our trip. En route to Seattle Monday, we learned that we would not be able to continue as we had planned, because of high water in North Dakota. So , we made arrangements to catch p with our trsin out of Chicago that leaves tonight. Yesterday, we left on the Coast Starlight, and arrived in Sacramento, and we are now waiting to fly to Chicago. We made it safely, without incident, through the incoming inspection.
More, later.
Another trip report. We were going to go from Charlotte to Spartanburg, South Carolina (the bottom end of the old Clinchfield), but found ourselves in Chester while headed that way. On the way to Chester I'd discovered a bunch of tank cars on an industrial spur. There was a public road nearby, so we turned on that, and discovered a yard full of tank cars, with more tracks and more yards going off into the distance. Eventually we found a crew switching with three blue-and-white GMTX Geeps. I got lots of neat cars to check out. Most of the major-railroad cars belonged to NS, so I assumed that this was an NS operation (the leased locomotives didn't give me a clue). It wasn't until we actually got into Chester, and I drove up to a no-trespassing sign that actually identified it as the Lancaster & Chester Railroad, of Gypsy Rose Lee fame (as discussed in the Lounge around pages 27 and 28 of the past quarter). Naturally, we had to turn around there, and follow the line to Lancaster, seeing whether we could find the ghost of a vice president for each mile of the line.
Johnny, it wasn't hard to find the lavish office building of the L&C on Main Street, but it looked more like a new facade on an old freight house. It was interesting to follow South Carolina Route 9 along the line, with its curves and grades, jointed rail (but nice-looking roadbed) and neat truss bridge over the Catawba River. One industry between I-77 and Lancaster had a couple of the old L&C 40-foot box cars in front of it, and another place nearby had three L&C gons of unusual design (they're 100-ton cars, only 37 feet long inside, sides of 6'7" in height, and lettered "Guardian Ft. Lauderdale" on the sides); they own four of them.
My sister, brother-in-law, and wife are in the next room, watching TV...I'm here, as usual, except that "here" has never, ever, been Charlotte, North Carolina, before.
MC, we bought a postcard with the recipe for Cincinnati chili at C.U.T., and mailed it to our daughter, who really enjoys cooking...then bought another one to hang on to. Pat is not a big chili fan, but says that this stuff tasted pretty good.
I don't recall being shown the car barns, but my guide did mention the B&O rerouting. I bought an Arcadia book on Cincinnati transportation; I shall have to see if that has pictures of the station, or explains some of the other things. I hadn't known before that Cincinnati once had inclines.
WMNB4THRTL Today's questions are from reading "The Railroad-What It Is, What It Does," by J.H. Armstrong, Ch. 5 The Railroad Car. 1. Journal boxes: What should we look for when we check them? I think one thing is 'enough' oil, but how much is sufficient? What else do we check?
Today's questions are from reading "The Railroad-What It Is, What It Does," by J.H. Armstrong, Ch. 5 The Railroad Car.
1. Journal boxes: What should we look for when we check them? I think one thing is 'enough' oil, but how much is sufficient? What else do we check?
Never having had to treat a wounded journal before, I can't really tell you how full the oil had to be--it definitely had to be in contact with the lubricators in the boxes, so that the entire surface of the axle could be covered with the oil.
Roller bearings, of course, changed this process completely. They probably need very little, if any, field inspection unless they've given a message to the defect detectors. An on-the-road inspection of any type usually involves checking the temperature, with a tempil-stick (melts at a certain temperature threshold).
WMNB4THRTL2. What is 'rail cant?'
Mudchicken gave you a good answer here. Yes, it makes a difference how you orient the tie plates!
WMNB4THRTL3. Flat spots: Can these been seen easily just by walking by or do they require a close inspection, or? Would these be the culprit when one night my brakeman asked my engineer if he had square wheels on his side?
Inspection is usually the way to catch them. Actually, most of the bad-ordered cars coming over the hump at Proviso, in my experience, had wheel defects. They were general "wheel-axle defects" on the UP, but the CNW bad-order cards had a special line for "wheel, S-F" (slid-flat). You'd be surprised how insignificant-looking a loud noise-making spot on a wheel tread can be!
WMNB4THRTL4. It talks about that cars often have at least one major overhaul in their life, perhaps being lengthened by 10 feet, from 40 to 50 feet. Would this car come back into service with identical reporting marks or do they change?
That stretching of a car is pretty heavy, and not too many cars go through something that drastic. Right now, the fad is to either stretch or shorten 48-foot intermodal cars (you just don't see 48-foot trailers or containers that much any more, but there's a demand for cars to handle 40-foot or 53-foot boxes). Some covered hoppers have been shortened to haul denser commodities. Box cars that have been modified lately (there just aren't that many 40-footers left to stretch) have usually been increased in height by anywhere from six inches to a couple of feet. Door modifications (either from double doors to single, or sliding to plug) are common. Some old steel coal gons have been reduced in height to be the right size for scrap or whatever...unless Herzog gets 'em and makes ballast hoppers out of them.
The rebuilt cars' new identities often depend on who is rebuilding them, and for whom. One of the biggest box-car-stretchers used to be the Chicago Freight Car Leasing Company, which would buy the old 40-footers, rebuild them to 50 feet, and lease them to Goodness-only-knows whom. So they'd get new reporting marks and numbers. If the rebuilding was done in-house (C&O, for example, stretched a lot of its own box cars in the early 1960s), they'd get new numbers, but would still be lettered C&O. I can think of a couple of cases where rebuilt cars did not get renumbered or relettered when rebuilt. When TTX stack cars or spine cars are rebuilt, quite often the new numbers will be based on the old ones (different first three digits, or something).
WMNB4THRTL5. It says, "However, AAR regulations now prohibit the general acceptance in interchange of cars over 40 years old regardless of whether their current state meets all other requirements." Would this most likely be due to worries over metal fatigue, or?
Moot point...I think it was fatigue that caused the restriction, but I've also heard that cars currently being built have had the age limit increased drastically.
WMNB4THRTL6. It states, "The whole 9,00 lb. truck is held together only by gravity and the interlocking surfaces on the principal parts." Really?! What 'locks' them down on? Sounds kind of scary when you were to hit a big 'bump.'
That's 9000 pounds, right?
Trains had a good article about trucks a few years ago, that explained a lot of this. Basically, you have the wheels on the rails, side frames on the wheels (sometimes a wedge or a bar [think SCL and ACL] to make handling the entire assembly easier), the bolster in the upper portion of the side frames to hold them apart, the springs to support the bolster and the rest of the car, and the center pin to hold the truck in the proper position under the car body (with the help of the center plates). It'd be a mighty big bump (usually caused by bouncing wheels over the ties instead of on the rail) to dislodge any component of this to a degree extreme enough to take the truck apart. A severe impact could knock out a couple springs, or bounce the body hard enough to knock it off center (the truck is no longer in the proper position and the center pin is probably gone), but it doesn't take too much effort to change out a wheelset just by lifting up the end of the car (after chaining the truck frames to the car to keep them on center).
WMNB4THRTL7. I'm confused by what seems to me to be conflicting info. Under 'Load Limit' section, it says, "Both cars will use the same size wheels, roller bearings, axles, and other weight-related parts." (Prior to this sentence, it told about different types of cars.) Then, under "Wheels," it states that wheels are 33 in., 36 in., 38 in., or even 28 in. sometimes. (I'm sorry; I'm not too sure whether I'm allowed to quote the whole paragraph here, so I took 'the safest course' and did not for now.)
Not having the book in front of me, I'm not sure what's meant by "both" cars in this case. However, cars in a given series, despite having different weights (and hence different load limits), will have the same gross rail load, because they do have the same bearing sizes, truck spring configuration, and wheel diameter.
Wheel diameters and bearing size are very important parts of the equation when it comes to determining the cars' capacity. Cars with a nominal capacity of 40 tons (rare nowadays!), 50 tons (almost as rare), or 70 tons usually have a wheel diameter of 33 inches. Bearing size is different among those three. The 28-inch wheels are also found underneath some 70-ton cars (usually 89-foot low-deck piggyback or auto rack flat cars), just to lower the height of the cars and provide more clearance. Cars with a nominal capacity of 100 tons (gross rail load of 263000 pounds) ride on 36-inch wheels, as do the modern-day 110-ton (286000-pound gross rail load) cars. The 38-inch wheels are on trucks with a nominal capacity of 125 tons (315000 pounds gross rail load).
________________
Currently in Charlotte, and suffering from railroad deprivation, since I've gone through Virginia and most of the way through the state here without seeing so much as a track. We did go off the beaten Interstate to check out NS at Bluefield, West Virginia. Earlier today I strafed a bunch of bad-ordered CSX gons in Charleston, getting original SFIX numbers off most of them, and interim HLMX numbers off those that had had them. Pat dropped me off at one end of the string, then moved to a parking lot and read her book until I walked the track (at a prudent distance) as far as the lot (I could have gotten the entire string, except that it was across a bridge that was clearly marked "No Trespassing"). Not sure what will be seen in Charlotte tomorrow, but expect to see more by the time we get to Roanoke!
Hadn't seen, but then again.......(the museum bookstore will get a visit soon) ....It was the only place I ever saw a PRR Baldwin Centipede (which was there totally by accident I was told)
MC - I understand there was an article on Cincinnati railroads in the Winter 2010 issue of Classic Trains - see: http://ctr.trains.com/sitecore/content/Magazine%20Issues/2010/Winter%202010.aspx
"Winton Place: Queen City Gathering Spot - By Denny Hamilton
Have you seen it ?
Nance: Rail cant (as opposed to shoulda, coulda, woulda....) is how much the rail is tilted inward from vertical, set by the bottom of the tie plate. You don't want that rail canted outward as that makes it easier for the rail to roll over.
CARL: Skyline may not replace your Chicago Hot Dogs, but the Chili is unique (ironically, there is a Skyline there in the Loop, about a block away from the Palmer House on Monroe (IIRC)). You were fairly close to where I grew up when you were in Glendale; My folk's house is about 3.5 miles west of there in a little less upscale part of town. The Wooden Depot from Winton Place was moved to a county park (Sharon Woods) at least 20 years ago - looks better in the park than it ever did in real life. I assume if you saw Winton Place, then you also saw the massive stone trolley barns as well along Spring Grove Avenue? (B&O/CSX moved over onto the PRR/NYC Big 4 main track in the 1970's and the original B&O Main Line (CH&D) was abandoned from Ivorydale(P&G)/Winton Place down to NA Tower/NorthSide/Gest Street to avoid all the grade crossings and the run through the middle of Spring Grove cemetery.
"+1" - not that I do it as often as I should, though - which is why my response applies to both comments above . . .
Thanks! That just might save (the rest of) my sanity!!
WMNB4THRTL (I'm HATING this new computer more and more with every passing day/hour, something!!! I'm better off with my old antique, even though some of its pieces and parts were from 1996!!! I just typed a fairly long reply and it erased it-- AGAIN!!! GGGRRR!!!!!) We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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