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MassivelyBuckNegro posted:peak will continue through the 1st week of january due to digital monday. tons of people redeeming giftcards after christmas extend the period of high ups volumes. Also returns. Especially on the clothing side.
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Dec 22, 2015 01:52
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Can anyone recommend a good train-related book, preferably something a little more vibrant than a run-of-the-mill history book? The best I've ever read is "Last Train to Paradise" by Les Standiford: http://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-Pa...ain+to+paradise It's about Henry Flagler's ambitious attempt to build a railroad across the Florida Keys all the way to Key West, and Mother Nature's ambitious attempt to wreck it in the form of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. I think I read the whole book in a day; it was impossible to put down.
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Jan 2, 2016 18:01
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I seem to recall The Men Who Loved Trains being a good read: http://www.amazon.com/Men-Who-Loved...ho+loved+trains It's an account of the Penn Central's bankruptcy (and what led to it) as well as its transformation into Conrail and subsequent split-up into the NS and CSX systems. Lots of good stories on Enron-levels of corporate misbehavior.
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Jan 2, 2016 21:12
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You might like Harriman vs. Hill: Wall Street痴 Great Railroad War. I haven't finished it yet because I haven't unpacked it from my move a year ago, but it's a really close in look of a few days on Wall Street trying to buy out the Northern Pacific. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816683646/ A lot more about financial maneuvering than actual railroad building, but it's railroad financial maneuvering.
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Jan 2, 2016 21:34
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http://www.amazon.com/American-Rail...rican+railroads this is a really good economic history of american railroads.
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Jan 2, 2016 22:56
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Jan 3, 2016 23:25
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I've been looking for a good read on the history and operation of Britsh Rail. Thanks!
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Jan 4, 2016 03:17
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A train hit a whole herd of elk not too far from me: http://helenair.com/gallery/photos-train-wipes-out-elk-east-of-helena/collection_99668b9e-2526-5771-a7be-89f53fb523bf.html#7
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Jan 4, 2016 03:58
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So anyone else had a chance to try out GE Trip Optimizer yet? How about LEADER auto-throttle? I have  goodbye jobs. The purpose of the inside cameras is clear now.
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Jan 6, 2016 22:34
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B4Ctom1 posted:So anyone else had a chance to try out GE Trip Optimizer yet? How about LEADER auto-throttle? It hunts pretty badly in some areas. I'm afraid that a job in the rail industry is not looking promising. It's been flat out misery where I am at, and they just keep whacking the boards, even though I have worked 10 days in a row and keep resetting with a dead head mixed in. Can't use a PL or vacation day at all. Plus morons etc.
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Jan 6, 2016 23:32
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After a few long months of hating, I have finally completed the sequel to gently caress Snow. The second chapter in the gently caress Winter saga is called gently caress Cold. Stay tuned for the final chapter in this epic trilogy.
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Jan 8, 2016 00:26
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BrokenKnucklez posted:It hunts pretty badly in some areas. The LEADER does here, but the Optimizer does a lot less.
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Jan 8, 2016 02:37
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Klaus Kinski posted:After a few long months of hating, I have finally completed the sequel to gently caress Snow. The second chapter in the gently caress Winter saga is called gently caress Cold. Stay tuned for the final chapter in this epic trilogy. ... is that -39° F/C I see?
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Jan 8, 2016 02:49
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Computer viking posted:... is that -39° F/C I see? I really hope that's not -39c...
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Jan 8, 2016 07:17
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This is the one case where the unit makes no difference. 
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Jan 8, 2016 07:55
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B4Ctom1 posted:The LEADER does here, but the Optimizer does a lot less. It's just a couple of areas, it's constantly between dyno 1 and throttle 1. It only does it on manifest trains so it's always getting some run out Oh and EMD smart consist can eat a dick. BrokenKnucklez fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 13:50
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Elukka posted:This is the one case where the unit makes no difference. -40 is actually the point where they're equal, but, well, close enough. I don't want to personally experience either one, please and thanks
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Jan 8, 2016 16:55
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It's not bad as long as there is no wind. Batteries do freeze if they don't have a good charge though. If your skin isn't exposed you can still do stuff.
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Jan 9, 2016 02:59
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BrokenKnucklez posted:Oh and EMD smart consist can eat a dick. Yep Manager: "were you running smart consist?" Man: "yes as required by the Superintendent Bulletin" Manager: "what were you doing when the train broke in two?" Man: "watching the smart consist break the train in two.' Manager: "why didn't you intervene?" Man: "I have already been written up for 'intervening' already."
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Jan 9, 2016 03:30
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B4Ctom1 posted:Yep
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Jan 9, 2016 10:35
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evil_bunnY posted:What a lovely workplace. As long as the incident is written up as human caused, that is all they care about. Think of it like when a bus driver speeds up because he saw someone shooting a gun on a ghetto street, and all his passengers fall down and get hurt. Then they are all counted as mass shooting casualties on shootingtracker.com to crank the stats up.
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Jan 9, 2016 17:52
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evil_bunnY posted:What a lovely workplace. We refer to it as "you don't get the big picture"
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Jan 9, 2016 18:04
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I found myself looking up and reading about SmartConsist, since I had never heard of it (non-railroad employee / railfan here). During my readings, I looked at how railroads are trying to cut fuel costs, and one of the ways mentioned involved lubricating the rails to lessen track adhesion. Isn't that somewhat counterproductive for safety, since it seems that it would lessen braking forces from the locomotive and the cars when slowing down? Also, wouldn't it lessen the ability of the locomotive to accelerate, causing wheel slipppage when it's trying to accelerate the train? Also, do railroads care about pollution on the roadbed, or do they not really give a poo poo?
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Jan 9, 2016 22:15
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Railroads aren't generally known for environmental stewardship, I guess.
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Jan 9, 2016 22:20
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:I found myself looking up and reading about SmartConsist, since I had never heard of it (non-railroad employee / railfan here). During my readings, I looked at how railroads are trying to cut fuel costs, and one of the ways mentioned involved lubricating the rails to lessen track adhesion. It might be an effort to minimize losses from hunting axles. I can't see why the tread would get any lubrication, as the steel/steel interface between wheel tread and rail head has about the most minimal amount of rolling friction you can get. Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Isn't that somewhat counterproductive for safety, since it seems that it would lessen braking forces from the locomotive and the cars when slowing down? Even fallen leaves can cause a lot of problems on braking, as many commuters in Britain have learned: http://askascientist.co.uk/technology/leaves-line-problem-trains/ Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Also, wouldn't it lessen the ability of the locomotive to accelerate, causing wheel slipppage when it's tring to accelerate the train? They don't exactly need any help slipping on dry rail... but the engineer can activate rail sanders that can help out with traction when accelerating.  Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Also, do railroads care about pollution on the roadbed, or do they not really give a poo poo? They literally give a poo poo, right on the roadbed. Or at least they used to. As far as track materials go, old ties used to get chucked down an embankment when they were replaced, and bundles of new ties are so full of creosote they'll have pools of oily rainbows around them after a hard rain. Rail weld kits (along with weld crew's lunch trash) get burned on site, ignited by the weld slag dumped upon it all, and rail saw blades get chucked into the woods like a frisbee. Old spikes, clips, anchors, bolts, tie plates, if the magnet (or a track hoe tire) doesn't pick it up, nobody will. The public also dumps their household trash onto the right of way quite often, and since the railroad isn't in the trash removal business, it'll sit there until it gets in the way of something. As far as emissions go, the railroad is like it's own sovereign 50' wide nation cutting through states and municipalities. They can pretty much do what they want. To answer your question, there will generally be some felt track mats down at the lube stations, but the grease still gets everywhere. I think the rail greasers you were seeing still just put grease between the vertical face of the rail head and the wheel flange, not between the top of the rail and the wheel tread.
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Jan 10, 2016 09:08
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NoWake posted:It might be an effort to minimize losses from hunting axles. I can't see why the tread would get any lubrication, as the steel/steel interface between wheel tread and rail head has about the most minimal amount of rolling friction you can get. I took a train in Russia once where the toilet was just a hole onto the tracks. Im sure its much the same in a lot of places.
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Jan 10, 2016 17:28
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Preoptopus posted:I took a train in Russia once where the toilet was just a hole onto the tracks. Im sure its much the same in a lot of places.
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Jan 11, 2016 11:56
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Here in Finland the older cars built in the 70's just dropped it all onto the tracks but I'm pretty sure everything built since then has a tank.
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Jan 11, 2016 12:47
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Elukka posted:Here in Finland the older cars built in the 70's just dropped it all onto the tracks but I'm pretty sure everything built since then has a tank. The newer ones recycle that waste in to coffee
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Jan 11, 2016 12:50
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Hambilderberglar posted:Wait where *isn't* this the case? I don't think I've ever seen a train with a septic tank system to hold 12 passenger cars worth of piss and poo poo, nor do I want to know what that looks like if a train ever crashes. I think all US passenger trains use chemical tanks now, by law. It's the same general system as on an airplane.
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Jan 11, 2016 18:50
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Preoptopus posted:I took a train in Russia once where the toilet was just a hole onto the tracks. Im sure its much the same in a lot of places. On the old Norwegian train sets they locked the toilets when you got into populated areas, and i don't think they got replaced (or upgraded?) until kind of recently - beyond 2000, I think. Simple solutions and all that. The new ones have tanks. Computer viking fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Jan 11, 2016 |
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Jan 11, 2016 19:08
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The  AMERICAN FREEDOM TRAIN passing through my hometown in 1976: 
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Jan 12, 2016 06:49
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Zuph posted:The I always love seeing street running because it just looks so unusual! I just finished registering for the 2016 conference of the Railroad Passenger Car Alliance. I'm going to go out, see if I can schmooze a few old heads into hooking me up with the right people so I can get a better job, and then on Monday, I get to delve into the dirty work. We'll be rebuilding a passenger car truck at the Texas State Railroad!
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Jan 13, 2016 06:01
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Crap British Trains The British Rail Class 141 I致e covered the dreadful Class 142 撤acer before in this thread and elsewhere (earning me this av from a certain  former PYF mod) but I haven稚 covered the Class 141 before. If the Class 142 is the embarrassing cousin at the family barbecue, the Class 141 is the slightly older cousin that is rumoured to be chained up in the attic and not spoken about in polite conversation. The Class 141 was so bad that when the diabolically awful Class 142 replaced it on the Yorkshire branch lines that it 都erved, they were actually considered an improvement. Think about that.The 141, like the rest of the 撤acer series, was a horrible mutant cross-breeding of bus and train technology, somehow incorporating the worst features of both. But to understand how this came about, we need to have a bit of a history lesson: British Rail痴 disastrous 1955 溺odernisation Plan had mandated the complete replacement of steam across the entire network by 1967. Whilst other countries were also dieselising, nobody was planning to do it at the sheer speed and with the same crazed missionary zeal as British Rail. In the USA, for example, diesels had been first introduced in the 1920痴, and by the late 1930痴 were a significant presence in both passenger and freight service. So whilst US steam was eliminated at about the same time as it was in the UK (significantly earlier in the case of some railroads), the process took place gradually over the best part of 40 years. BR didn稚 have a single production mainline diesel locomotive or unit on the tracks in 1955 (and was in fact still building new steam locomotives), and was therefore planning to replace almost its entire traction fleet in just 12 years. This super-short timetable caused all manner of problems that lasted the lifetime of British Rail and beyond. The first was one of capacity there simply weren稚 enough experienced diesel locomotive builders in the country to produce even a fraction of the new stock required. Only English Electric, Brush and BRCW had produced diesels before (ironically for export as BR wasn稚 the slightest bit interested before 1955) but their factories could only build so many trains in 12 years. Political considerations meant that importing trains, or even expertise, from more experienced nations such as the USA and Germany was out of the question. So BR was forced to procure trains from any company that could just about bash two pieces of metal together shipbuilders, car manufacturers, aircraft builders - the British Traction Council handed out contracts like confetti to any idiot with a rivet gun and a pair of overalls. It didn稚 help that a lot of these contracts had something of the pork barrel about them, with politicians eager to ensure that lucrative contracts arrived in their constituencies, regardless of the execrable results. The second problem was one of time the accelerated timetable forced procurement corners to be cut. Whilst a number of types were subject to (often hilariously disastrous) prototyping and pilot schemes, many designs, particularly the diesel passenger units, were procured directly into squadron service without adequate testing, with calamitous results. If anything, the procurement of the diesel passenger units was even more chaotic and disastrous than that of the locomotives. An astonishing 40 different designs were procured from 14 different manufacturers between 1955 and 1967 to some very vague specifications, and hardly any of them were subject to prototyping or proper testing.    Or anything that might be called "Styling" The vague specs meant that different types of unit were incompatible with each other and had vastly different coupling codes, spare part pools and maintenance requirements, destroying any economies of scale and producing operational nightmares. For example, the Class 110 had engines with inward-facing cylinder heads, as opposed to every other type that had outward-facing ones, requiring completely separate maintenance facilities from every other type. The Class 127 had automatic hydraulic transmission. If it was coupled to any types with mechanical transmission (i.e. pretty much all the others) the driver had to remember not to leave it in 泥rive as he would normally do but to manually change gear, otherwise the mechanical unit would interpret 泥rive as 1st, because 鉄pecifications, what are those? After several instances where 127s dragged other types around in 1st gear for hours on end and destroyed their transmissions, they were banned from being coupled to anything else. The maintenance and operational issues meant that types were allocated by area rather than by traffic type, to avoid duplicating maintenance facilities and avoid coupling one type to another wherever possible. This resulted in some areas (particularly Scotland) receiving no workable units at all. And of course many of them were complete lemons. Some highlights: - The Class 118 had something of a structural problem. Specifically, if you braked too heavily the bodyshells would come loose from the underframes and slide forward onto the tracks, in a scene straight out of a cartoon. - The class 124 had a horribly over-complicated and defective transmission that would cause its gearboxes to violently disintegrate, on one occasion causing a flying gearwheel to slice through the underframe and embed itself into the ceiling of the (fortunately empty) passenger compartment above. - The Class 112 was so unreliable and riddled with asbestos that they ended up being used as store rooms on oil rigs because what they lacked in being able to move they made up for in not catching fire very much. - The Class 103 was so prone to rust that some examples spent less than a decade in service before literally coming apart at the seams. - The Class 109 featured an advanced monocoque construction and a floor made entirely of asbestos. BR handed them back (presumably wearing hazmat suits) and, rather than, say, encase them in concrete and drop them down derelict mineshafts, the manufacturers sold them to Trinidad, because gently caress it, it痴 only black people. Even the types that weren稚 comically bad were less than spectacular. Most were designed with a lifespan of 20 years, to quickly replace steam and then be replaced by more advanced types in the 1970s. Sadly, those of you familiar with the UK in the 1970s will recall that nothing worthy of the word 殿dvanced happened at all (other than advanced economic decline), and BR was so chronically underfunded that not a single new diesel unit type was procured for the entire decade. So by the early 1980s the motley selection of diesel units was beginning to cough to a standstill. The Thatcher government wasn稚 interested in buying shiny new trains if they were just going to be used by smelly proles anyway, and told BR to do something cheap in the interim to last 20 years or so (sound familiar?). British Rail needed some inspiration. In fact they waited ages for inspiration, then several inspirations arrived at once buses! Why not put a bus on railway wheels? This was a genius idea, because: (1) It was cheap. (2) See (1) There then followed a scene straight out of Top Gear whereby BR mounted a British Leyland bus on some railway wheels and called it a prototype:  The worst train in the world. This was subject to rigorous testing that proved that the design had the following advantages: (1) It was cheap. (2) See (1) They then told British Leyland to produce another prototype that could be evaluated in passenger service. British Leyland completely misunderstood, and created the class 140, which had advanced crashworthiness protection, powerful engines, advanced railway-standard suspension and comfortable seats:  Nothing safer than a train so ugly that it repels obstacles with its looks alone British Rail were furious! Did they look like they wanted an actual train? What did they think this was, a proper railway with two pennies to rub together? They told British Leyland to go away and think about what they壇 done, and not to come back until they had a design that fulfilled the following ruthless and exacting procurement criteria: (1) Cheapness (2) Low Cost (3) Non-expensiveness (4) gently caress passengers (5) Bah Humbug So British Leyland used all their years of experience, experience in building cars like the Austin Allegro (a car that was famously more aerodynamic in reverse than it was going forwards), to create a class of 20 units that would knock the ball out of the park in terms of cheapness, ugliness and shitness. Behold!  And when you finally escape from the thing, you池e in Doncaster. Great. Normally, when you travel in something this hideous, you are at somewhat of an advantage because everyone outside has to look at you whereas you only have to look out. However, in a Class 141 the joke was on you, because the interior looked like this:  展e find the defendant guilty of stealing from the blind and the crippled." "I sentence him to spend 20 minutes in a Class 141. Now whilst the interior may have been reminiscent of an East German doctor痴 waiting room, or maybe a Nepalese prison cell, at least those places don稚 vibrate or bounce around with such violence that you are thrown out of your seat onto the floor. Not so with the Class 141. With only four wheels per car and suspension that consisted of what looked like second-hand mattress springs, the 141痴 ride was so rough that passengers would be ejected out of their seats, or thrown against each other and the walls. It may well have been more comfortable to just be dragged behind the thing on the tracks. Aside from the diabolical ride, the 141 was noisy, draughty and chronically unreliable. Even though one of the supposed advantages of the design was that buses were basically simple and reliable things, somehow the 141 was plagued with problems problems with the engines, problems with the brakes, problems with the couplings, problems with the doors that made their failure rates even worse than the 30-year-old rattletraps that they were supposed to replace. They were put to work in the Leeds area, but even tough Yorkshire types could only stand so much punishment, and in 2000 they were withdrawn and replaced with Class 142s yes, the dreaded, legendarily poo poo Class 142 was considered an upgrade over this abomination.  泥onkey cart? Luxury! I had to travel to 恥it in 舛lass 141! Presumably because Britain had a grudge against the rest of the world following the loss of the Empire, someone decided that the Class 141 was good enough to export. A class 141 was sent for trials in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, who thanked BR profusely because it made them feel so much better about their existing railways.  Which look like this, by the way. But one export failure wasn稚 going to perturb us plucky Brits, and, presumably as some kind of twisted revenge for the whole Salman Rushdie thing, much of the class was exported to Iran in 2001. It seems that the good citizens of Iran, unlike our own, actually have some standards, and they lasted even less time there than they did in the UK. A few years later, a couple of examples turned up dumped in a siding in the Netherlands, and nobody had the slightest idea how it happened or where they came from.  Maybe they bounced there. Weirdly, three of the original 20 units are preserved in working order on heritage railways in the UK. Come for the steam trains, stay for the bus.
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Jan 13, 2016 22:11
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I'm conflicted: it's always sad to read how totally the UK government and BR hosed up the railroads in the UK, but on the other hand, I always love reading your posts about BR and the amazingly messed up things that they whelped.
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Jan 14, 2016 02:31
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:I'm conflicted: it's always sad to read how totally the UK government and BR hosed up the railroads in the UK, but on the other hand, I always love reading your posts about BR and the amazingly messed up things that they whelped. Don't worry, privatisation fixed everything that BR did wrong! 
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Jan 14, 2016 15:07
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:I'm conflicted: it's always sad to read how totally the UK government and BR hosed up the railroads in the UK, but on the other hand, I always love reading your posts about BR and the amazingly messed up things that they whelped. The answer is the government created BR and continually meddled with it so it never actually worked, then used them as a scapegoat, which was easy since BR was almost completely incompetent anyway. Interestingly enough, American dieselization was, like most things involving American railroads, begun by the private sector. Except it was spearheaded in part by General Motors, who were looking to expand outside the saturated auto market. The U.S. Navy was involved too because railroad diesels were, from their point of view, an ideal industrial base for building engines for submarines. The Deltic diesel, incidentally, originated with an Admiralty requirement for a fast attack craft engine. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jan 14, 2016 |
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Jan 14, 2016 22:23
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Axeman Jim posted:Crap British Trains The British Rail Class 141 Four. Pretty sure one has been on the Island of Sodor for a while .I never knew how good we actually had it with Melbourne trains down in Australia. At least ours actually work most of the time. That said, we've still had some poo poo of our own. Crap Trains of Victoria, Australia Meet the Tait. Or as it's better known; The Red Rattler.  Hello, Ladies... If they look like Steam Engine carriages, that's because they are. Or at least, were. They began their life in 1910 as regular passenger cars and spent a good ten years being chuffed about Victoria by Steam Engines inoffensively. Then as new-fangled Diesels and Electrical trains came into style, along with Melbourne undergoing electrification for its trams in 1919, they needed to modernize. So rather than build something new and expensive, Sir Thomas James Tait and the railway commission came up with a much cheaper idea; Ditch the locomotives and electrify the carriages. While Britain was torching money on prototypes and mismanagement, these spent the next thirty years giving people bone-jarring rides around the state until Australians got to finally experience a train that didn't threaten to cause white-knuckle syndrome. In a better world, the Red Rattlers would've been crushed for kindling the moment its successor rolled out of the yards in 1954. Instead they ran alongside the Harris and even the Hitachi's and Comeng's for another thirty years until finally being put to the axe in 1984. The Rattlers were also banned from traveling in Melbourne's underground City Loop, because a pile of painted wood catching fire in an enclosed space is generally not considered a good thing.  The Harris was the Comeng of it's time when it rolled out in the mid-50's, shining a great big light on how crap, and ancient, the Taits were and lead to them getting their better-known nickname with its fancy modern blue paintjob. Well, except for one minor design flaw; they were insulated with Blue Asbestos. This was, however, rectified in later models. With White Asbestos. They spent thirty years running around Melbourne giving people rides and a risk of lung cancer before being finally retired in 1988. A bid was made to modernize them with air conditioning, but only got as far as a handful of cars before MET rail realized "Hey, why don't we just buy more Comengs instead?" and buried the lot of them at a dump site in Clayton, save for a few Heritage-preserved trains. Meet the Hitachi  It's as pleased to see you as you are to see it. They started life on our railways in the 1972 and had the fancy new gimmick of heated interiors. This may sound nice, until you remember this was an Australian railway and any goodwill towards it went south come Summer. They tended show up in a whoosh of hydraulic fluid that you could often smell throughout the carriage, and ran around naked with an uninsulated gunmetal body, heating up under the Australian sun. If you ever wondered if telepathy was a thing, you could stand on a platform in the summer heat and know precisely what everyone was thinking; "Please, God, don't let it be a Hitachi coming around the bend". Don't worry though, because you could always crack a window and risk deafening yourself and everyone in the carriage when it got into the City Loop.  A perpetual time capsule of crap The interiors were designed in the 70's and remained unaltered well until Connex or M>Train got to finally modernizing them with air conditioning. In the mid-00's on the last six Hitachi's in service. Leg room could best be considered optional unless you were short or thin, and come 5pm you were guaranteed to get very intimate with everyone crammed up against you throughout the ride home, in a space that had minimal handrails. Either you learned to grip the lights like you were choking someone or you went bowling into people during a sudden stop. The real mystery is why Heritage groups would want to preserve this blight on the lines, but apparently Public Transport Victoria have stated one set will be preserved. Presumably so they can take new engineers to see it late at night with a warning; "Don't build something like this".  The Comeng is the first train that Victoria's Railroads actually got right, rolling out in 1981 with air conditioning, better handrails, and seats that could fit people facing eachother without being borderline sexual. They also had more space for commuters to safely stand in bulk with better overhead handrails. Comengs are still running even today, and have taken well to modernization over the years with fancy new toys like automated station announcements and interior LED displays. For a while they were intended for on-train advertising, spinning a phone number and ad for "YOUR ADVERTISEMENT COULD BE HERE", but no-one ever went for it. That got dropped with in a year of it starting, and now the LED's just list off the next station. Whether it was the correct station, or even the correct line was another matter, however. Their only real flaw is that every now and then a door will jam instead of closing automatically and get the whole train cancelled, due to some lockout in the controls preventing it from starting if the doors don't all shut properly. (The driver can override it to get the train out of the way, but driving with a door hanging open tends to be unsafe)
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Jan 15, 2016 06:24
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:Also, do railroads care about pollution on the roadbed, or do they not really give a poo poo? A lot of rail yards and lines have been where they are for a hundred years or more. Even if all railroads are comprised of tree hugging environmentalists now, they sure weren't when the worst possible stuff was shipped with no safety controls. You can bet they don't care about what's already there, since caring would probably bankrupt them all.
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Jan 16, 2016 01:31
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Most rail yards are considered superfund sites, fwiw
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Jan 16, 2016 02:03
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