zugmannAll these night shots posted lately have made me order a new tripod this morning. I've done a little night work before, but never had a decent tripod. So maybe I can get out of my rut.
Go for it! Getting out of the ruts can't hurt!
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)
This is a follow-up report on a couple of construction projects around here.
First, Pat and I saw a westbound UP freight leave Elmhurst on Track 1, which is normally the track for eastbound scoots, and rarely gets any use in the westbound direction. We thought we'd chase it home to Lombard. We didn't see it actually go through the new crossovers, but saw the train's hind end disappear around the curve on Track 2.
Second, the town of Bensenville as we used to know it looks like Ground Zero of some sort of catastrophe. North of the MILW tracks and east of York Road, everything--yes, everything--is leveled in connection with the O'Hare expansion. But today we were surprised to see the shopping area at York and Green, south of the MILW tracks, also gone.
The UP's new bridge over Irving Park Road (one long girder span that covers at least five lanes of traffic) appears to be done, and the trackage (concrete ties and all) is laid up on top of it. Trains are still using the old route as of today, though. So far, the CP tracks have not been raised to go over Irving Park; this would be done with a bridge just a short distance west of the new UP bridge...unless a new connection is built so both railroads use the UP bridge (that would seem to deprive CP of the room to hold out a couple of trains waiting for entry into Bensenville Yard or the UP's trackage, something that's often done now).
I also was talking with a retired CP (MILW...who's anyone kidding?) employee this morning (he attends our church); he was told by a CP Road Foreman that when CP goes over Irving Park Road on a new grade separation, the climb from the yard to the overpass will be the steepest grade anywhere on the CP system!
never mind.
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
Hello,
I have a few ?? about track.
1. Does it impact anything if the gauge is FULL of mud, right up to the rails? I'm thinking no, but...
2. How big of a gap in the rails, at a joint, would cause a problem? Any idea in inches?
3. How much of a kink in the rails would be problematic? If you can see a bit of waviness, is that a problem or does it have to be really bad, or...
Thanks, as always! Make it a safe day.
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
None of these sounds like a condition I'd want built in to my track! I'm no expert, but all of these conditions, though harmless by themselves (at a slow speed) suggests that there may be deeper (figuratively and literally) problems. For example, if I couldn't see ties or ballast under a mud-filled roadbed, I'd wonder whether they could hold the weight of anything going over them...particularly if I had no clue how the mud got there in the first place (for example, was this a sand loading site?).
Nance -
1. . . . Until the mud freezes - then it might derail some rolling stock, esp. something light-weight such as an empty flat car or caboose, etc. Definitely don't want that mud in anything other than low-speed track - not that you'd want it there, either, because it will accelerate the rot of wooden ties; corrosion of anything metal; foul the ballast and ruin the drainage so that the track might become unstable and start to pump and get out of cross-level and good surface; and makes it impossible as a practical matter for a track inspector to examine anything but the gage and cross-level, and wonder what's going on underneath the mud if those parameters are not good or show signs of dynamically moving to adverse conditions/ values under traffic, etc. Other than these, no - no big impact . . .
2. A gap between the rails at a joint of more than about 5/16" or 3/8" indicates that something is wrong with the one or more of either: the bolts, bolt hole drilling in the rail, bolt hole punching in the joint bar, and/ or the joint bar used for the rail, etc. That's about the maximum amount of opening designed and 'built in' the rail and joint bars between the bolt hole diameter and the bolt's shaft for thermal expansion and contraction before the bolts contact the sides of the hole and start to bend or break, etc. Somewhat surprisingly, I can't find anything in the FRA Track Safety Standards (2007) that states a specific dimension for this. In certain applications such as car dumpers, weigh scales, movable bridges, etc., the gaps can get to be from 1/2" to 1" or so, which is about the maximum I'd want to see for a low-speed (10 MPH) operation. Although, I have seen low-speed industrial operations over gaps in the 2" - 3" range on tangent track (at broken-out rail ends) that evidently had no problems with it - but curves would be much more sensitive to such as gap, as I'm sure you can imagine . . .
3. Depends on the speed, and other conditions, such as cross-level, gage, etc. As a guide, the FRA Track Safety Standards' Table 4 at Sec. 213.55 - Alinement. allows up to a 5" deviation at the midpoint of a 62-ft. long chord for Class 1 track, 3" for Class 2, but only 1-1/2" for Class 4, etc. A bit of waviness is not a problem except for high speeds.
- Paul North.
Nance - how about this:
That's actually a very telephoto-enhanced shot - the train is around three eighths of a mile away. We do 15 MPH there, tops.
We found a pull-apart this summer - the bolts on one side of a track joint sheared off, but the joint bars were both still in place and holding the rail in alignment. Since it was less than 100 yards from "Rule 98" (Restricted Speed), MOW didn't even put a restriction on it before they fixed it. They had to wait until a nice warm day to fix it, though.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Had a wreck this morning on CN's old EJ&E line at Spaulding, Illinois (Bartlett or Elgin, roughly). It disrupted service on Metra's Milwaukee West line (which hosts CP/DM&E/ICE trains as well); no idea when the line(s) will be reopened. One report says two freights; another says eight cars off one CN train. No hazmat, they say, but something was burning pretty good. Metra was caught with most of its trains on that line west of the derailment site; there are buses to ferry commuters to Roselle, where a couple of trainsets are doing their best to bring people in to Chicago.
Carl ; any news about the wreck near you. Just caught a snip before a commercial , then the fine folk forgot to tellthe story. Hazmat involved???
Cannonball
Y6bs evergreen in my mind
Ahhhh- uhhh , some days it is harder to get out of 1st. gear and into 5th overdrive.
Yea, we all have those moments, whether we admit them or not.
Have a good day.
EDIT: Hhmmm, as per the thread up that's dedicated to this wreck, it was/is a haz-mat carrying train. Curious. Guess it'll come out in the wash as to which is correct.
The news reports I'd seen (up until the one posted in the other thread) said that hazmat was not involved. One said there was hazmat on the train, but that it was contained.
One piece of footage shows persistent flames coming from underneath the ADMX covered hopper that was in the vicinity of the diamonds, but that car or its contents would not be hazardous.
This is not an area I'm familiar with at all, so I don't know the orientation of the film, but there was quite a pileup of cars just one side of the diamond. Someone's already said that Metra service would be curtailed into the weekend, but I doubt that it will take that long to get something opened up.
That time of year again - vacation bid time.
I hate trying to decide when I want off a year ahead of time. What time of year would be good to visit your neck of the woods, Carl? (I'm going to try and shoot for it this year... see what happens).
CP Hudson 2816, which suffered a cracked rear driving axle last summer, is back up and running. They took it out for a test run yesterday within the city limits to shake things out. No word yet on when to expect a road trip out of town. Great news.
Bruce
So shovel the coal, let this rattler roll.
"A Train is a Place Going Somewhere" CP Rail Public Timetable
"O. S. Irricana"
. . . __ . ______
zugmannThat time of year again - vacation bid time. I hate trying to decide when I want off a year ahead of time. What time of year would be good to visit your neck of the woods, Carl? (I'm going to try and shoot for it this year... see what happens).
I remember it well...trying to explain to well-meaning relatives, etc., that we couldn't change our vacations to suit everything we wanted to do, and having to struggle for years to be able to get one in the summer. I was lucky in my choices...I'd go for the weeks around my kids' spring breaks in school; by the time they graduated I could do summer. And the one or two weeks of flexible vacation days were also helpful in the last few years.
Tom, just about any time is train time around here. I'd avoid winter and the hottest months, though. And if there are considerations other than railroads you'd like to have accommodated, let us know and we could be more specific.
This came from Railway Age this morning:
UP—and only UP—earns its cost of capital The Surface Transportation Board announced Thursday that among all U.S. Class I railroads, it found that only Union Pacific was revenue adequate for the year 2010—meaning that it achieved a rate of return equal to or greater than the board’s calculation of the average cost of capital to the freight rail industry.
The agency determined that the railroad cost of capital for 2010 was 11.3%. UP’s rate of return was 11.54%. Falling short of a return equaling the cost of capital were: BNSF Railway, 9.22%; CSX Transportation, Inc., 10.85%; Grand Trunk Corp. Consolidated (including all Canadian National U.S. affiliates), 9.21%; Kansas City Southern Railway Co., 9.77%; Norfolk Southern Railway Co., 10.96%; and Soo Line Railroad Co. (including all Canadian Pacific U.S. affiliates), 8.01%.
Somebody with a finer ability with figures (slightly different from "numbers", which I can do ) will have to explain to me why return on investment and operating ratio don't correlate. We keep hearing about this amazingly low operating ratio that CN has all the time, yet under this metric they don't look too hot.
UP gave me a genuine thrill this afternoon. I walked down to the tracks after church, while Pat had some church-related business to finish up. The home signal at the new control point showed red-over-green on Track 1, so I walked toward the control point, hoping to shoot video of the train going through the crossover. The video didn't turn out well, but it did show that the train was moving as he went through there. There was no reduction in speed for the crossover, this was a well-powered stack train, and he was doing every bit of the 50 m.p.h. he was allowed for the crossover move. I didn't see so much as a wobble, or hear a flange squeal.
Gray day today, with a strong northerly wind blowing leaves everywhere. But it's still a balmy 55, so I will see whether I can get another bag of leaves out of our front yard before the weather moves in tonight.
COOL; real nice catch!!!
Hi , it's me again, this time studying Signals, which are very unclear to me!
"The yellow over yellow aspect is the one aspect that varies the most in meaning from railroad to railroad. Depending upon the individual RR I have seen it mean Advance Approach, Approach Restricting, or Approach Diverging" quoted .from online resources of "Tales from the Krug"
So, a crew would know exactly what it meant bc they would know what signals mean on their own road? Is this part of the reason a crew would have a pilot when in unfamiliar territory? TIA.
For us, yeller over yeller is "approach slow".
Yellow over red over green also means the same thing.
Or in PRR territory, two sets of a bunch of yellow dots pointing up to the right.
You have to know the signal rules on the territory you are operating over. And yes, if you are unqualified on a certain territory, then you'd need a pilot that hopefully is.
On the UP, yellow-over-yellow is Approach Diverging.
You are tested by your employing railroad on the rules for that railroad. If you have operating rights over territories on your railroad employing different signal systems, you're responsible for knowing all of them. If you're working on another railroad, you have to be familiar with their signal system, or get a pilot. In our neck of the woods, they have the CORA book, which shows the signal rules for all of the railroads involved; if you go there, you must know there.
A few years ago, Amtrak's Pere Marquette plowed into the rear of a Norfolk Southern freight train on the south side of Chicago. There was a lot of speculation on how this could have happened, but the most likely scenario is that the engineer misinterpreted a signal that meant something on NS, and something less restrictive on some other railroad.
When somebody (usually a railfan) suggests that all railroads convert to common signal rules everywhere across the country, it is generally (and accurately) noted that training costs and replacement or reconfiguring of signals makes that a prohibitively expensive proposition. I suspect that PTC (which I'm not sure came up in the discussion about this wreck) would help make this a lot less of a problem.
I figured I'd pop in and say Hi. It's been a while. I spent most of the day trackside but two of the highlights turned out to be:
1) A new view - Recent construction gave railfans a new overpass to shoot from:http://flic.kr/p/aCv9ug
2) Northbound intermodal Q199 had 10 motors today. Yes, 10. They were:-CN 2224 (ES44DC),-CN 8881 (SD70M-2),-CN 8836 (SD70M-2),-CN 2291 (ES44DC),-CN 2326 (ES44DC),-CN 2285 (ES44DC),-CN 8906 (SD70M-2),-CN 2505 (C44-9WL),-CN 5687 (SD75I),-CN 2204 (C44-9W).http://flic.kr/p/aCvbTZhttp://flic.kr/p/aCvTBa
Sorry Jim!
Some of you probably saw my post regarding Atchison, KS. Here's one of the photos from there that I like. No, this wasn't the elevator that suffered the explosion.http://flic.kr/p/aCuP8hhttp://flic.kr/p/aCuPDd
Thanks for looking. Here's hoping everyone's been doing well. See you around again soon.Dan
Dan
It was too late to say anything yesterday (after I found out), but a belated happy birthday to Misty (Mrs. CNW6000)!
Neat pictures, Dan! Is that new bridge anywhere in that double-wide CN corridor along U.S. 41 north of you, or is it in town?
I'll tell her that Carl, thanks.
The new bridge is in Neenah so that's close enough to make a quick trip.
Is this new bridge temporary or permanent?
Curling up with a new book today; it arrived in the mail this afternoon. It's The Lake Line (Central Electric Railfans' Association Bulletin #144), a history of the Grand Rapids, Grand Haven & Muskegon Railway (an interurban line which ran between roughly 1902 and 1934). One of the authors was a biology prof at my old Alma Mater (can I call it that if I didn't graduate from there?), whom I had no idea was a railfan while I was going to school there (I knew of a couple of other railfan professors there, one of whom had also been published in a national historical-society bulletin).
The book is interesting, but in my cursory flip-through I found a mis-identified location in Grand Haven. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into the book on a cool, rainy day (something like tomorrow is supposed to be!).
zardoz Is this new bridge temporary or permanent?
This morning I was lured by the sunshine and warm temperatures to take my homework trackside. That plan worked for about a half hour before the weather conditions changed--I could swear that there was a solid sensation to some of the drizzle that enveloped the three of us (me, the laptop, and the bike). And in those thirty minutes four trains went past on the platform (the one nearest me, an Edgewood coal train, was moving fast enough to move my parked bike until I grabbed it). Another eastbound train was lined up (I love those new signals!) when I left, but I didn't want to soak things I couldn't repair.
Westbound trains were moving very slowly, apparently on each other's blocks. The line had had some signal problems around West Chicago this morning which threw the rush hour into a tizzy, and westbounds were probably still dealing with the repercussions. The eastbounds (an on-time scoot and the coal train) didn't seem to have that problem.
Temperatures have dropped about 20 degrees in the three hours since then, and we have a wind advisory out there.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.