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British Railways had a very similar setup for training signalmen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDFYtMpN-yQ And the idea goes back even further - a couple of the old pre-grouping companies built models for their signal schools. The old Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway training model (used up until the 1990s by BR - it might well be the one in the Pathe film, although that looks like it's based on LB&SCR/Southern equipment) is now in the National Railway Museum and they run it for demonstration purposes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1MTaPwuDAqg BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 18:57
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Grim Up North posted:European goods trains have to contend with centuries old infrastructure meaning tight curves, small loading gauge and low maximum train length. They probably look like toy trains to you compared to American or Australian trains. Yeah. I wrote a big-rear end post about this from the point of brakes (or British freight trains' lack thereof), here. But the same applies to couplings - once your entire national transport and industrial infrastructure is based around a standard, there's a massive disincentive for that standard to change, even if there are now technically better systems out there. Especially when all that infrastructure is owned by thousands of separate private companies, each seeing no real benefit to investing in improvements individually. It's no good one colliery investing in a fleet of 40-ton bogie hoppers with Westinghouse brakes and buckeye couplers if the railway its connected to doesn't have any locomotives that can couple, pull or stop those wagons and the port the coal is going to doesn't have the equipment to mechanically unload the hoppers. JuffoWup posted:I don't know why, but my brain broke staring at that screw connection. I think mainly because I'm trying to see how that thing would handle even a 50 car freight train on any kind of grade here in the states that wouldn't involve the screw shearing. I'm sure it is possibly fine, but just doesn't seem like something I'd want to trust. At least compared to the knuckle setup used here. Freight trains in the UK didn't even use screw couplers. They originally used three-link chain couplers, which were 'loose' (a lot of slack between each wagon). That stopped the in-train forces building up and overwhelming one coupling, since the wagons were free to move about and run slack in and out individually. With no continuous brakes, the skill of the guard in the brake van was to use enough braking force to keep most of the couplings loaded or even tight (but not too tight), and similarly the driver had to know when to apply and take off power (and how quickly). Every wagon basically went along the rails as a semi-independent entity, under only indirect control. On uphill gradients all the couplings would go tight and the weight of the train would come on the first wagon and the chain between that wagon and the loco, again the skill was in getting some tension on the couplings before you hit the grade and gently applying positive power with the loco so that coupling took up the weight gradually rather than as a shock load. But for all that broken couplings were a procedural hazard that was part of normal freight operations for about a century - that's why trains had brake vans at the rear and why lines with gradients were well-served with catch points and derailers. The other hazard was that if the couplings went too slack (if the train went downhill and the guard didn't keep enough brake force at the rear, or if the engine driver was too eager with the steam brake) the chain could become unhooked. Mineral trains were frequently 60, 80 or even occasionally 100 wagons long, all on loose-coupled three-link chains and no continuous brakes. Until about the time of WW1 most mineral wagons had 'dumb' buffers (just blocks of wood, not hydraulic or sprung pads) and many didn't even have any sprung draught gear (the coupling hooks were just bolted straight to the wagon frame, which was usually wood). Two rigid axles and a 9-foot wheelbase was the standard, producing a wagon that could hold 10 tons of coal in a wagon that weighed about 5.5 tons empty. So even the longest mineral trains rarely got above 1500 tons all-up weight. And yes, as you'd expect from a train made up of wooden-framed wagons with four wheels, a short wheelbase, dumb buffers, no brakes and held together by bits of chain, the maximum speeds were very low - 25mph as an absolutely maximum, with many plodding along at 15mph between frequent stops to inspect the bearings; oh yeah, most of these wagons ran on plain bearings 'lubricated' by tallow and other animal greases, so even at 20mph hot boxes were frequent (another common source of broken couplings and derailments) and the rolling resistance of the wagons was huge, especially in cold weather. It's notable that when railway companies had a free hand, they used rolling stock very similar to that used in America and other more forward-looking railway industries. The LMS had a fleet of twin-bogie 40-ton gondola-type hoppers that they used for internal traffic to carry coal to its own electric power stations, and as early as the 1900s the LSWR had developed a design of all-steel vacuum-braked twin-bogie ballast hopper that was so good that it was perpetuated right through to the end of BR and is still used today. The NER was able to use its monopoly over the coal-producing regions of County Durham to standardise on a type of 20-ton wooden-bodied bottom-drop hopper for coal, which the LNER developed into a 21-ton steel-bodied hopper. Dumb buffers and grease boxes remained common until well into the 1930s but after British Railways was formed all the wagons on the system came under single ownership. BR set up an 'Ideal Wagons Committee' to review the condition of its stock (about 1.5 million wagons and vans of various sorts), to decide which designs of wagon inherited from the private companies to continue and to draw up new standard types and features for future construction. This basically led to virtually all the ex-private owner wagons being hauled straight to the scrapyard. The bulk of the remainder were (slightly) more modern inter-war designs with a 10-foot wheelbase, steel frames, hydraulic buffers, draught gear and 'instanter' couplings, where the centre link in the chain had a triangular shape so it could be laid 'long-ways' to work like the old loose-coupled three-link chain or 'upright' to shorten the chain and bring the buffers into contact. These were permitted to run at up to 35mph in the 'loose coupled' configuration or up to 65mph if the coupling was in the short position. Just under 10 per cent of the wagon stock that BR inherited was fitted with continuous brakes, but as a result of the Wagons Committee an intensive programme through the 1950s saw virtually all the vans, flatcars and non-mineral open wagons retro-fitted with vacuum brake gear. New-build of general-purpose open wagons basically stopped and nearly all new freight wagons were brake-fitted. The exception was mineral wagons, which had to be unfitted for operational reasons (collieries, docks and other industrial handling gear couldn't handle wagons with brake gear). So mineral trains still plodded along at 20mph with rakes of unfitted loose-coupled 16-ton box wagons. By the 1960s the classic British goods train consisted of the front portion made up of vans, container-carrying flat-wagons and the occasional general-purpose open wagon, all fitted with vacuum brakes under the control of the driver on the loco and the rear portion made up of unfitted mineral wagons, tank wagons, bolster/machinery flat-wagons and the odd older van or GP wagon under the control of the guard in the brake van. The ratio of the braked and unbraked portion determined how fast the train could run - 35mph if the braked portion was only a few wagons, up to 65mph if the train was nearly all braked and all the wagons had instanter couplings and they were all in the short position. Then the Beeching-era reforms came along, general merchandise goods trains were virtually eliminated entirely from the network within a decade and BR standardised on long-wheelbase rolling stock with air-brakes forming single-purpose block trains running from point to point. As ever the exception was coal and mineral traffic, which remained stuck in the 1830s with rakes of short-wheelbase unbraked loose-coupled 16T wagons trundling around bits of the network until the 1980s.
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Oct 17, 2021 16:16
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Disgruntled Bovine posted:I knew British railways were a bit technologically backwards but that's crazy. Thanks for the effort post. While they undeniably were technically backward in some respects with regard to rolling stock (couplings and brakes especially), it's important to remember that whatever the shortcomings it worked. The British railway system at its peak moved a quite astounding volume, rate and variety of goods and people at a frequency and density not found on the same scale anywhere else on the globe. And remember that at the same time there were mineral trains creeping along with what were essentially 18th century farm carts held together by bits of chain and pulled by locomotives of a design not really changed since the 1850s, the companies were producing some of the most technically advanced passenger locomotives going, and running passenger services that included the fastest point-to-point timetabled service, the fastest average speed timetabled service and the longest non-stop timetabled service in the world. It's just a case of what the system and everyone in it was used to. For instance, just as the use of buffers, chains and handbrakes boggles the American railroading mind, so does the fact that train-order operation was still widely used on US railroads into the 1970s boggle those used to British railway practise. Arranging traffic by timetable and exchanging bits of paper with written orders on was phased out in Britain by the end of the 1870s because it had proved so dangerous, and everything from then on was done by signals, absolute block or token control. The condition of the permament way on many bits of the American rail system has been a continual source of horror for British observers pretty much forever, as has the fact that it's not properly fenced off or separated from other rights of way. Different conditions, different priorities, different business cases, different conventions, different practices, different legislative and commercial environments. They each worked (and work) for what they're required to do.
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Oct 21, 2021 14:10
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Ten days ago there was a 'minor' (as much as these things can be) crash at Salisbury when two trains going in the same direction on diverging lines collided with each other in a tunnel. No fatalities but some injuries, including 'life changing' ones for one of the drivers who was trapped in the cab of his train for some time. One of the DMUs ended up on its side. Early indications seem to suggest that the cause is a mix of low traction due to slippery (leaves on the line) conditions and some sort of signalling failure (either procedural or technical). A third train went through the junction just a minute or so before the collision, so a significantly worse crash was only narrowly avoided. This video (and others like it) have been doing the rounds of the recovery operation. Now, I'm not a rail professional in any way, but I always pictured recovery to be quite an involved and sophisticated thing involving cranes, winches, jacks, high-ratio pulley arrangements, hydraulic pistons and the like. Not "get a freight loco and a towing strap and pull really hard", like a scaled-up version of getting a car out of a ditch. Especially with lots of workers standing what seems to be very close to a towing strap being yanked by a 3300hp loco. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsHXWUMsLdM Apparently it worked though, even if it did end up needing two locos. If you want to see and hear an EMD 645 get thrashed, this is a good video.
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Nov 10, 2021 16:50
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFLb1IPlY_k A coincidence - I had never heard of these graph-form timetables before...until three days ago I watched this video: https://youtu.be/srpDHfuGzgs 'An Impression of a Day on the West Highland Railway' from 1960, which includes a shot of rows of desks with guys with comb-overs and circle-framed spectacles producing them (at 16:00 in the video). That film itself is a gem - the sort of weird mix of nerdy train-spottery detail, socialist realism, modernist art and slice-of-life drama that the BBC Film Unit seemed to specialise in in that period. I particularly like the contrasting voices - straightforward historical or geographical information read out in clipped, crystal-voweled BBC English, and all the operational stuff and 'local colour' and cultural commentary in Scots:  : "Garelochhead, then up to Douglas Summit." : "1-in-58...1-in-54...easing to 1-in-80." : "Loch Long, where tankers berth across from Argyll's Bowling Green. : "Three-quarter regulator, 30 per cent cut-off, 12-chain curves and climbing steady!"Poetry.
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Nov 21, 2021 22:44
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Full Collapse posted:Here's a YouTube channel I came across recently. That is a cracking channel - I've often meant to post it in here myself. So much 1950s British Railways hubris! That video you linked to is a classic example - "It's only recently that it's been realised that this process of breaking up and re-forming trains is a century-old legacy, largely irrelevant to our contemporary economy. So the new aim is to get rid of marshalling yards all together!" This was in 1966, eleven years after the £1.2 billion 'Modernisation' Plan including building several huge new marshalling yards... Some other favourites: Second Report on Modernisation By this point the wheels were already coming off BR and Beeching was sharpening his axe. You wouldn't know it from this video, packed full of New Jerusalem, White Heat of Technology optimism, all set to a Handel brass band soundtrack. Eleventh Report on Modernisation - Nine years later and we've got to the stage of "actually, closing down railways is good because it creates loads of green space and you can use old engine sheds as music venues." Mishap - How to respond to accidents and incidents in 1958. This is York - A day's work at one of BR's big mainline stations in 1953. Spick and Span - How BR cleaned [was supposed to clean...] its coaches. Measured for Transport - How to move a high-voltage transformer through the Welsh mountains by rail in 1962. Little & Often - How to fire an LMS Black Five
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Dec 22, 2021 12:14
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Connie4800 posted:the Modernization Plan absolutely sucked Dog Shite because instead of using brand-new steam engines like the rest of Europe who didn't go full-in on electrification the British scrapped them for unreliable faildiesels like the various Type 1s; in effect, it was railroad nationalization done by people who absolutely hate trains. loving both Germanies were using neubauloks and rekoloks until the 1970s; the Standards coulda lasted at least that long. Like most British post-war industrial gently caress-ups, it was a lack of consistency, with policy directors changing horses in mid-stream in reaction to short-term problems. Robert Riddles designed the BR Standards to handle the majority of BR's traction needs for the next 30 years (and they were approved and ordered by the BTC as such). They were high-quality, well-engineered locos intended to be easy to maintain over a service life of 30+ years - the same sort of lifespan that much of the Eastern Bloc got out of its 1940s/1950s steam locos. Steam was to be replaced by a rolling programme of electrification for all but the minor routes, with diesel filling these gaps and being used for shunting and for light passenger multiple units and railcars. As well as the Standard locos, BR spent a fortune designing and building the Mk1 coaching stock, again to very high standards, which would go with the new generation of locos. Riddles laid out the economic basis for this at the time - although diesel was cheaper to operate, it was way more expensive to build, and it relied on imported oil. Britain was broke and was in dire need of new rail traction now to replace the ancient locos that were still in widespread service, many of which were from the Victorian era and had been slated for withdrawal before the War made them indispensable. Aside from shunters and the LMS prototypes British railways had no experience of building or operating diesel locomotives, while it had multiple works and manufacturers which could design and build steam locomotives, plus huge domestic reserves of coal to fuel them. The Standards and the Mk1 coaches began to enter service in 1951. Four years later the Modernisation Plan lays out a slightly different scheme - near-total electrification was still seen as the end goal, but it would happen at a slower pace and in the interim diesel traction would be introduced, with a Pilot Scheme to find out which types and designed worked best. The publication of the Modernisation Plan coincided with BR's finances hitting the skids and the whole entity tipping into running at an operational loss while traffic share nosedived and freight tonnage bled away. There were also ongoing staffing problems since at a time of near-full employment the railway found it hard to attract people to the dirty, physical and long work required by steam. The dieselisation was stepped up (before the first of the Pilot Scheme locos had even entered service) and the build plans for the Standards were scaled back. As BR's financial black hole continued to grow, management essentially bet everything on a rapid large-scale dieselisation plan which would reduce operating costs, ease the manpower crisis and improve the railway's image. Virtually all electrification schemes other than those already underway were halted and thousands of diesel locomotives, many of untried design, from unproven manufacturers and built to specifications rooted in the early 1950s (which was a very different world from the economic and operating requirements of BR in the early '60s) were rushed into service. Construction of the Standard steam locos was halted in 1960, before construction on many classes had even properly begun - for instance the Standard 4MT 4-6-0 was intended to replace the smaller Western Region 2-cylinder 4-6-0s and a variety of Victorian 4-4-0s on the London Midland Region. But only 80 were built. The 3MT 2-6-0 and the 2MT tanks were similarly supposed to replace older numerous pre-nationalisation (or even pre-grouping) classes but were never built in the intended numbers as they were instead replaced by DMUs and Type 2 diesels. Only ten Standard Class 6 Pacifics were built - less than half the intended number - before their construction was halted in favour of diesels. This left BR with several small classes of 'standard' locomotives confined to very specific areas, and a whole fleet of brand new Standards that were operating alongside older steam locomotives and in many cases would be withdrawn before their predecessors. And these weren't cheaply knocked-out 'Austerity' locos or lightly modernised Big Four designs - they were practically blank sheet, fully-engineered, high-quality, very capable locos. The first Standard to enter service in 1951 was withdrawn in 1966, after only half its intended lifespan. Some Standards didn't even last that long. The same problem befell the coaching stock. The Mk1s were nearly all fitted with steam carriage heating, because they were intended to work with the Standard steam locos. With the Mk1s entering widespread service, and plenty of pre-nationalisation steam-heated stock still around too, BR required that the new diesels were also fitted with steam heating equipment. The steam generators were, without exception, problematic and on some diesel classes caused more 'failures' of the locomotive than all the other causes combined. Several loco classes which, on paper, had terrible availability/reliability figures, were actually perfectly good locomotives fitted with rubbish steam generators. The steam generators were also bulky and heavy, adding to the problem of many early BR diesels being overweight (the 'Baby Deltics' being a particularly badly-affected example) and the need to cram a carriage heating gear into the engine compartment with all the other stuff often made servicing awkward and in some cases added to poor reliability by introducing heat, steam and oil to the engine compartment or simply making the space too crowded for adequate cooling or forcing other vital bits of equipment to be located in less-than-ideal places. Then, having acquired a fleet of diesels lumbered with unreliable and awkward steam heating equipment, BR withdrew all its steam locomotives years ahead of the originally intended schedule, leaving them with the slightly ridiculous situation of a railway run entirely by diesel or electric traction still heating carriages by steam. A rolling project to convert the carriage stock to electric heating and fit locos with the necessary gear was implemented, but several key diesel classes couldn't be fitted with ETH gear and on others it led to classes (designed in the 1950s) not already blessed with a surplus of power and performance to match the new timings required in the 1960s and 1970s having a couple of hundred horsepower knocked off what they could use at the rail.
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Jan 28, 2022 21:50
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Tex Avery posted:It's a shelter for inspectors to ride on the front end while the locomotive was being tested. One page I found reported that a guy named Lewis Schofield was riding up front on that locomotive when a super heater tube burst, killing Schofield. Specifically they're called indicator shelters. That one in the pic is quite sophisticated, and I guess was a properly made piece of kit that was presumably kept aside and adapted to fit each loco as needed (I guess the metal 'corners' with the windows were permanent, and they were joined by the wooden planks which depended on the width and shape of the loco frame). Most of them look like half of a garden shed or an outhouse perched on the buffer beam. They housed the equipment used for producing indicator diagrams, which required gear attached directly to the loco's cylinders and valve gear. Later on they also fitted equipment for monitoring the superheater, smokebox draught, exhaust back pressure, oil flow etc. Engineers would ride on the buffer beam to monitor and adjust the equipment. The shelter was needed for reasons of public decency to shield the travelling public from the sight of their enormous balls.
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Feb 6, 2022 22:26
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Here in the UK the Class 323 EMU is well-known for its AC equipment sounding like a 1980s F1 grid getting the green light when they pull away: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OD1ZDbs44ww
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Apr 18, 2022 22:34
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 Clearly an issue that railroads have had to deal with since the days steam...
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May 16, 2022 17:48
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spincube posted:The Class 91 'Intercity 225' locos (and coaching stock) are getting a new-old livery: Yessssssssssssssssss! Didn't know this was happening but it's a very good thing. (Edit: On closer examination, I really like how it's not just IC Swallow, but IC Swallow pattern in modern carmine/plum LNER colours. Apparently it's also a proper paintjob, not vinyl. A great way for the class to see out their last few years in service). Not only is the Intercity 'Swallow' livery objectively good - and one of the best liveries that BR ever came up with - but when I was a kid the IC225s were just entering service and, seeing them in magazines and on the telly I just thought they were the one of the best things in the world - not just the best train, not the best machine, but the best thing. We didn't live in a part of the country anywhere near their stamping ground so I only got to go on one once before they became GNER (another cracking livery) but nine-year old me was almost beside himself with excitement. Now I live somewhere on the ECML and have been on loads of IC225s and they still feel a bit special to me - a few years ago my other half and I went on a weekend holiday to Scotland and shelled out for First Class on the train, and our northbound train was hauled by the Class 91 in Swallow livery, just to top off an excellent day. I took a train into London last weekend and was dreading an LNER Azuma with its cramped, ironing-board seats, rough ride, feeble HVAC and weird under-floor banging noises, but lucked out with an IC225 set that was, as ever, smooth, quiet, comfortable, refined and stonkingly quick. It'll be a sad day when the last of them is retired. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Jun 15, 2022 |
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Jun 15, 2022 00:22
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smackfu posted:I’ve been watching some of the California High Speed Rail construction progress videos, and it seems like a lot of the effort (and cost) is building giant viaducts to cross over existing freight rail lines. Is this what other HSR countries have to do too? Pretty much the definition of HSR is a line (or network of lines) physically and operationally separated from the rest of the 'conventional' network and dedicated to running one type of train (fast passenger trains) all travelling at the same speed on the same service pattern. That's what allows you to get the fast journey times and the regular, frequent service that makes it attractive to users. There was nothing that technically adventurous with the original Japanese Shinkansen - they were just very powerful streamlined electric train sets fitted with advanced signalling equipment. The big change was that they had a dedicated line to themselves, with no freight trains or slower passenger trains stopping at intermediate stations getting in the way. That's a key part of the saga that is HSR in the UK - the 'High Speed' bit is actually something of a misnomer since the reduced journey times are really more of a bonus over the huge capacity increase it provides. Put all the long-distance express trains on HSR and they can zoom along at 220mph. The old main line now has room for the freight trains rolling along at 60mph and the stopping passenger trains which average 60mph between stops. You don't need to leave huge headways in the timetable to keep different classes of train out of each others' way, so you can pack more slow services onto the old line and offer faster, more frequent journeys on the HSR.
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Nov 4, 2022 16:36
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nhFVQFnOltY Came across this great atmospheric video of traditional signalling operations in Serbia. Love the chain-driven crossing barriers with the half-hearted warning gongs. And the resident railway dog
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Dec 15, 2022 12:15
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kathmandu posted:Can’t believe this is how I heard about the CP-KCS merger going through I'm on the other side of the Atlantic so didn't even know it was in the offing. A couple of days ago I looked up the CPR wikipedia page (I wanted to confirm that they used to run high-speed high-security high-priority trains to transport silk in the past - which they did) and the entire page was in the past tense. I was thinking "what the hell, when did Canadian Pacific cease to be a thing?" and then noticed that it said it had merged with KCS a few hours before I looked up the page. It was like a weird real-time Mandela Effect. And yes, it's a really low-effort name and doesn't even have the same sort of ring to that Burlington Northern & Santa Fe does. I'm hoping for a tri-national version of the CPR roundel with a beaver, a bison and a golden eagle and interlocked maple leaf, cottonwood leaf and cactus.
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Apr 16, 2023 12:42
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namlosh posted:What time period was this? As per wiki: Wikipedia posted:Between the 1890s and 1933, the CPR transported raw silk from Vancouver, where it had been shipped from the Orient, to silk mills in New York and New Jersey. A silk train could carry several million dollars' worth of silk, so they had their own armed guards. To avoid train robberies and so minimize insurance costs, they travelled quickly and stopped only to change locomotives and crews, which was often done in under five minutes. The silk trains had superior rights over all other trains; even passenger trains (including the Royal Train of 1939) would be put in sidings to make the silk trains' trip faster. At the end of World War II, the invention of nylon made silk less valuable, so the silk trains died out.
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Apr 16, 2023 15:59
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Thanks for that trip report Noosphere - I really enjoy these insider insights. In that vein, this video floated to the top of my YouTube recs yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4a1R0VBwD4 Fast Freights on the Baltimore & Ohio, 1954. There's something that's both a bit funny but genuinely likeable about the bombastic narratives these 1950s info films spin - the companies behind them were very self-aware of their own importance, history, how much of the economy they moved and the intrinsic theatre of a mile of freight cars moving at 60mph with 6000 streamlined horsepower at the head. Not so keen on the very 1950s decision to call the train/loco 'Big George' and to refer to all the cars as 'his ladies'... It's got some interesting camera angles that can't have been easy to get with 1950s equipment - close-ups of the couplers flexing in and out, the brake rigging moving and the car wheels rattling over track joints and switches at speed. One question - at the 5:00 mark there's a shot of a Wabash boxcar with the comment that "she hasn't been home in six years - not lost, just travelling". What was/is the arrangement with cars working between different railroads in the US? In Britain the private companies were quite jealous of their stock. Wagons with loads could roam quite freely between systems (with each company the wagon travelled over receiving a share of the income) but any wagon unloaded in 'foreign territory' had to be returned to its home network, empty and as soon as possible. This led to a lot of wagons trundling around carrying nothing but air, and lots of trains of empties clogging up the network, so by the 1900s various railways had formed traffic agreements with each other - so for instance the Midland and the London & North Western could use each other's wagons on their networks so long as they were carrying loads and were travelling in a vaguely homeward direction. Just before WW1 the Great Northern, Great Eastern and Great Central agreed to common working of a large proportion of their respective wagon fleets. During WW1 wagons were all 'pooled' for ease of operation and after the war this was retained - all the 'standard' wagons of the Big Four (open general merchandise wagons and covered vans, both of the usual 9ft wheelbase and not fitted with vacuum brakes) were pooled and could be used for any purpose, by any company, anywhere in the country. Wagons would also be inspected, maintained and repaired at the nearest wagon works, although the owning company would foot the bill. This meant that you could see Southern Railway wagons in the far north of Scotland, or LNER vans in deepest western Wales, and wagons could get 'trapped' in foreign territory for years at a time (which is what the B&O film seems to imply happened to that Wabash boxcar?). Specialist wagons - flatcars, container wagons, tankers, fish vans, grain hoppers, anything long-wheelbase, with high-speed axle boxes or with vacuum/air brakes - wasn't pooled and was marked up as 'Non Common User' and these still had to be returned to their home system ASAP once they had delivered their cargo, and often carried an instruction of where exactly it had to be returned to if found 'off-system' painted on the side. The exception was cattle wagons, which were pooled from the mid-1920s between the LMS, LNER and SR (the GWR ones were not pooled since they had non-standard brakes). Wagons were pooled again in WW2 and then once nationalisation happened they all become part of the same operation and so began to mix quite freely. If, as per the video, a Wabash boxcar could spend six years without travelling on Wabash rails, that implies that there was a similar pooling arrangement? Or was it a case of various alliances and agreements between specific railroads? Some other videos that I've seen recently that the thread may enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svZVzq-3W68 "Assembling a Freight Train" on the Santa Fe sometime in the early 50s. Amazing how labour-intensive it all is - numerous switching/trip movements, cars being sorted by direction, destination, delivery order and so on, endless numbers of paper waybills being tacked on the sides, duplicated, stacked, sorted, typed, transmitted and passed between armies of clerks, yardmasters, dispatchers and conductors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXcD6ZdPR9k "Last of the Giants - Big Boy" - a publicity film from the UP on the demise of the Big Boys. Some more brilliant purple prose here: Union Pacific posted:"Theirs' was a call to dreamers of every age, wafting them from humdrum schoolroom or office to fancied adventures on the High Iron... You don't get PR films with scripts like that any more!
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May 14, 2023 18:25
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Noosphere posted:Great post ! I'll focus on this video for now. The processes haven't changed much in 75 years : there are simply more computers and far, far fewer people involved. Paper handling, of course, but also nearly every step of the yard work apart from (de)coupling, and inspecting the wagons for safety is automated. And there is a slow-moving project to implement totally automated Scharfenberg couplers for freight wagons. These would also allow for the automation of brake checks, as in modern passenger trains. Here's the British equivalent of that Santa Fe film: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-fully-fitted-freight-1957-online The life and times of the 4:48pm fully fitted fast freight from Bristol to Leeds.
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May 14, 2023 22:19
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jadebullet posted:In the US, railcars on foreign rail were and are interchanged between railroads constantly but not without cost. A railcar on foreign rails can be used by the foreign railroad for its own cargo loading purposes, since it is in everyone's best interests to minimize non-revenue car movements, but the car's owner receives a per-diem payment for each day the car is on foreign rail. Sash! posted:Within seven years, between Staggers, the early 80s recession, and the railroads having been correct about their fleet make up, the per diem exploit collapsed. There was suddenly a huge glut in the boxcar fleet and those boxcars were returned to their home rails at short lines who couldn't even store them all. They were sold off en masse and I believe a good number of them even because Railbox property. Thanks - so similar to the working agreement era of British railways, but with the crucial difference that foreign cars are charged per diem. And, without a specific inter-company agreement, foreign cars could not be used for revenue purposes by the host. That had to wait for the post-WW1 pooling system. British practice was to charge customers and wagon owners by the mile - loads attracted standardised and (legally defined and enforced) rates per mile. The mileage any given wagon travelled from origin to destination, and the route by which it did so, was closely monitored and every company that owned track that wagon passed over was allocated a portion of the overall fee payed by the customer on a straight portion basis (if a wagon travelled half its distance on the Midland, a quarter of its distance on the LNWR and the other quarter on the Caledonian, the rates would be split 50% to the MR and 25% each to the LNWR and the Caley) but with an adjustment to allow an extra portion to go to any company that actually operated a train the wagon travelled in - so if the MR provided the initial engine, brake van and crew, then handed the wagon over to an LNWR train which then ran to the destination due to trackage rights with the Caledonian, the Midland and the North Western would get more of the share and the Caley would get less...unless those trackage rights had been agreed via some other adjustment of the mileage rates. This byzantine system was run and managed by the Railway Clearing House, which maintained an army of clerks and inspectors around the country as well as huge regional and central offices tracking wagons, keeping running totals of mileage run and consulting vast tomes which adjustments to the standard rates applied to which companies and between which geographical spots on the network. If you look at old OS maps you'll see lots of railway sidings marked 'Mileage Sidings' - every goods station will have at least a couple. This was where wagons charged basic mileage (with no further charges or services) were picked up, marshalled and dropped off. On top of the basic mileage charge the railways could add cartage, standage and demurrage charges. Cartage was the fee for loading/unloading the wagon, with the option of extra charges to collect and deliver the cargo from door to door. The railway companies would gladly charge for this, but economy-minded customers could take on the logistics and manpower of physically taking the cargo on and off the wagon themselves. Paying cartage usually ensured that the wagon (or at least its load) would be accommodated in a goods shed or (as appropriate) on a siding with a loading ramp or crane rather than on a plain unadorned mileage siding. Standage was the charge for use of the physical track space on which a wagon stood. After a wagon arrived at its destination (and absent of any other factors or regulations), the customer had two days' grace to have the wagon unloaded and available for further use, after which standage fees applied at a per diem rate. Demurrage was charged when the customer was using a railway-owned wagon and exceeded the two days' grace period. Large customers could avoid standage by having their own private sidings (which simply incurred an annual connection fee) and demurrage by owning their own wagons. Wagon ownership was very easy and cheap in the pre-WW2 era so even small companies often found it more economical to own their wagons and avoid demurrage but pay standage. In the 1950s one of the many financial millstones around British Railways' neck was that the standage and demurrage charges were massively out of date and no longer remotely reflected the costs incurred to the railway. They were so low compared to other typical business expenses that many customers were having goods delivered in closed vans (which incurred premium demurrage rates over open wagons) and then not unloading them for months or years at a time because paying BR standage and demurrage was cheaper than renting or paying business rates on warehouse space.
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May 15, 2023 21:13
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I always feel bad when someone does a really long, comprehensive and interesting post like that and I can't find anything specific or insightful to say. But I really enjoyed reading it, so thanks  Had an afternoon out at a heritage railway yesterday:    Because of the prolonged dry, hot weather there was a diesel shoving at the back to save the steam engine working too hard on the climbs and risking embers/sparks flying into the fields. Class 37 in faded Trainload Metals  livery 
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Jun 12, 2023 20:20
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Itzena posted:Oh hey, I recognise that line! I wonder if they have the arguably worst diesel ever built for BR back there yet? That is a field with some strong competition - doesn't narrow it down much. But if it's the one I think you mean, I believe it was still at the Severn Valley Railway when I visited the C&PR.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:06
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lsVeXeulUg0 It's 50 years of the Great Central Railway heritage line, and to mark it they hitched a Standard 9F to 50 freight wagons. It's been a while since a 9F was worked that hard, and even longer since the drumroll of several dozen short-wheelbase wagons moving at a decent speed on jointed rail was heard. The consist is decidedly inauthentic (hence all the brake vans dotted throughout it and the unfitted mineral wagons being in the middle between the tank wagons and fitted vans) but I think it makes it look like when, as a kid, you decided to connect together every item in your train set.
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Jul 7, 2023 22:26
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I also have a strange fondness for the Pacer. But that's because my experience of them was semi-regularly riding one on the Severn Beach Line while at uni in Bristol, and so it's mostly nostalgia for student/young adult freedom and the Pacer nearly always meant going to or coming back from doing something fun with friends. I never really.had to ride a Pacer - never had to use one twice a day, five days a week to get to and from work. Never faced waiting on a platform on a cold, wet winter evening just wanting to get home and getting a late-running, overcrowded 1970s bus body on a freight wagon chassis. Plus the Severn Beach route was pretty much exactly what the Pacer was meant for - a lightly-used single-track branch line that was short hops between basic urban/inner suburban stations on half its length and longer jaunts between barely used rural platforms on the other half. Most of it didn't need the Pacer to go at more than 30mph and it barely had a chance to get up to 60mph, let alone cruise there. And the whole route takes under an hour. That's what the Pacer was meant for - shambling along basic urban/suburban branch lines that didn't have enough traffic to cover their costs. The problem was that they were introduced right at the end of BR's 'managed decline' era and had to face surging passenger numbers in the 1990s. And because they were new and cheap they got redeployed to services they were never really intended for - faster, longer, higher-frequency ones with longer runs between stations and higher ridership. They are not good units. They are a cheap, desperate design with all the flaws you'd expect of combining elements never intended to be a passenger train to make a passenger train. They're noisy, coarse and drafty. The Severn Beach ones went through Montpellier and Redland in a demonic howl of flange squeal and laboured up the hill in the Clifton Downs tunnel in a tortuous roar of straining diesel clatter. And they always managed to blow scorching hot air on your shins and cold air at your face for some reason. In an ideal world BR would have been able to afford more Sprinters in the 1980s. But that was never a realistic option, so the choice was between Pacers and no trains at all. They allowed a lot of urban/inter-urban lines - now heavily used - to stay open when they would otherwise have been closed for the cost of needing new rolling stock. For that, and for being pushed into uses they were never designed or intended for, I have a sort of grudging respect for the Pacers. I certainly welcome that the NRM has one. They're utterly representative of an era of UK railway history.
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Sep 2, 2023 09:25
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Neddy Seagoon posted:British Rail's newest cheap passenger service. British Rail Internal Film Unit, Object 417-80b, "Pacer Railbus Project: Proof of Concept Testing" In other news, apparently Mexico is getting the retired HST sets. History repeating: quote:The controversial Tren Maya project, aimed at bolstering tourism in the region, was initially intended to utilise electric traction. The line’s construction has been criticised as politically motivated and environmentally questionable. HSTs stepping in as the Plan B to an electric traction project which became politically controversial before being canned at great expense? Is this 1983 or 2023? BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Sep 8, 2023 |
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Sep 8, 2023 12:41
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Noosphere posted:Swiss trains will only honk or whistle in an emergency or if they pass a signal ordering them to. Same in the UK too - trains honk (technically still called a whistle) only at marked Whistle signs, the vast majority of which are at ungated or user-worked level crossings. Manned, remote controlled or automatic crossings don't require the whistle unless there's a particlar sighting issue (a curve) or there are separate road/foot traffic gates. And the whistle is just the standard quick two-tone 'hee-haw', not the American long-long-short-long from the approach until the train is in the crossing. Bells are only required on British trains for use on what are officially tramways not railways or (very rare, and now even rarer) cases of street running - these were so unusual that rather than fitting rolling stock with the required bells, side skirts, cowcatchers etc. it was easier to follow the procedures that exempted the train from those regs: a speed limit of 5mph and escorted by a pilotman on foot carrying a red flag. Talking of the 'high vis' front ends, the UK railways have only recently (2016) caught up with the rest of the world and realised that fitting bright headlamps to trains makes them easier to spot. Now, if a train has compliant lighting (three headlamps in a triangle - one high level and two low down - and two tail lamps, all of at least a certain intensity) then it doesn't need the yellow-coloured front end that has been mandated (except for steam locomotives) since the early 1960s. The idea of headlamps that actually illuminated ground/attracted attention only came to BR in the late 1970s (about a century after everyone else had sussed it out), with one central headlamp rather than the pair of low-wattage bulbs shining through a translucent screen (originally intended only to light up the headcode displayed on the front) or the little flickering oil lamps used before that.
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Dec 17, 2023 12:28
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spincube posted:I suppose you could cynically say that the yellow snouts are for protection of shunters, depot staff and track gangs, who are just statistics compared to dead paying passengers - still, the headlight thing sounds to me more like a convenient fig-leaf explanation for 'someone's dickhead failson really hates the bright yellow, and everyone's forgotten why it's there in the first place, so whatever: baby gets his bottle'. The yellow ends were originally brought in specifically for the safety of track gangs (shunting and yard engines had the black/yellow 'wasp stripes' at each end for their own purposes) to assist the P/way people (especially the dedicated watchmen for each job) spot the quieter, faster diesels and electrics. Particularly after BR painted their locos dark green which, when using only headcode discs or dim marker lamps, made them harder to see approaching between/behind trees when not accompanied by the exhaust beat and atmospheric display of a steam loco. For all sorts of H&S reasons Network Rail has been steadily moving away from the old business of doing P/way or trackside work on active running lines - the work is now more and more often done via an engineering possession so you don't have crews working away on some track, some ballast, a culvert, maintaining signals etc. while service trains thunder past a few feet away anything like as much as you did in the 1960s. So the need for visibility out on the main line is reduced. The problem of work gangs being habituated to the sound and sight of steam traction is long gone. And modern high-intensity lamps are far more visible, over much greater distances, than a first-gen diesel with a yellow-painted front end and a couple of glow-worm marker lights on the front. Research and real-world evidence (much of it from America) has shown that the triangular pattern of lamps is much better at allowing people to gauge distance and approach speed than either single or paired lamps. In the 1960s when the yellow warning ends were introduced you not only had track gangs, but crossing keepers, signalling linesmen, civil engineer inspectors etc. roaming the system on foot. You had signallers in mechanical boxes without track circuits, stations with barrow crossings (or even track level pedestrian crossings), more numerous (and more heavily used) marshalling yards and good sidings with shunters going in between wagons to (un)couple and so on. There was much more need for a clear and simple way of improving train visibility. I strongly suspect that the track is a much quieter, less populated place these days and high-intensity headlamps are just as good, if not better, than a coat of yellow paint. Most of the rest of the world, often without the UK's legally-mandated fences and gates and heavily-manned and closely-monitored system, managed with one big headlamp or two or three slightly less-big ones, and never bothered with the yellow ends.
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Dec 17, 2023 16:23
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spincube posted:Fair point. I still think the yellow noses look nice, though You're definitely right that they are a distinctly 'British railways' feature and make any bit of rolling stock, even if it's a standard design from a European manufacturer, look 'at home'. The Elizabeth Line trains with the black front end and the TPE locos with the two-tone blue noses look rather odd when you're so used to all trains having a yellow nose. Same as seeing Class 66s in use in Europe without them. Personal opinion, but I don't think the full yellow noses did the looks of some of the early locos and MUs any favours - English Electric stuff with the big nose like the 37s and the Deltics really look odd with the whole thing painted yellow, and the 'Heritage' DMUs looked so much smarter in the green paint with the whiskers than with the yellow end (especially in the era when the rest of them was painted all-over BR blue). Of course the yellow ends worked nicely on the Trainload sector grey livery, but that is the One BR Livery To Rule Them All, so of course it would.
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Dec 17, 2023 19:12
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Thought I'd share this video of steam trains decked out with mappable LED strings for Christmas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRTCJpyTiiY Also: Today (Christmas Eve) is the anniversary of the Hawes Junction Disaster, one of the key moments in British railway history in the development of safe practices. The Wiki article does a pretty good job in outlining it, as does this article from the Settle Carlisle Railway Trust. It's also portrayed in this extremely 1970s-BBC documentary. In brief, a signalman at a busy remote station on the Midland Railway's main line to Scotland, near the end of his 10-hour shift in terrible weather in the early morning of Christmas Eve, 1910, forgot about a pair of locomotives he had previously positioned on the northbound main line behind the starter signal. As they waited there, he accepted and cleared the signals for a northbound express sleeper train. When the signals cleared, the pair of engines set off into the next section, unaware of the express approaching behind them at more than twice their speed. The express caught up and collided with the engines about 2.5 miles further down the line. The initial collision was not especially destructive - the light engines were pushed along the rails, derailed and then fell against an embankment. The express was also pulled by a pair of engines which derailed and the carriages piled up around them, with severe 'telescoping'. A post-crash fire, fuelled by the wooden-bodied coaches and leaking gas cylinders, added to the destruction and hindered rescue efforts. Although the death toll (12 persons) was by no means the highest for the era, the nature of the disaster caught the public's eye and its emotions. The timing - Christmas Eve - obviously added to the tragedy. So did the location of the accident, on the Midland's famously beautiful, grand and difficult route across the 'roof of England', in the midst of wild and remote fell country on a night of howling wind and lashing rain. That one of the drivers, despite serious injuries, walked over a mile through the storm to get help. And that the signalman who unknowingly made the fatal error, as he waited for the 'out of section' bell from the next signal box that never came and first saw the growing flames of the crash silhouette the looming fells against the low clouds, said "...I am afraid I have wrecked the Scotch Express." It had all the hallmarks of a Victorian dramatic novel. That it was due primarily to human error - a forgetful signalman - also stoked demands that something be done. There were numerous contributory factors, ranging from the failure of other railwaymen to follow the laid-down regulations to the weather. The Midland Railway shouldered much of the general blame; for its refusal to issue signalmen with lever collars to prevent them from clearing signals were trains were standing, for its similar refusal to consider installing track circuits to remotely indicate the presence of trains and for its policy of using multiple low-powered engines even on difficult, steeply-graded routes which resulted in signalmen being distracted by extra work as pilot/banking engines were removed, turned, repositioned and attached. The Hawes Junction Disaster gave impetus for the fitting of track circuits (already in widespread use in America) at busy junctions and stations in the UK (the Midland very quickly installed them at Hawes Junction) and added further weight to a long-standing campaign by the Railway Inspectorate to push for safer rolling stock with steel bodies and electric lighting. The signal box where the disaster unfolded is still in regular use and was recently restored and refitted. It is also now protected as a Listed Building in recognition of its historical significance as the last traditional signal boxes are being rapidly replaced by modernisation projects - in 1910 there were over 10,000 signal boxes on British railways, now there are around 800 and by 2045 they will all be gone, replaced by no more than 14 fully digital remote regional control centres. Ironically, by so clearly demonstrating the need for track circuits and ushering in the means of automated control, the Hawes Junction Disaster started the process which will lead to the signal box's own obsolescence in a few years.
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Dec 24, 2023 15:51
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Saukkis posted:Long lasting paint sounds like a good explanation. Yellow against sun light, green against road debris. But it still feels surprising that these colors would have such an advantage to be favoured so widely. Cream/green was also common (not standard, but common) on municipal trams and buses in the UK from the 1950s to the 1970s. And it was one of the schemes that British Railways experimented with in its early days when looking for a new standard livery for coaching stock (they also tried chocolate/cream, dark purple/white and all-over wine red before settling on crimson/cream). They were also virtually the default colours for painting public or industrial buildings - find a school, library, hospital, council house, military base, factory etc. that was built or refurbished in that time and there is a good chance that, inside and out, it will have dark green and cream paint. Those colours (more accurately, paints in those colours) were cheap to make, durable, looked smart, hid dirt and resisted atmospheric pollution. They had also been made in vast quantities during WW2 so not only were the paint companies geared up to make it in volume at low prices but there were loads of tins of it available as military surplus.
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Feb 6, 2024 11:40
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Pigsfeet on Rye posted:X-post from the comics megathread! Just look at all the optimism for the future of railroading ! The great railroad meltdown was gathering momentum but nobody realized it yet. Although that illustration seems to predict the advent of Conrail by about three decades.
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Mar 13, 2024 21:27
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