Posted on 05/10/2022 4:03:57 PM PDT by Intar
Main point of the article:
“PSR has [made] engineer’s trains almost impossible to control. Shareholders roll the dice with communities, cities and the environment daily. They don’t live here. Trains have more than doubled in length. Imagine a train 16,400 feet in length weighing 17,500 tons: That is three miles, 560 feet and 35 million pounds. One train. And it is hauling hazmat, tanks of say, chlorine gas, or anhydrous ammonia. Just one tank car alone weighs 131 tons, that is 262,000 pounds. To give an example from history, 262,000 pounds of chlorine gas is approximately two-thirds of what the German army used during the trench warfare of all of WWI. One tank car alone.
“And then we pick up more enroute! My conductor is three miles away while I reverse this train into an active rail yard! Crossings don’t matter, and communities? Are you kidding? No sane country would move materials like this. These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very cars themselves. The risks the Class I carriers are taking is a race to disaster. It is absolutely dreadful and grotesque.
Another Precision Scheduled Railroading factor in supply chain failure: Even when the majority of these PSR trains make it, without dramatic ends, they rarely get across the road during a crew members hours of service (HOS) time limit, which is 12 hours. Several factors:
“The rail infrastructure, in particular rail yards and sidings, were designed and built during the great Industrial Age. They did a lot of things right: they overbuilt bridges, for one. But it is not a failure of imagination that they could not foresee, from a sane perspective, that someday the bosses would want to normalize 15,000-foot trains.
“Yards and sidings do not accommodate this scale. It is a clash of function and design. So, imagine this: A 15,800-foot train with distributed power locomotives placed in the middle and at the rear of a train, comes to work a station with 4,500-foot tracks and needs to pick up and set out cars in the middle and rear of the train. This will not be lickety-split.
“Yes: Crew after crew expires on HOS. It is incredibly tense work shoving 12,720 feet of train, with a human being holding on all the way back there, well over two miles away, in reverse, into a rail yard, to pick up, say, 23 more cars. To then add those cars and run a battery of required air tests on the train, before departure. The scale of these trains compounds the time required to make these moves many-fold. Sometimes, in the winter, the train’s brake system cannot be adequately recharged to allow the train to depart. And while this is happening, another monster train is waiting outside town (losing on-duty time) to do more of the same! Now, both trains need to be recrewed. This is another reason people are leaving: There is no human being I know who can take being called at 7 PM for a 9 PM job, and go through this to finally arrive at the hotel at 2 PM, without an impact on their wellbeing. It is brutal.”
But it sounds like the labor cost savings are at least partially burned down the line at the switching stations. Maybe it is more economical breaking down a 3x longer train than running 3 separate trains since the crew at the depot only works when a train pulls in. And yes I know rail is much more efficient compared to freight. I work with freight companies all the time, and overseas transport too.
And I do agree, if the train is hauling something potentially toxic, they should take extra precautions. I think Denzel made a mediocre movie about that (and I like Denzel, but that film, meh). There’s a TV show about a future world where the remnants of civilization survive on a train that circles the globe.
For a long train even on the [relative] flats, there is an ultimate tensile strength for a given rail car [especially the one right behind the loco] that should not be exceeded..
.
Train lengths are often limited due to the length of passing sidings.
“The rail infrastructure, in particular rail yards and sidings, were designed and built during the great Industrial Age.”
This is nonsense. Trackage is designed and built to handle planned traffic. Mainlines handling this sort of traffic have been extensively built, rebuilt and upgraded multiple times over the last decade or so….heavy trains running on unsuitable, antiquated or poorly maintained tracks wind up on the ground pretty quickly.
This way they only need one crew, and also collision-avoidance is easier with one train than with three.
Yeah, the engineers better be into crossfit training too - that’s a 3 mile run to the caboose with a lot of jumping cars along the way.
Caboose? Been a while since I’ve seen one of those.
Is there a train car left in America that doesn’t have Mexican graffiti painted on it? I sat for about 15mins today while a train passed and EVERY car had some sh*t painted on it.
It’s not all Mexican by any means, but no. Every train car in the U.S. has been vandalized by now. They’re probably getting scribbled on before they leave the factory.
A modern freight train needs an engineer and a conductor to operate. Mile-long trains are the general rule. I could see the point of using two people to operate a THREE-MILE-LONG train instead of three separate trains but it sounds like the challenges are greatly multiplied by such length.
I have delivered railroad crews to BNSF trains in an SUV. Sometimes I had to drive one of the crew to the other end of the train which was a mile away, then wait, and bring the crew member back.
Operating a passenger vehicle in a busy railyard is dangerous and requires great caution and vigilance.
I have a vintage PRR rule book.
That sort of thing would NEVER have been permitted back in the day!
Lol
Let me guess. Build Back Better will save us. And of course while they’re at it a few trillion for high speed rail no one will ride.
I always say we haven’t automated rail services, yet they think self driving cars are a good idea. Bassackwards if you ask me.
An additional factor is the problem in the towns along the railroad. They slow down for the crossings and then take a very long time to clear the crossings. Challenges with fire, emt and police exist when the train has the crossings blocked for an extended period of time.
I agree.
Remote operators first.
LOL!
Why is it that these big complex, pushing, pulling braking, steering systems are not fully computerized. So men don’t have to be manually calculate weight/velocity/windspeed & what not. From start to finish it should be completely computerized.
This job would orders of magnitude easier than, for example, creating a self driving car.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.