Used to see 4 truck flats on FEC with shuttle booster sections, from Morton Thiokol. Covered, with cooling units, marked do not hump.....
Years ago, I had full access to the SP Santa Clara yard and was in the Santa Clara tower which is at the north end of the yard.. I watched cars being switched in the bowl yard. A box car would not couple the switch engine no matter how hard he coupled to it. He hit it so hard that he tipped it on its side with a lourd bang. We stood there in sheer awe when the yardmaster who was in the Newhall tower at th south end of the yard came over the radio with words that were defininetly an FCC violation (All were explictives NOT deleted). We laughted so hard we rolled on the floor and our sides ached for hours afterwards. I would have loved to have been in the Newhall tower when he had to explain to the trainmaster in San Francisco why the big hook from the Bayshore yard had to come down to right a car.
Several years ago in Zanesville, Ohio I watched black tank cars being kicked on the Ohio Central. The cars were probably empty because they made a resounding BOOM when coupled.
"Mom! 99 is blowing for 16th Street. Dad will be home soon."
Automobile Unit trains only exist after the multi-levels are accumulated into a common yard. The The automobile industry cannot figure out how to accumulate product by destination and then advance it on a Unit train. This would also assist the auto haulers that deliver the product. The manufacturers ship to alol destinations daily and the railroads have to consolidate and resconsolidate the shipments as they move toward their destinations. This results in increased switching. To avoid passed drawbasrs, the railroads would be prudent if they flat switched and shoved each car to a coupling. Kicking and humpoing increases damage and the consuming public does not want something that was remanufactured in a auto body shop before they get it. This is all the more reason that the 1.4 revenue trips per month of a multi level do not increase.
NorthWest D. Carleton would know more, but I think unoccupied passenger cars being carried in freight trains are prohibited from being humped. Historic equipment also often is.
D. Carleton would know more, but I think unoccupied passenger cars being carried in freight trains are prohibited from being humped.
Historic equipment also often is.
I once saw several PRR passenger cars going over the hump at Elkhart, IN. I was in the hump tower at the time and casually asked the yardmaster, who was looking away just then, why The Broad Way was going over his hump .
After cleaning up the coffee he spilled, we looked into it a bit and found the cars were whitelined and billed to NdeM.
ChuckAllen, TX
caldreamer What where theose "narrowly defined exceptions" to kicking cars? Ira
What where theose "narrowly defined exceptions" to kicking cars?
Ira
Specified locations into specific tracks and then only after 'job briefing' with the trainmaster. This isn't 'were'; this is NOW!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
My carrier also has restrictions. Some are the locations where it is allowed is listed by bulletin including specific tracks within such locations. Cars with "trombone" cut levers are prohibited from being the car cut off in some areas. Those are usually found on cars with long travel/cusioned drawbars. There has been an effort to paint those levers blue or yellow to identify them. (I think there are OK if they are sandwiched between two "normal" equipped cars. They just don't want those special cars making the uncontrolled coupling.) There are limits on how many loads or total number of cars can be cut off in motion.
When a manager, who never pulled a pin or lined a switch, asks "Does switching really go faster when you can kick cars?", you know that practice will eventually be going away.
Jeff
samfp1943 tree68 I was in Lynchburg, VA a few years ago on business. During the evening, I visited alocal mall which overlooks an NS yard. They were kicking cars. As each car was kicked, it rolled off into the darkness, finally stopping when it hit another car on that track with a resounding "bang." I suspect some of those couplings were over 4 MPH. A long time ago in a land far away, I had occasion to spend a summer working at what was then, the Lockbourne AFB @ Columbus Ohio. We were roofing new base housing...Over the weekends the crew would go down to Jackson, Oh. where most of them were from. At that time the DT&I RR had a large yard there. I think it was a 'flat yard', meaning every car movement had to be shoved in. The noise of those cars, hitting together, all night, and in the daylight, could be heard all over that small town. It sounded like an Anvil Chorus, accompanied by a redition of the 1812 Overature [with real canons]. I even made a couple of trips down to watch, some of those cars were kicked so hard, I imagined that one could see daylight under the wheels. I know things are now done differenttly, but at one time, things were done expediently on the railroads. That show there in Jackson, Oh. was memorable, even these days. Maybe, that may be why the DT&I RR is not around thses days?
tree68 I was in Lynchburg, VA a few years ago on business. During the evening, I visited alocal mall which overlooks an NS yard. They were kicking cars. As each car was kicked, it rolled off into the darkness, finally stopping when it hit another car on that track with a resounding "bang." I suspect some of those couplings were over 4 MPH.
I was in Lynchburg, VA a few years ago on business. During the evening, I visited alocal mall which overlooks an NS yard. They were kicking cars.
As each car was kicked, it rolled off into the darkness, finally stopping when it hit another car on that track with a resounding "bang." I suspect some of those couplings were over 4 MPH.
A long time ago in a land far away, I had occasion to spend a summer working at what was then, the Lockbourne AFB @ Columbus Ohio. We were roofing new base housing...Over the weekends the crew would go down to Jackson, Oh. where most of them were from. At that time the DT&I RR had a large yard there. I think it was a 'flat yard', meaning every car movement had to be shoved in.
The noise of those cars, hitting together, all night, and in the daylight, could be heard all over that small town. It sounded like an Anvil Chorus, accompanied by a redition of the 1812 Overature [with real canons]. I even made a couple of trips down to watch, some of those cars were kicked so hard, I imagined that one could see daylight under the wheels. I know things are now done differenttly, but at one time, things were done expediently on the railroads. That show there in Jackson, Oh. was memorable, even these days. Maybe, that may be why the DT&I RR is not around thses days?
Any coupling of a free rolling car to a secured track of cars is going to make loud noises - even when the couplings are made within acceptable speed ranges. If the secured cars are empties the noise will be even louder than if the cars are mostly loads as each empty car acts like the reverberating portions of a hifi speaker to amplify the sound. The only quiet coupling will be where the crew shoves to the coupling with only sufficient force to complete the coupling. It isn't possible to accurately determine coupling speed by the sound the coupling makes.
samfp1943 - 'flat switching' in the era you described was where the crew would 'kick' car(s) from the cut by accelerating the entire cut, applying the brake thus giving momentum to the cars that had been uncoupled from the cut by the crew and they would then drift into the track the crew had lined for them. Present day on my carrier virtually ALL kicking of cars has been outlawed and is now against the rules except in several narrowly defined locations.
Some shippers install accelerometers along with their shipments that will record the date, time and intensity of impacts the shipment has suffered. They will interact with the carriers about overspeed impacts - to what ultimate end is always in question.
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...
Almost everything gets humped.
There are few that don't.
Depressed flats and flats with large, dimensional loads usually get switched out.
Rail trains and specialized equipment usually gets switched out.
Autos (loads and empty), dangerous (loads and empty), 5 pack double stacks, loads that have DO NOT HUMP all over them and loads of pipe or any other shiftable loads - it all goes over.
As for the hump controlling the speed - I see and hear cars hit WELL over 4 mph on a regular basis.
They don't care. It takes too long to switch a car out. The hump is top priority and someone will be answering for any delay to productivity.
10000 feet and no dynamics? Today is going to be a good day ...
Aircraft parts cars
"No soup for you!" - Yev Kassem (from Seinfeld)
Commodities that I forgot to mention in my original post are Group 1 hazmat materials (Explosives) and Acryonitrile. Acrylonitrile is used to make ABS plastics. It can be very dangerous. It is is shaken to hard it can self polymerize (start a chemical reaction). If it does and gets hot enough it can explode producing among other things hydrogen cyanide gas. Very nasty sutff.
CShaveRR denveroutlaws06 Certain coal gondolas can't be humped Actually, that's not true. Those big red signs on the sides of the old steel coal gons say "Do Not Tamp". I don't think it's a question of structural integrity so much as the possibility of overloading the car if the load of scrap or whatever is compressed. There are plenty of other cars I'd have been more scared of not surviving a trip over the hump than those.
denveroutlaws06 Certain coal gondolas can't be humped
Actually, that's not true. Those big red signs on the sides of the old steel coal gons say "Do Not Tamp". I don't think it's a question of structural integrity so much as the possibility of overloading the car if the load of scrap or whatever is compressed. There are plenty of other cars I'd have been more scared of not surviving a trip over the hump than those.
In my part of the world aluminum coal cars have at least 3 restrictions: "RADIANT THAW ONLY" (that means no flamethrowers to dislodge a frozen load as flamethrowers melt aluminum), "DO NOT HAMMER ON CAR", and "DO NOT HUMP, KICK OR DROP SWITCH". The first 2 are stencilled on the car's side, and the third is found on the switch list beside the car number. "DO NOT TAMP" warnings are new to me, but all the scrap gons we see up here are so beat-up, scratched and rusty that it could easily have worn off; sometimes I wonder if they are using old equipment on its last run to haul scrap metal to the steel mill, that would get rid of some empty car moves...
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
i wasnt refering to the steel hopper/gondolas some of the aluminum gondolas have do not hump on them
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2276746hem
denveroutlaws06Certain coal gondolas can't be humped
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)
certain coal gondolas cant be humped
Johnny, that's the truth--I dealt with it every day I worked up there. Eventually folks got used to dealing with me, knew the job would get done safely and properly, and everything was fine.
Eddystone I worked for 2 heavy hauling and rigging co's moving, loading and unloading heavy loads handled by railroads, a DO NOT HUMP sign doesn't mean jack to the railroads. We moved 1 transformer 4 times, it had an event recorder on it that registerd over 15,000 "hits". I don't know what constituted a "hit" but the power co. took delivery of it and put it in sevice and it immediately blew and split the case.
I worked for 2 heavy hauling and rigging co's moving, loading and unloading heavy loads handled by railroads, a DO NOT HUMP sign doesn't mean jack to the railroads. We moved 1 transformer 4 times, it had an event recorder on it that registerd over 15,000 "hits". I don't know what constituted a "hit" but the power co. took delivery of it and put it in sevice and it immediately blew and split the case.
I worked for a local Power Company, if we had a transformer considered essential (a generator step up or very large grid unit), we would have a "rider" accomany the car....
In some cases, also done for over the highway moves as well
from the Far East of the Sunset Route
(In the shadow of the Huey P Long bridge)
CShaveRR I have been avoiding this discussion, because I'm too long gone from the scene of the crimes.Jeff, the special instructions for Proviso used to be different because it wasn't an "automatic" hump like every other one on the railroad. I know that when I was up there, the instructions were adhered to religiously, but I suspect that the almighty car count persuaded some people to cut corners, and some officers to look the other way.We did have the advantage of being able to control the retarders to stop cars from rolling beyond them, so coupling a "buffer" car behind them could be done more efficiently.The "RSSM" classification must have come about after I retired. I'm sure that it covers some tank cars whose release of commodity would be a total disaster. I'm sure that chlorine and ethylene are among the RSSM goodies.I still get a chuckle when I think about the first time a Schnabel car showed up on the hump lead. It was empty, but it still required special handling, and nobody (else) seemed to know what to do, or why.
I have been avoiding this discussion, because I'm too long gone from the scene of the crimes.Jeff, the special instructions for Proviso used to be different because it wasn't an "automatic" hump like every other one on the railroad. I know that when I was up there, the instructions were adhered to religiously, but I suspect that the almighty car count persuaded some people to cut corners, and some officers to look the other way.We did have the advantage of being able to control the retarders to stop cars from rolling beyond them, so coupling a "buffer" car behind them could be done more efficiently.The "RSSM" classification must have come about after I retired. I'm sure that it covers some tank cars whose release of commodity would be a total disaster. I'm sure that chlorine and ethylene are among the RSSM goodies.I still get a chuckle when I think about the first time a Schnabel car showed up on the hump lead. It was empty, but it still required special handling, and nobody (else) seemed to know what to do, or why.
Johnny
dehusman Federal law permits humping loaded hazmat cars (except RSSM). They have to be in cuts of two or less, and they leads have to be clear of car ahead and following cars can't be released until the hazmat cars are clear of the lead and must be in cust of two or less. RSSM can't be kicked, can't be humped, can't be cut off in motion, must be coupled to at minimum speed, and can't be struck by a car rolling under its own momentum.
Federal law permits humping loaded hazmat cars (except RSSM). They have to be in cuts of two or less, and they leads have to be clear of car ahead and following cars can't be released until the hazmat cars are clear of the lead and must be in cust of two or less.
RSSM can't be kicked, can't be humped, can't be cut off in motion, must be coupled to at minimum speed, and can't be struck by a car rolling under its own momentum.
TIH/PIH = toxic inhalation hazard/poison inhalation hazard.
RSSM = rail security sensitive material.
Sorry to plead ignorance, Dave, but I can't recall what the acronym RSSM stands for.
John
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
NorthWestbut I think unoccupied passenger cars being carried in freight trains are prohibited from being humped.
Previous comments about kicking notwithstanding, I don't think passenger cars are to be kicked, either.
Cars carrying weapons such as rocket motors or missiles cannot be humped.
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