Do you love your Good & Plenty?
If the train was setting off a radar detector at he front end, I’d bet money it was the wheel slip detector doing it, or from the back end the FRED data link.
Thank you so much for such an informative thread.
Does the engine have a bathroom? Can you relieve yourself in motion or do you have to wait until you stop again?
Are you generally in constant radio contact with your dispatcher? With other trains?
Do signals work on battery backup in case of power failure? If not, do you just stop and wait?
Does it frighten you to go over a high trestle?
If there are two engines pulling a train, does one person control both?
Can you listen to music while you operate?
Do you wear an engineer hat?
Is your cab air-conditioned?
Yes, there is a bathroom in the cab. In freight engines it is in the nose. On the Amtrak P42’s it is behind the cab. It’s possible to use it in motion, though if the engineer has to go he can only leave the controls to another licensed engineer, per the rulebook. And you know we’d never violate the rulebook. It’s a chemical toilet, much like a porta-john. Union contracts mandate that they be functional, well-equipped, and clean. Usually they are. We can refuse a locomotive if it’s not up to par.
Nah, not really. You can dial them up if you need to, but once you have your go-ahead, you are governed by signals or track warrants, so there’s not a lot of need to stay in contact. He can see our progress on his computer screen. Sometimes you have to call in and remind them to set a route, or find out when and where you’ll meet another train, but for the most part once you’re on the mainline you don’t talk to him much. You can talk to other trains, and when one passes you’re supposed to do a roll-by inspection and radio the engineer that all is well, or there’s a defect. Some rulebooks also have the crew call signals over the radio.
Yes, there is battery backup. If a signal is dark for any reason, you treat it as though it were displaying its most restrictive aspect. So for an absolute signal, you stop and call the dispatcher until you get cleared past it. For a permissive signal, you can stop and proceed at restricted speed until you can see the next signal. (Restricted speed means a speed at which you can stop at half the distance of your vision.)
There aren’t many in my neck of the woods, but I do have a phobia about bridges in general. Crossing the Mississippi as a passenger makes me a bit nervous.
Yes. They are MU’d together (stands for Multiple Units.) The lead control stand controls them all.
No. And after the big head-on accident out in California, it’s now against Federal law to have a phone on your person while operating (unless you are using it to call your dispatcher or the police or something.) No electronic devices allowed, basically. We can nap when the train is stopped, so long as one crew member remains awake.
I did on the tourist railroad. Not on the big iron. You dress like your typical casual blue-collar worker.
Yes. The creature comforts aren’t bad. There’s a fridge and a microwave, too.
Thanks for a great thread! It seems to me that a lookahead radar might not be a bad idea for a train. Give that extra warning of an oncoming moose on the track, etc.
Speaking of creature comforts, do any locomotives have ‘sleepers’, like the bunk space behind the cab in my brother-in-law’s truck? You mention a ‘limo’ coming to relieve the train crew when they’ve done their twelve hours in the cab; do long-distance trains have two crews alternating and the off crew using a sleeper?
And it’s not really a limo, is it? One would think it would just be a van or a crew truck or a car. Or even a taxi…
So does the dispatcher sit in a control room with animated track diagrams showing where every train is and how all the switches are set? I have this impression of a rail-traffic controller, like an air-traffic controller, but without the airport view.
And lastly, a steam-engine question. What is the purpose of the ‘shrouds’ outside and parallel to the sides of the front part of the boiler (?) on this steam engine? (I was down at the railway museum in Toronto a couple of weeks ago…)
‘Big head-on accident’…?
Those are called smoke lifters or, colloquially, “elephant ears”. They are supposed to channel the airflow past the stack so that the smoke rises up above the train, rather than coming straight back into the engine crew’s faces. They’re not all that widely used, but one of the best-known operating locomotives, UP 844 has elephant ears, lending it a distinctive look.
No, no sleepers. A train might go from LA to Chicago, but at the beginning and end of each subdivision, a new crew comes aboard. The old crew is either now at their home terminal, or their away terminal, where they will get their rest at a hotel until called back to their home terminal. Like I say, the subdivisions are a couple hundred miles long.
Semantically, a limousine is any vehicle for hire, so technically it’s a limo, but you’re right that it’s a crew van. And I don’t know where they hire their drivers, but most of them were absent the day they taught driving in driver’s ed.
Pretty much, although each dispatcher will only be responsible for one subdivision (or a couple of lightly-traveled ones.)
This is a BNSF dispatcher:
BNSF DS
This is the main BNSF dispatching room, in Ft. Worth. I’ve been in the conference room that overlooks it, and it’s flipping amazing.
BNSF center
Beaten to the punch on the elephant ears. But yeah, smoke lifters.
Chatsworth, CA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chatsworth_train_collision
Wow. Even better than I imagined. 
Metrolinx (the transit arm of the provincial government) has been slowly buying up the rail corridors in the Toronto area and putting in more tracks, bridges, etc, to expand its commuter rail service (GO Transit–Government of Ontario Transit) and gradually make it more all-day and regional.
They’re also putting in a train to the airport. That one will be diesel MUs and enter the airport on a bridge overtop of all the layers of other bridges that access the airport, to reach an elevated terminal station.
The upshot of all this is that they’re putting in a new rail traffic control centre as well. I hope it will look like the BNSF one.
I think I remember hearing about that on the news, even so far away in Toronto. Scary.
Is kicking* the cars permitted? Or under the present rules must cars
always be attached to a locomotive if they are to be moved?
What is the advantage of bottling the air over releasing a car’s brakes
by draining all the air out of the car’s brake system (trainline, reservoir,
and brake cylinder)?
*Kicking - giving the car(s) quick shove with the locomotive, stopping the
locomotive and letting the car roll off on it own.
Kicking was allowed when I was active, so long as it did not endanger crew or equipment.
Since bottling the air was, from the time I started training, one of the big sins, I never have thought much about the rationalization. I suppose it’s a time saver, since the local train would have to have the brake pipe charged to go from the terminal to the spur. It would take quite a bit of time to drain all the air, then perform the movement, then hook back to the rest of the train, recharge the system and go.
One would have to walk along the train and individually release the air from the cars, since a release from the head end would, necessarily, begin recharging the system. And you have to hold the release valve open on each car–as soon as you let go, it’ll close.
I have a 3-year-old son, which means I’ve watched a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine. I know that in the UK, the guy who drives the train is the “driver,” which make sense. There, an “engineer” seems to be a person who repairs or maintains the engines, what we would call the maintenance technician.
If each car is equipped with brakes does this mean your stopping distance stays about the same as the average weight per car? Regardless of how many cars you are pulling?
I’ve always found entertaining, the US / UK differences in titles of railway personnel. In the US, the guy travelling not on the loco, but on the train (passenger or freight), and in charge of it re general regulating and safety, is the “conductor”; in the UK, he’s the “guard”. The head person in charge of a station is, in the US, the “station agent”; in the UK, “stationmaster” or “stationmistress”. However – on a steam loco, the engineer / driver’s mate and subordinate who keeps the fire going, is the “fireman” on both sides of the Atlantic.
Oh, and the vehicle called the “caboose” in the US, is in the UK the “brake van” or “guard’s van”.
No. The longer the train, the more distance it takes to stop. It has to do with weight, of course, but mainly with the propagation of the braking. Remember, the brake pipe goes from the locomotive, to each car, all the way to the end of the train, and our brake valve is in the head end. If I want to set the brakes, I release some air (say 10 PSI) from the brake stand in the locomotive. This reduces the brake pipe pressure from 90 to 80 PSI. The first car’s triple valve senses this and applies the brake on that car (the brake cylinder actually applies at 2.5 times the amount of the brake pipe reduction, for a force of 25 PSI on the brake shoes.)
The next car’s triple valve then senses the brake pipe reduction, and the same happens.
In a train a mile long, it’s going to take some time for that reduction in air to reach the very last car, so what you end up with is part of the train (toward the front) braking, while the rear is still rolling free and pushing on the head end. It can take a minute or more for the last car to register a brake application.
In an emergency set, a radio signal can be sent to the Flashing Rear End Device to dump the air from the brake pipe (all the way to 0) as well, which makes it faster–the application begins at the front AND back of the train, and meets in the middle.
It also takes a hell of a long time to charge a mile long train’s brake pipe from 0. And remember that in direct release, you can’t partially release brake pressure, so you have to do a full release. If you’re parked on a grade, the train will runaway because there’s no air, and the brakes will release long before the locomotive can charge the brake pipe again. So the conductor would have to walk the train and set enough handbrakes so that the train wouldn’t take off rolling, then we charge the brake pipe, then he has to knock off those handbrakes.
Does anybody wish they still had cabooses?
They’re still around for local trains that must do extended reverse moves. Now they’re just called shoving platforms, but you can still see them at the end of trains.
Your reply to my question about tapered train wheels and track curves is correct. I looked it up to find more info. As you stated, both left and right wheels are on a fixed axle, whereas on cars they use separate axle with a differential geared joint, which allows one wheel to spin slower than the other in curves.
Since rail road track curves are very, very gradual, they need a minor differential speed. So some genius designed the wheels with tapered contact surfaces, that taper inward. From what I read, the rails also have a slight taper. So when in a curve, a right hand curve forces the wheels to the right side, which causes the wheels on the right side to slide along the taper, which results in a larger effective diameter at the line of contact, while the left wheels net a smaller effective diameter at line of contact.
This causes the right side wheels to rotate at the same speed as left side, while realizing a different surface speed.
Did you ever see cattle on the tracks ? Were you scared ? Did you ever hit one ?
I was wondering if you’ve ever been derailed. I lived in Omaha for a time and knew people who worked for UP. I asked a long-time engineer if he had ever been on a train when it derailed and he laughed and said any engineer who hadn’t been on a train when it derailed hadn’t been an engineer long.