A friend from an old railroad family, says the accidents went up when they started hiring unconnected outsiders.
When the crew is connected by family and friends, they watch out for each other. Unconnected, they don't care that Stosh showed up drunk. Thinking that if they stay back it will be safe.
While you can reduce crews with longer trains, you still need a certain amount of horsepower to pull a certain tonnage over the mountain. I’m guessing that this reflects reduced tonnage.
Those look like relatively new engines. Less than 20 years old.
The newer engines have a lot more horsepower than the older ones. If they were replacing every retiring engine with a new one, it’s not a surprise that they’d have a surplus.
They can always be dispatched to localities to provide electric power in blackouts.
Does anybody know if the electronics on these things are tempest hardened?
From what I can see, those parked locos look fairly modern - spotted a few wide cabs.
If these engines are diesel powered electric variety, they make great generators if the grid goes down.
Pipelines have sidelined Buffet’s railroad investment.
Same in the Roseville CA yards on the other end of the transcontinental UP line. Just no shipping or other related material to haul, so engines fill the yard instead of trains.
sheer ignorance. longer trains do not mean fewer locomotives. and it’s weight being pulled, not length of the train that matters. a locomotive is rated for a given tonnage over the road. this figure varies with the location....grades, curves, etc. less tonnage uphill of course. but over the same section of railroad from point A to point B it’s the same. so if one of those units can pull 50 loaded 100-ton cars, you will need two of those units to pull 100 loaded 100-ton cars.
I've traded them over the years....and own some now.
That makes sense. I would guess there is a "fixed" cost associated with keeping an engine in service, plus a variable cost based on miles & tonnage pulled. It is probably more efficient to reduce the number of engines in use, storing others, so as to reduce that fixed cost. It would require attention to scheduling but the net effect would be fewer "active" engines sitting around. There'd be stored engines, presumably at a lower cost, and active engines running a higher duty cycle with less down time.
Maybe there’s a market for them in the prepper community, off-grid power generation.
I suspect this is the result of exactly what the article says - improvement in efficiency.
The local train here, which has 10-40 cars daily, used to run with two units. About 18 months ago I noticed that it was operating with only one. Joke is on the UP though. It has broken down twice in the recent time and they had to bring another unit up from the yard to finish the day. Once the RR police had to come and get the engineer and drive him back to town so they could get the other one. No one else on duty that was qualified.
Dunno - I thought that Iron Horses were steam engines. BTW, did you know an idling diesel engine has the same rhythm as a purring cat?
Train A leaves Honolulu at 6 am heading east. Train B leaves Los Angeles at 9 am heading west. How much are the drinks in first class?
4-5 years ago, there were about 4 dozens on the sides in the switchyard at Missouri Valley, Iowa.