Kicking cars

[Murphy Siding]

In an old Trains Magazine, I was reading an article about railyards and switching. Around here, all switching is done with a switchman riding the car and getting off to do the groundwork. So, kicking cars is quite foreign to me. If I understood the article correctly, it sound like some poor devil has to walk(run) beside a car, holding up a lever(?), until the train hits the right speed. Then,he signals the engineer, who brakes the locomotive, causing the car to come uncoupled. At that point, the switchman can let go of the lever(?). What am I misunderstanding here? Wouldn't every switchman have to be an olympic triathlete? Can someone shed some light on this for me? Thanks

[Anonymous]

Murph - That's pretty much how flat switching works. You bleed the cars off to release the brakes, then you loco pulls out a track and you begin switching. Depending upon the yard and your comfort level you may ride a car back in each track and tie a handbrake on it before you begin kicking cars into the tracks you are using to classify cars. But you do run along side the cars and another crew member will usually line up your tracks for whatever you are kicking. Then you tell the engineer by radio or handsignal to give a kick and he widens the throttle as he deems necessary. You run alongside dodging switchstands holding the cutting lever up and tell the engineer to stop when you are going fast enough. The car rolls free into its track, you back up, your switchman lines you up for the next car (you both have a switchlist so he knows what will go where too) and you repeat the process until you have switched your cars or until the end of your shift.

[Murphy Siding]

Holy Cow![:O] How fast are they going when they kick a car,and how far does that poor guy have to run?.

[rrandb]

I have seen then on the steps of either car but not jogging.

[silicon212]

On my old Magma excursions back in the 90s, the crew would have the engineer accelerate the cars to be kicked to about 5MPH. Go too fast, and you have a collision that could result in a car or two going onto the ground, or a broken knuckle - too slow and the car never makes it to its intended destination. The real fun comes with "dropping" cars - its like kicking only the locomotive is ahead of the cars to be moved and not behind. In that case, you're hoping not to become "frogged" by a car stopping partially through the switch!

[csxengineer98]

that artical just about sums it all up, but the only time you realy need to run along side the car holding the cut leaver up is if the pin wont stay up..or if the engineer isnt a good kicker and bangs the cars around to much to make the pin fall once you get it up... most of the time..you just reach in..grab the leaver.. lift..and let it fly...
csx engineer

[rrandb]

QUOTE: Originally posted by csxengineer98

that artical just about sums it all up, but the only time you realy need to run along side the car holding the cut leaver up is if the pin wont stay up..or if the engineer isnt a good kicker and bangs the cars around to much to make the pin fall once you get it up... most of the time..you just reach in..grab the leaver.. lift..and let it fly...
csx engineer

Thats how I've seen it usually go down. If those boys did that much jogging there would be alot more skinny brakemen. LOL

[edblysard]

Hey, I resemble that skinny remark!

CSX engineer has it for you...the pin, or locking device that keeps the knuckle pin locked in the closed or down position is designed that, once you get some slack bunched up between the cars, you can lift the pin, or cut lever, and it will un lock the knuckles, and most of the time stay up or unlocked.

If the engineer doesn’t keep a steady push(kick) on the cars, or you have a boxcar or two with hydra cushion draft gear, and the slack action jumps back and forth, the pin will get knocked down.
In essence, the cars couple back into each other...then you get to run along side and hold the pin lever up.

Our rules say max kicking speed is 4 mph...But that’s also the coupling speed restriction for auto racks...we go faster, or slower, depending on what we are trying to accomplish.

You set bumper cars, as Character said, in the empty tracks, and start kicking.
You learn to judge the cars by load or empty, hopper, tank or flat, as to how hard or soft to kick them.
And a lot depends on the content of the car…most flammable gas in tank cars, max you can let roll free at a time is two.
Some tank cars, due to the contents, have to be shoved to the joint, you can not kick them at all.
Loaded autoracks, gondolas with pipe loaded above the top, and most shiftable high value loads are shoved to the joint

Got a few gaps in the track?
Find a covered hopper or two loaded with plastic pellets, and give them a really good hard kick...gaps gone!
Got a car with one of those really long, floppy drawbars?
You float it down in case the drawbar flops to one side and it by passes the coupler of the car you are kicking against.

On of the first things you are taught in your training class is, when working in a yard, to open every closed knuckle you find...so the cars kicked or humped into that track will make all the joints, or couple up the cars....saves someone having to walk the track getting it together later.

My crew is typical for most yards...a engine foreman, an engineer and a switchman, (field man).

Engine foreman is a fancy way of saying yard conductor...I get to make the decisions, fade the heat when they are wrong, and pull the pins.
Engineer get to see the same scenery, back and forth, over and over, lots of times.
Field man gets to try and stay one or two steps ahead of us, keeping the yard tracks lined up for the next two kicks or so.

Get a crew that has worked together for a while, and they can bang 'em out pretty quick.
When everybody gets the same groove on, it can be fun, in a way!

We routinely handle 50 cars cuts, sans air brakes....and switch about 250 to 300 cars a shift.
I switch into two leads, with 16 different tracks, seven down on lead, 9 down the other.

Depending on the blocking of the cars in the cuts, I might line the top lead switch ten or eleven time a cut, or thirty or forty if the cut is full of singles.

I take good care of my lead switch, it is my best friend at work...I have lined it so many times I can do it with my eyes closed and tell you if it has engine sand, or a rock in it, when it was lubed last, and if the switch points are snug or not.

In a well designed yard the field man can stand in one place, and be within 40 yards or so of all the switches he needs to line...and my switchman has 17 of them!

After the switching, we trim the tracks, or set out the cars we switched in a order that makes them into outbound trains...we couple up the tracks, swing them out of the switching yards into the departure yard, turn cover on the head end, and spot them for ground air and their initial terminal air test.

Flat yard switching is one of the aspects of railroading that rarely gets any press, most places have hump yards, or mini humps now, and where they do flat switch it is often in small yards, and they use air on the cars and shove to the joints.

It is a skill that seems to be going away, I don’t know of any other major flat switching yard operation our size down here, we have 50 tracks in the yard proper, three crews per shift, three shifts a day, and we all stay busy.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=7299+clinton+drive+houston+texas&ie=UTF8&ll=29.764899,-95.294209&spn=0.013374,0.031114&t=k&om=1

This is a overhead of North Yard where I work, zoom in on the parking lot and you can see my MU parked on the lead to the left.
Or type 7299 Clinton Drive, Houston Texas into your Google map search...

Not skinny, just well toned!
Ed[:D]

[blhanel]

So which car is yours, Ed?[}:)]

[rrandb]

I didn't point any fingers or name any names but we both know some of them boys have built a right good size shed to keep the rain off their tools. LOL Present company excluded. They did not get that way by jogging at work. [:O] [swg] [(-D]

[edblysard]

Brian,
Mine is not there, I left already.
I think the shot was around 2pm or so...usualy we have finished up and scooted by 1 to 1:30.
The MU is parked on the lead, the long track that curves down and to the right.
You can see the roof of one locomotive is painted white.
Far right, next to the big empty looking dirt "lot" is our receiving yard, six tracks, the longest hold 130 if we dont cut the little crossing.
The empty lot is really a raised dirt dump, it is made up of the dredge from the ship channel, scroll straight down and you can see the turning basin of the Houston Ship Channel and the city docks.

Look around the yard tracks, you can find some Cat machinery, bulldozers on flats, and in the receiving yard, a bunch of green John Deere combines on flats.
See if you can find the big red KLR heavy duty flat car, articulated ends, with four trucks, eight axles.

rrandb, we both know about engineers spread...the longer they sit on the seat box, the more they spread out...most of ours cant look down and see their toes with out having to suck a gut!
And they got it made up there, all our motors have A/C and iceboxs....they get up there with their lunch coolers and start in eating.
Bout the only time they come down is when we are done for the day.
Ed

[GP-9_Man11786]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding

Holy Cow![:O] How fast are they going when they kick a car,and how far does that poor guy have to run?.

Can you imagion Charlie Brown doing this job?[;)]

[edblysard]

Or Lucy lining switches for him?

Ed

[rrandb]

I may have gotten engineers confused with brakeman. I appoligise!!!

[MP173]

Ed:

Thanks for the tour.

Do you know what the costs are to "yard" a car?

In other words, what does your company figure it costs to handle a single car to be classified?

If I were guessing, I would think $75/per car with all the fixed costs associated.

ed

[coborn35]

Here at BNSF's 28th Street Yard, they kick cars really hard. Like 5-8 mph. Nothing makes you pay attetion more than getting the p*** scared out of you when a car gets kicked, (and coupled) right BEHIND you!!

[edblysard]

http://www.trainweb.org/southwestshorts/ptra.html
http://www.railcarmgt.com/sub2/media/downloads/cs_ptra.pdf

When the server comes back up...I will get you the tariff and switching fees..
Ed

Or look here...again, the server seems to be kaput right now...
http://www.google.com/search?q=Port+Terminal+Railroad+Association+switching+fees&hl=en&lr=&start=0&sa=N

[Murphy Siding]

It sounds like, if the engineer does it right, the switchman only has to lift the lever, and not run alongside. If an engineer and switchman do this every day, they'd probably get very good at it.

[chad thomas]

Would someone have to walk the train beforehand and close the angle co-cks (where appropriate) and bleed the air? Or is this done for for every cut as the cuts are kicked? That's got to be asking a lot of the power (brake wise) on those 50+ car cuts with the air cut out..

[ChuckCobleigh]

Since Google maps doesn't work on my version of MacOS, I used zillow.com, which has satellite pictures and home prices overlaid on the images. The yard is interesting, to say the least. Then I swooped around Houston. Needless to say, being in Southern California, the prices in the Houston area are astounding. Or maybe it's our prices that are astounding.

Of course, I'm not ready to pull up stakes and move there yet.

[Lord Atmo]

this goes on at Altoona every day. basically the train backs up at a certain speed but usually nothing too fast. i see the crewmember actually walking alongside the train rather than running. but they never go very fast that the crewmember has to run. i'm unsure as to whether this exact speed is accomplished because they use 2 geeps instead of 1 or that the engineer is just that good

[edblysard]

Our car department inspects every inbound train for bad order cars, bleeding off the air as they go.
By the time I get to it, the track has been inspected, all BO cars tagged and in the computer, (on my switch list) and the air is gone...hand brakes are applied to the leading end only.
We have MK1500Ds, with dual clasp brakes, (two shoes per wheel), so they do stop pretty quickly, but most of that depends on your engineer.
Good ones can crack the whip at 5 mph, bad ones will wear you out in a hour.
I might jog along beside a car, for 50 feet or so, but that’s it...I don’t run, not in this heat.

Dragging this many cars around with no train brakes takes a little more skill than is often written about...timing and knowing how your train will react is part of it...getting a good engine foreman who makes intelligent cuts is the other part.

If the cut has a bunch of loads, or is just plain heavy, we will close the anglecock about 5 cars deep in the cut, and shoot some air to them, so the engineer has the brakes on those cars to work with also.
Trust me, I have to ride the end of the cuts around, so I have to trust my engineer completely, and he has to trust me too, as I am his eyes on the end of a 120 car shove.
Bet on me giving him every extra ounce of control over the cut as I can.

We drag a receiving yard track out, shove around and into a few holding tracks, and get to switching, depending on the best place to make a cut on the train.

Once the engineer starts the kick, and the slack bunches up, you can lift the pin lever, and then release it, and if everything works like it should, that’s pretty much it.
I might have to take a few quick steps holding the lever up, but not often.
The norm is lifting the lever while taking a step or two...sometimes you have to jiggle the pin to make it stay up, but you get to the point that you know the instant you lift if you’re going to have to hold it up, or if it will stay up on its own.

Ed

QUOTE: Originally posted by chad thomas

Would someone have to walk the train beforehand and close the angle co-cks (where appropriate) and bleed the air? Or is this done for for every cut as the cuts are kicked? That's got to be asking a lot of the power (brake wise) on those 50+ car cuts with the air cut out..

[Anonymous]

Flat switching can also tear the stuffing of the lading.

When I was in high school, I had a part time job at a grocery distribution company that recieved carloads of canned goods. I spent about half my time unloading boxcars and semis.

The company that prepared our private-label brands in Californina shipped by rail, and would use two different routes - ATSF-Streator-PC or ATSF-Kansas City-MP-St. Louis-PC. The Chicago cars were almost always in good shape when they arrived - they usually switched at Argentine, Elkhart, and Buckeye Yards, which were all humps. The Kansas City cars had shifted loads about a third of the time - some of them were real disasters, especially if the load contained glass jars. The traffic manager told the damage occured at St. Louis - I guess the boys at Dupo Yard may be been moving a little faster that 4 mph!

The worst mess I ever saw were four boxcars loaded with gallon jars of apple juice from Washington State - it normally shipped via truck, but there weren't enough trucks available at the peak of the Arab oil crisis. Easily half of the contents of each car load was broken - there was a layer of "syrup" on the floor of each car.

It was fall, and the yellowjackets quickly found out about it the mess - they got so thick that we had to cable one of our semis to the cars and pull them about a quarter mile to the far end of the siding to keep the insects from attacking the guys on the loading dock. PC had to call a cleaning contractor and wa***he cars out on site - at night when the 'jackets were inactive.

The shipper later told us that all thirty cars he shipped that day had the same problem - apparent whichever crew switched the cars off the Yakima local that night must have been in a hurry to knock off.

[Murphy Siding]

How many cars can be kicked at one time?

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by Murphy Siding

How many cars can be kicked at one time?

You could kick 40 cars or more. The only issue with large cuts is their momentum. However,when a large cut of cars was going to one place, it would be shoved instead of kicked.

[edblysard]

Each railroad makes that determination, and list the number of cars allowed to roll free in their timetable and general orders...
That said, there are FRA hazmat restriction all railroads must follow.

Flammable gas, two cars max.
Hydrocyanatic acid tanks may not be allowed to roll free at all...you shove them to a joint, and must have at least one buffer car on top of that before you can kick against the track with the cyanide car in it.

Loaded auto racks, two at a time under 4mph.

Shiftable loads have to be shoved...pipe above the gondola top, or pipe/ plate steel on a straight flat car is a shove move...bulkhead flats are treated like boxcars, let ‘em rip.... Again, if you look at the car and the load is, say a boxcar full of beer bottles, or apple juice for that matter, maybe a load of lumber that might shift, you use the best tool you have, your brain.

Our switch list shows a lot of info, but not the exact contents of the cars beyond the normal hazmat info.

But after a week or two, you know what cars have what inside....the apple juice guys, if they worked the job before, knew the load was fragile, they just didn’t care.

We can’t afford to be that callous, as small as we are, tracing damage back to a switch crew is easy, and for us, each customer counts, enough so that we go a little farther than normal to take care of them...we can’t afford to lose the business.

There are other restrictions, about a page worth in the hazmat book, but common sense should prevail.
Think about it...
Who in their right mind would kick a car full of pressurized cyanide acid?

Up until a year ago, on the PTRA, the number of cars you could kick was totally up to the foreman...I have come around and got a pin on 14 loaded boxcars at once...but I have also been switching the same lead for ten years, and I trust my field man to tie handbrakes correctly, tight enough to hold the cars and absorb the impact from a kick, but not so tight they slide…
Again, trust in your crew plays a lot into your decision making process, and you have a job briefing before you start.

We get together between cuts, and talk over what we plan on doing next, which cars to shove, where to tie down the bumper cars, check and agree on which tracks are clear, and which already have bumpers, stuff like that.

If you get to watch a regular switch crew that has worked together for a while, you will notice that almost never talk to each other on the radio, we have each others work pattern down pat, I know where my field man is headed, and what he is going to do, and he knows what I need from him, and when I need it.

Once you get going, it is almost like a dance, where you know your partners moves before they make them.

Because I trust him that much, I can keep up a steady flow of kicks, knowing he is a step ahead of me all the time.
Almost all of our communication is with hand signals; keep the radio free to talk to the engineer and tell him to kick ‘em.
And when he gets close enough to see me, we switch to hand signals too.

Yard dogs watch out for yard dogs, so to speak!

I know how hard, or soft, to let them go, and how far they will travel down the yard tracks before gravity and friction take over.
In this instance, the 14 boxes coupled up to the bumper cars at less than walking speed, never even budged the bumpers.

But the FRA field inspector is some what of a twerp...he and our Superintendent don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things...mostly because the FRA guy is 5'5" in cowboy boots, and our super is well over 6'.
Seriously, they come from two different cultures, and the FRA guy insisted we only let 2 cars at a time go now.

This turns a 30 car cut with 4 or 5 great pins into 15 kicks...time consuming.

But oddly enough, I have watched the hump at Englewood let 5 car cuts of loads, and three and four loaded autoracks go scooting down the hump, so...
You might ask Carl about hump yard restrictions, he is a hump master, so he will know.

So the short answer to Murphy’s question is…
Each railroad has its own rules on the number of cars you can kick, superseded by the hazmat handling rules and switching restriction for hazardous materials.
Ed
(yes, I love what I do, and they pay me to do it!)

[blhanel]

QUOTE: Originally posted by edblysard


Look around the yard tracks, you can find some Cat machinery, bulldozers on flats, and in the receiving yard, a bunch of green John Deere combines on flats.
See if you can find the big red KLR heavy duty flat car, articulated ends, with four trucks, eight axles.

No luck on the KLR, but the combines were easy to spot. They probably came from Waterloo, IA.

[ericsp]

QUOTE: Originally posted by blhanel

QUOTE: Originally posted by edblysard


Look around the yard tracks, you can find some Cat machinery, bulldozers on flats, and in the receiving yard, a bunch of green John Deere combines on flats.
See if you can find the big red KLR heavy duty flat car, articulated ends, with four trucks, eight axles.

No luck on the KLR, but the combines were easy to spot. They probably came from Waterloo, IA.

The KRL car is about 12 cars to the north of the combines on the track to the right. There are also a couple cars in the main yard that appear to have Cats on them.

[edblysard]

The reason I remember when we left the day this was shot is because the combines had been vandalized en route....some one had shot all the windshields with a pretty big caliber rifle.

Our claims agent and the gumshoes got all grubby climbing across the other tracks to inspect them...this is one of the reasons the car department inspects the inbounds closely, had we handled the cars and then found the damage later, the PTRA would had had to pay for the repairs, as it was UP got the bill instead.

The KLR flat is going to look like a big red rectangle, the side of the car has "Red 'n Ready" painted on it.

Eric found some of the Cats...lets see, if you can find the Coke train, to the right about six tracks are a few more Cats on Flats...most of these are headed to Chile, but some go as far as Russia.

To the left of North Yard, and looking like it is part of it, is another yard, about ten tracks wide and running under an overpass...this is UPs Basin yard...Formerly HB&T.
Keep scrolling up, and follow the tracks out the north or top end of the yard, and you will end up at UP Englewood(SP) and the hump over Wayside drive, just a little past that is Settagast yard, also UP(HB&T and MoPac).
Englewood is a pretty big yard, has the hump and bowl, plus an intermodel ramp at the far left, or west end of the yard, looks like a seperate smaller yard.
All within three miles of each other, these are the three biggest yards in South Texas.

If you scroll down, or south, you will hit the turning basin of the ship channel, follow that to the right and you will see that it is almost solid refineries all the way back to Galveston Bay...our tracks run on both side of the channel.
Go left instead, and follow Buffalo Bayou to downtown Houston, still carries barge traffic.

When I was a kid, Houston had...
CB&Q, Santa Fe, MoPac, Katy, Rock Island, IGN, SP, PTRA and the HB&T all running trains into the city, with SP being the major player....when you said railroad, you meant SP.
The CB&Q, HB&T and the Rock all ran on the line next to our neighborhood...the Fort Worth and Denver (joint Rock Island CB&Q property)

It is down to BNSF, UP, TexMex and PTRA now.

[ericsp]

Ed, is that red car about a dozen or so cars north of the combines, on the track to the right, the KRL flatcar?
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.765858,-95.291572&spn=0.001274,0.002942&t=h&om=1