Is there a special signal or signage for draw bridge approaches?
What’s the max speed limit in the US?
Thanks – encouraging to read. You yourself, as you tell us, were born long after the end of regular everyday steam rail services in the US – and as you say, there are plenty more like you. I’m hoping and trusting that it’s the same over here.
The financial troubles over the past few years have had an adverse effect on preserved steam lines in the UK too; though to the best of my knowledge, none have yet (touch wood) actually gone under.
This is a fascinating thread – I’m struck by the fact that virtually all posts, except for mine, have been about the modern rail scene. I feel a bit uncomfortably that I’m a tunnel-vision-afflicted nut, with rather little interest in the field outside of steam !
How does the Crown* 4-4-0 compare to the steam engines build by the old time
locomotive builders (Baldwin, American Locomotive, Porter, etc.)? I have
heard that they are under powered and steam poorly.
I always thought that the brakeman position was what everyone started as and
from there you could work your way up to conductor or engineer. Is this no
longer true? Do railroads no longer have brakeman?
Is a flying switch** still permitted? Have you ever done it?
- Crown was a builder of small locomotives for amusement parks that started after
the locomotive companies stopped manufacturing steam engines. Crown
locomotives were probably never intended to be used on main line railroads.
** Description of what a flying switch is can be found at the bottom of this article:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/592/what-does-do-not-hump-mean-on-the-side-of-railroad-cars)
What’s your opinion of foamers?
Any good weed weasel stories, or any experiences with idiot non-company cops?
Is operating a steam locomotive fun?
There’s special signals and signage for most anything you can imagine. I didn’t run a route with any drawbridges, so I can’t comment on what they are, but any special circumstance would be covered in the subdivision’s timetable/special rules book.
For the vast majority of mainline trackage, it is 65 for freight and 79 for passenger. In the northeast corridor and a couple of other places, there is higher speed. The Acelas can do 125 or so, IIRC. St. Louis-Chicago is upgrading for 110 MPH running.
I have a soft spot for that little engine. Build quality was good, and the things were engineered to really take a beating in sharp curves and lots of starts/stops. The firebox was probably too small, which I think leads to the complaints about poor steaming. We converted ours to propane, and the engine did everything we asked it to do, every time. There were times when we popped the first safety valve waiting for the switchman, so steaming was never an issue. Of course, we never got above about 15 MPH, either…
As a position, it’s pretty much gone. Normally, a low-seniority conductor would be assigned the third spot on a local train, and would be called the brakeman, since that’s the job he was doing. But nowadays, the entry-level in train service is almost exclusively “conductor trainee.”
It’s a GCOR rules violation. I have never done it myself, but I have seen it done a few times. Neat to watch, but scary. It requires you to bottle your air, which is a big no-no.
I share a kinship with them, since I’ve always loved trains. I think they do more good than harm (keeping an eye out for vandals, safety issues, etc.) I’ve had railfans bring me fresh coffee and donuts while waiting for hours for a meet out in the boonies, which is nice, and usually they’ll shoot the shit with you to pass the time. In some cases, if they’ve got laptops and the software, they can actually show you the dispatcher’s screen and give us more information that we have access to!
Oh lord…I’ll have to come back to that.
When I was a kid, there was a racing set called “Twin Turbo Trains” that had a loop-the-loop. After watching the things go flying off of there, I’m pretty solid on loops, thanks!
It’s hot, dirty, sometimes frustrating work, but when things are going right–yes, it’s fun. It’s one of those experiences that so few people get anymore, so you feel a bit special because you got to take part in it.
Now I remember the last item.
Conventional wisdom is that the train always has right of way. Are there any circumstances where this isn’t the case?
It is a rhetorical question. 
How do you qualify on different signal systems and routes? If you’ve been driving trains on the East Coast your entire career, can you get a certificate for Union Pacific lines out west by taking an exam on signal policies, procedures, route layouts, etc., or would you have to apprentice with a Union Pacific engineer?
Are there realistic train simulators that actually help you gain or keep skills? For example, if you want to start on a Chicago -> Salt Lake City route that you hadn’t done before, can you fire up a simulator and get a halfways reasonable look at what signals, switches/interchanges/ typical hazards (e.g. rocks, rednecks, sheep, sinkholes, flooded valleys) , curves, grade changes, etc. exist, or would it be blah and generic and not much help?
No. There can be questions of which train has right-of-way, though.
You’d basically be hired by the Union Pacific and put into the classroom part of engineer or conductor school, where you get the books, flashcards, study materials, and lessons so that you could take the GCOR rules test and the signals test. You’d be fine on air brake tests, since you’d already know that and it’s universal.
Once you’ve passed the tests, you’d still have to qualify on the route on which you’d be working, just like anyone else, so you’d basically be an apprentice under an experienced engineer for a few trips until you got familiar with your new territory.
Yes, though not so much on the consumer market. The railroads have state-of-the-art simulators with actual video of each route taken from the head end. The video syncs to your speed, so you’re actually driving that route, with the real signals, switches, grades, etc. The program allows the dispatcher to line you to different places and throw different signal aspects at you. 90% as good as the real deal. Generally, though, you’d just ride along on the actual route a couple of times, then drive it with an experienced engineer a few times until you qualified.
What does this mean, “bottle your air”?
Sometimes I’ve had to “bottle my air” during my car commutes with others. It’s uncomfortable.
I’ll try to explain this as concisely as I can, because the whole operation of air brakes is complicated.
Normally, the locomotive (which has an air compressor that is used to charge the brake line) is connected to the rest of the train via air hoses–they hang down under each coupler.
Because of the way the brakes operate, a fast loss of air in the brake pipe will actually trigger an emergency application. This happens when, for instance, an air hose fails somewhere on the train. That car’s triple valve senses the air loss, applies the emergency brake, and the loss of pressure is then sensed by the next car, which applies its e-brake, and so on, all the way to the engines and the rear of the train.
“Bottling air” is when the engineer connects the locomotive to the train, charges the brake pipe through the entire train (up to 90psi on freight/110psi on passenger) and then closes the valve on the first car on the train. He can then disconnect the locomotives without dumping the air on the train. Problem is, the brakes on all those cars are now released, and not connected to a brake control stand that can release some air and apply the brakes–or initiate an emergency application.
The best analogy I can make would be to put a car in neutral and then walk away.
Do you or any of your co-workers have colorful nick-names? (On another website
I once saw a tread that discussed the nick-names some railroaders had for each other and
the stories behind the names - some of the names and stories were pretty
funny.)
Thanks for starting this thread. Looking forward to reading your weed weasel stories.
Why would you ever need to bottle air? I’m assuming it’s something you can’t sustain for very long before something leaks down enough to trip a valve.
It sounds like a good way to discover you stopped on a grade as the cars roll away from you. “Dude, where’s my train?”
Just remembered the rest of this. The truck driver claimed the train was stopped when he started across, but suddenly started up and drove into him. Pretty much everyone laughed at him.
Mostly. But I have been surprised by factual answers from people on the inside before. If nothing else I knew it would be good for a chuckle.
Last question I think. I used to travel for a job that had me driving for miles down a highway beside a track. Often when meeting a train my radar detector would do off. Some friends have said that trains have a radar based system to detect obstacles on the track. Others have said that trains broadcast as a warning system so that detector equipped vehicles will look before crossing.
What’s the Straight Dope?
There are some interesting nicknames out there. I worked sometimes with a guy everyone called Dave Chappelle because he looked exactly like him, and there was an older engineer that everyone called Skeletor (behind his back.) One of the young trainmasters was Napoleon. My father used to call me Jughead, and when I mentioned that, it stuck to me for a while.
My favorite story has to do with a local cop in a small town. We were bringing a passenger train through an interlocker (a place where two railroads cross over each other at grade.) We’d gotten there first, so we had the right of way, and we were running on green signals at track speed, which was about 45 MPH through this town.
Well, I guess the STREET speed limit was 30.
So we come pulling around a pretty sharp bend to the right, just past the interlocker, and up ahead, parked on the tracks, is a black Camaro with “Police” down the side, lights flashing. We were a good quarter of a mile away and not moving that fast, so it didn’t require an emergency application to stop. Released some air and brought the nose of the locomotive to within a few feet of the crossing.
This guy–Chief of Police, he was, by the name of Harry Williams–proceeds to climb the side ladder and bang on the door. When we opened it, he climbs into the cab (a Federal offense) and proceeds to tell us that the speed limit in HIS town was 30, and that he’d clocked us doing 45. The Asst. Engineer and I try to explain that city traffic laws have no bearing on our speed limit, which is set by the railroad and has been so since…probably the 1870’s. Still, he demands my driver’s license and pulls out his ticket book.
By this time the Conductor has walked up to the engine from the train, and now he’s on the radio with the dispatcher, explaining our delay and basically trying to get the DS to call somebody…anybody…to resolve the situation.
I let the asshole write me a speeding ticket. The Conductor finally takes charge and demands that Harry “get the hell off MY train, or I’ll throw you off myself.”
Cop gets down, backs his car up, and we’re off. Since it wasn’t legally binding anyway (and, even if it was, the railroad would have paid it) I opened my window, tore up his ticket, and threw it at his car. He got out and I yelled “mail me the littering ticket.”
And that was that. Dude got fired a year or so later for seizing large amounts of coke that never made it into the evidence locker.
It’s done to perform a “flying switch.” Say you are facing a spur track that has one entrance only. You have cars behind you that you need to leave on that track. Since the engines are in front of the cars, you can’t just back them up and disconnect. So, in the old days, you’d bottle the air and put the brakeman on the ground a bit ahead of the switch. You get the train moving, then the brakeman pulls the pin to disconnect the engines from the train. The engineer throttles up and accelerates away from the rolling cars. Once the engines pass the switch, the brakeman throws it. The cars roll onto the spur. The brakeman climbs on board and sets enough handbrakes to stop the cars.
Yep–those pesky trains accelerate like my new Camaro, I’m tellin’ ya!
The trains themselves don’t have a radar. Nor is there a system in place to broadcast a warning. There are talking defect detectors every 20 or so miles along the track that scan for dragging equipment, hot axles, and the like, and I guess those would use radar. There are also radio signals coming from the flashing rear-end device at the end of the train, which keeps in contact with a radio in the cab so the engineer can see what the brake pressure is back there, as well as when that car starts rolling (or stops.) If there are distributed power locomotives back on the train, they use radio, too. But no–no systems like you describe.