A week or so ago, I saw a program on (I think) Discovery Times about the Auto Train derailment on April 18, 2002. As usual for this type of program, it was long on blah-blah and exceedingly short on information. So, I downloaded the NTSB report on the accident, which you can find here in a PDF document, which of course had a very detailed report on the investigation.
Recall that the cause of the accident was a sun kink in the track as the train moved into a curve. In amongst the detail was a marvelous treatise on CWR and the difficulties in maintaining it and preventing sun kinks. (The kink in this one was reported by the engineer to be displaced about ten inches or more.) It's a fascinating read and covered the series of small actions that probably got the length of track out of balance with respect to its neutral temperature, providing a lot of technical background.
Now to the surveyor part, with a hat tip to our muddy feathered friend in Colorado, which concerns the practice of surveying curves over the seasons, for instance, to see that curved track hasn't chorded (a term I hadn't heard before) inwards over the winter, plus other surveying needs. There is a lot of interesting narrative and background into the track maintenance issue, not quite a textbook but a tutorial and reminder that we learn a lot from failure.
From an engineering perspective, a railroad track is a complex mechanism that has a lot of non-textbook features which present interesting problems, to say the least. This NTSB report really highlighted the built-up knowledge supporting the folks who lay and maintain the foundation of the business and improved my admiration for what they have to learn and practice every day and night.
Excellent report with solid science related information. So many of us take for granted what is involved in laying, maintaining, and repairing railroad lines.
Thank you for sharing!
"I like my Pullman Standards & Budds in Stainless Steel flavors, thank you!"
....Will read that report, it sounds very interesting.
Quentin
Well, it took me about an hour and a half to read the report, and I found it very interesting. I am kinda surprised that I was able to understand it all - I didn't expect the report to be written in (mostly) plain english. Based on my experience reading aviation related reports (usually in summarized format), I'm a little surprised that the board didn't hit the engineer harder for not activating the EOT dump valve faster. Having said that, I thought the report reached it's conclusions in a logical manner, noting what they knew versus what they surmised. Very interesting reading!
Edited to add:
I also learned quite a bit about the physics of rail and ballast, and why things are done they way they are when laying and maintaining track. A very educational report as well!
Tom
Railroading - in all it's aspects, Operations, Engineering, Signalling, Billing, Collections and each and every other part of the enterprise are nowhere nearly as simple as the first appear.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Jock Ellis Cumming, GA US of A Georgia Association of Railroad Passengers
That was a fascinating report. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I read most of it and found it extremely well written and easy for a non engineer to understand.
Just as Balt indicated, what appears to be simple...running a train, is not so simple after all. The engineering required in the CWR installation, plus the subsequent resurfacing, tamping, etc makes it necessary to keep on top of the track conditions.
It was interesting how the accident could be traced back to a tamping maching malfunctioning several months earlier. I never realized the impact of lateral (and longitudal) forces on CWR.
Great reading.
ed
Read 2/3's or so of the report....Understandable for us non railroad people...{but railfans}. Detailed with specifics. The report goes to wide measures to document site, near site, operations procedures, crew specs....just everything envolved.
People involved that must make decisions from this report sure seem to have good detailed, understandable info. Hope it supplied info to proper people to whatever action was necessary to prevent a reoccurring incident.
Excellent report - should be required reading for all roadmasters. Particularly the findings that monumentation was not called for in this case - especially after the breakdown in the repair unit. Also that a track disturbance report was not timely filed and that the reduced speed limit was not kept in place until re-surveyed for alignment. Spiral-to-curve transitions are critical, and the sloughing off of ballast was contributory as well. Maintaining superelevation and replacing holddowns with reference to neutral temperature needs to be properly documented. It would be prudent for the track inspector to have a running readout of cross-slope as he/she drives these curves, possibly with a level guage mounted in the cab.
Mudchicken must deal with monumentation issues a lot ...
Warren & Chuck:
(1) Mudchickens on the railroads are few in number and rarely get used for this type of thing anymore. (BNSF, CSX and IC have the most, UP,KCS & NS the least).....The baloney meter started to register here until the track geometry cars being used as survey vehicles started to register. Engineers can, for the most part, no longer survey - the new folks are clueless number crunchers because surveying in CE programs has been de-emphasized. Mudchickens rarely get to work with the roadmasters anymore. (Most roadmasters don't have a technical background. They came up through the trackman ranks. Many roadmasters are weak at understanding how the track liner in their surfacing gang really works. There are some on Chief Engineer's staffs that think track lines put out geometricly perfect curves because a salesman told them - including some folks with degrees).... welcome to the real world.
(2) Crosslevelling by hand with a $500 Magnum crosslevel by the track inspector is as good as it gets. Most of the on-board track level & geometry devices for hi-rail trucks available today are horribly unreliable/imprecise. Joe-Bob's empty beer can on the dashboard or sloshing cup of coffee are about as good.
(3) Far too many folks put way to much credibility in what a track liner puts out as finished track (All it can do is smooth a curve, it CANNOT put out perfect geometry on its own - It's only a stringline solution)...The yellow machines rarely if ever get the time to go back and field check/ measure & plot their work which can become an issue in high speed track.
mudchicken wrote:Engineers can, for the most part, no longer survey - the new folks are clueless number crunchers because surveying in CE programs has been de-emphasized.
Engineers can, for the most part, no longer survey - the new folks are clueless number crunchers because surveying in CE programs has been de-emphasized.
MC
When I started my EE schooling as an older chap in the mid-seventies, it was common to see the civil sophomores wandering around our hilly campus with tribods, transits, etc. I think they had to have two semesters of surveying in addition to the rest of the "core" engineering courses that everyone regardless of major had to take. I may have not been paying as much attention by the time I finished up two years later, but it seems that the "survey crews" were a less common sight. In 1981 or 1982, California changed the PE act so that civils registered after that time were not authorized to practice surveying unless they were also registered as land surveyors. Occasionally a case percolates up from a CE survey that was hosed, mostly in Northern California, for some reason.
Interesting that the first half of PE examinations is called the "Fundamentals of Engineering" exam, leading to the EIT certificate. It's too bad that a lot of kids coming out don't get the picture that what they learned in school really was supposed to be the fundamentals and that there is a lot of additional knowledge and skill to be acquired to actually become an engineer, regardless of the field.
The NTSB report that started this thread was a nice tutorial on just how deceptively simple something like track can appear while in reality being a very complex system in itself. I had the good or mis-fortune of working on a cutting edge avionics system technology for a number of years which hid its complexity well, much to the dismay of newbies coming on board who thought it was pretty simple. It wasn't that they didn't appreciate at first the complexity of the technology, so much as their conviction that they knew more about it than those of us who had been working it for a long time and refused to listen and learn. That meant repetitive coaching and correcting that wasted a lot of time. I suspect that MC is now thinking, "Been there, done that," and I might add, it wasn't fun, either.
Thanks for that link.
mudchicken wrote:I'm more concerned [and sobered] about the operating management that somehow thinks a BA degree and riding on some other guy's coat-tails to the top of the operating management feeding frenzy is the only thing needed. He/she has no clue about the railroad and what it takes to have a plant / franchise to run on in the first place. The track department braintrusts and skills were just a drag on those with the "we run trains" mentality. The Mechanical Engineer that created the Business Administration discipline in New England's textile mills all those years ago has got to be rolling over in his grave..........Especially now that all the institutional memory has retired or been downsized with no replacements in the pipeline to train....scary.
M.C. Right on target; You can see some of these engineering types in action, in the classroom and in the real world. Newly minted engineerring types are so stoked with the bookwork, they have trouble seeing how the little mistakes can effect how their new real world product turns out; most of them are unable to adapt easily, even the professional types screw up and do it big time. In this area there was the upgrading of US hwy 400 to create a bypass around Parsons,KS. The road is a limited access,[called here in Kansas a 'SuperTWO', 'cause the politicians can't fund a fourlane road now; they buy the ROW, and off set the soad so the next politicians ac fund the additional two lanes???] Anyway, some of the KDOT braintrust ok'd and had built a very large double box culvert for the new road, the only problem was the original survey was off by about 90 degrees and they ok'd its construction. Since it was built months ahead of the main ROW const it sat unneeded and un used til the road arrived. It was too far off to be used. It was turned into rubble and buried under the new ROW and a new double box was built..OH,Well was the engineers attitude, the contractor got to build another box and paid for it again..
http://mprailway.blogspot.com
"The first transition era - wood to steel!"
mudchicken wrote:....Especially now that all the institutional memory has retired or been downsized with no replacements in the pipeline to train....scary.
The company I worked for until I retired, or at least a year before I retired (gobbled up by a bigger defense contractor) had an interesting engineer development philosophy at the mother ship that worked pretty well because it was a big organization with enough business momentum they could afford it. They would do the annual college-hiring thing and bring in a bunch of bright new-meats and immediately throw them into a lab under the wing of at least one senior technician and one or two seasoned senior engineers. The new-meats would be involved with some interesting hands-on work that required some technical skills but not a great amount of prior knowledge, with constant guidance from the mentors. That would go on for at least two and maybe more years, while they acquired first the understanding that they didn't really have a lot of knowledge and second the impetus to gain that knowledge. Once they got that seasoning, if they were up to it, they started doing some minor design work, moving up in complexity as they were able to handle it.
It was a great paradigm, worked pretty well and produced some very good engineers, which was necessary in the outer space business. Whether this is continuing under the new corporate umbrella, I am not aware. At least before that, they were very careful to maintain the pipeline of knowledgeable engineers.
Of course, where I worked, away from the mother ship, we were much smaller and didn't follow that strategy, which meant that a lot of knowledge walked out the door every year, more so when business was down.
The large rail sompanies are big enough that they should have been maintaining a continuing pipeline of competence all along, but quite frankly, many people who pose as managers do not have a clue about the long-term effects of some of their policy initiatives, as they seem to live from quarterly to quarterly and stop their thinking at that point. Breaking the pipeline of competence and institutional knowledge is something that will not be recovered from for a decade or more, if ever.
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