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Klaus Kinski posted:They have been testing some equipment here that records vibrations and stuff and flags the location for manual inspection. It's not perfect but inspecting the rail while it's in production is certainly useful. The one they were working on where I went to school was strictly image-based. I think the intention was to automate the process of finding missing/broken spikes, bolts, and track clips. But they were never able to perfect the algorithm which would interpret the image itself, I'm guessing because there are too many variables when it comes to track structure. Rail projects in engineering academia seem to start off well enough, but the graduate students undertaking them quickly get frustrated with all the red tape that goes with working with a class-1 railroad (it's worse than government) and more often than not, will look for employment outside of the railway industry once they graduate. The ones that do stay with it either wind up on the consulting side or prematurely become middle-aged personas within their twentysomething bodies if they do go work for a railroad.
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May 20, 2015 18:56
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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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Disgruntled Bovine posted:I used to live half a block from a greenline station so I rode these a lot. I know the Boeing LRV's gave the MBTA a lot of trouble but they were the most comfortable cars on the greenline. They were quiet, had the best AC, the smoothest ride, and the most comfortable seats. Boeing's foray into building transit vehicles was an interesting one. They were one of a few aerospace companies [Rohr also comes to mind] which had excess workforce following the loss of defense contracts (due to Vietnam winding down) in the early 1970s and decided to try railcar building as a result. Rather than hiring engineers and consultants away from their competitors in this new industry, they decided to use their own ~*aeronautical expertise*~ which generally commanded an unnecessarily high level of precision in the manufacturing process, and produced components which were too complicated to withstand the rigors of daily use, such as the door opening/closing mechanisms. Their "US Standard LRV" was the direct result of this way of thinking, and although they worked more or less "OK" on the other system they were sold to (San Francisco's MUNI), the MBTA's cars had problems right and left, and it got bad enough that some of the Boston cars were sold (by Boeing) to San Francisco when the former refused delivery. MBTA kept modifying their cars until they finally did work as intended, which was right about the time they'd reached their intended service life and were retired. However, Boeing did build a drat good "L" car for the CTA in Chicago (the 2400 series). Mostly because the CTA's engineers kept Boeing's design staff at arm's length and demanded justifications for design "innovations" which were only going to overcomplicate the cars and make them unreliable. These cars were still in passenger service up until about a year ago, and they kept a small fleet of ~30 cars for work trains and special events.
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Feb 5, 2016 03:58
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Wilford Cutlery posted:How often does this happen? A Metra commuter train was struck by lightning this morning, and had to be pushed the rest of the way by another train behind it: I'm in Chicago, and pay attention to delays like this when I hear about them. Sometimes lightning will take out the signals, and might cause other problems on the Metra Electric District since it has overhead wire (although all the MUs have lightning arresters). Before this, I've absolutely positively never heard of lightning -directly- hitting a locomotive and damaging it. My guess is that the locomotive got hit somewhere near the electrical cabinet and made some nice blue smoke in there.
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Aug 30, 2016 18:39
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