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Guy Axlerod posted:We do something similar where I work, but we call it Lock-Out Tag-Out. We take a padlock, and lock the power switch for the equipment in the off position. There is a tag attached to the lock, and it says "Joe Blow locked this out. Call him at 555-1234" Positive isolation is where the industry will head to if it knows any sense. The mining industry has used it for years - railways, as usual, have been slow to catch on. I'm currently in charge of rolling it out at one of our depots. It's got some challenges associated with it since I'm basically breaking new ground in some cases (certainly within my company). Everyone else is basically watching what I do and copying it for the other depots. It's pretty cool.
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May 28, 2011 10:07
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:47 |
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porkfriedrice posted:From what I've read on a rail forum (railroad.net), those trains have recording devices that are similar to the "black boxes" on aircraft. There is. For example, this incident (url to report here, scroll down to the Rungoo incident) happened a couple of years ago. It killed both of our drivers in the train at the time. You'll note that if you open the report and go to page 39 of the PDF, you'll see that all of the track infrastructure (in this case, level crossing lights, track circuitry, etc.) are logged, to the point of it only going haywire when the control box was cleaned up by the derailed power car. Secondly, the same is done in the power car itself. Page 43 of the PDF shows everything logged, from horn/headlight status, to brake pipe pressure, etc. We record everything that happens in a locomotive for this very reason. All of this, as you can see, is published by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, whom investigate every transport incident that occurs be it rail, air, sea, etc. There is a free mailing list you can sign up to where they send out messages informing you of when reports are completed or when major updates are made. It's all freely available for public viewing on their website, too. The investigation process is pretty thorough. They go into behavioural theories as to what may have caused it, interview eye-witnesses, scour data recordings and log books, etc. It's a pretty good process to have and I'd be throughly surprised if the US didn't have an equivalent in place. rcman50166 posted:So when something like that happens, how do they clean up the mess? Do they repair the trains or just trash them? Or maybe it's like a car where it depends on the damage? I would vote repair seeing how heavily they are built, but I don't know much about the subject They do whatever's the most financially sensible. I know of old rollingstock that derailed and are just dumped on the side of the track on network-owned property and left there because it's a remote site where you can't get trucks/cranes in and it'd cost more than the vehicle's worth to recover. Hell, one of the coal carrying companies in Queensland has a few wagons laying on the side of the major highway in to the closest city, where they derailed, simply because they're write-offs and they're in no hurry to go grab them since they're worthless now. Others will get dragged in for repair. Others again may get recovered, sent to workshops and stripped for parts then shoved as an empty shell in the yard to just rust away until someone disposes of it. It's a business so, exactly like insurance, it depends on what's the most financially sensible decision. The only case I know of when this hasn't happened is when Qantas re-built a jet because they have the safety record of 'never having lost an airframe in the jet age'. After one overshot the runway and suffered significant structural damage (I think in Signapore), it was technically a write-off but Qantas spent more money than the jet's value to repair it, so they could keep their record of 'never having lost an airframe in the jet age'. Nam Taf fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Jun 4, 2011 |
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Jun 4, 2011 15:16
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Das Volk posted:The Onion is hit or miss these days, but this is so spot-on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tInDH2FeXaM Holy crap that is utterly perfect. Trainspotters are massive sperglords who literally stand around with notebooks and relay sightings of trains to one another. That is to say, sometimes it was faster for me, as an employee, to talk to the local rail sperg who could tell me exactly where a locomotive was, than it was for me to find out from the guys who are paid to know. They were able to tell me the precise time it departed a depot 1.5 hours drive away and could tell me that it was in a consist with 2 or 3 other locomotives and coming up to where I was. They're goddamn crazy.
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Jun 18, 2011 10:52
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Wedesdo posted:How they have so much time (and gas money) to chase trains? What do they do for a living? I've no idea what they do for a living but they're not actually driving around chasing them so it's not really expensive. They hook up with other trainspotters and share details on sightings of locos. For example, the place I was referring to was in a small town of about 75,000 people, where the depot is only a few minutes drive from the "CBD", and across from the passenger station for the long-distance trains there. As such, they'd just stand on the platform and look in to the depot as they either run through the city on the main line, or in to the depot for servicing. At the same time, their peers would do the same in the town over 100km away and be in constant communication with each other, so the guy in the town where I was would have heard that a loco had just departed from the depot 100km away on the north line heading towards the town where I was. Hence he'd know. They're goddamn crazy. That said, it's also hilarious how big some of the gaps in their info is. They'll have huge detail on some aspects which makes you wonder how the hell they know about some stuff, but then they are completely off the mark on other stuff that, as an employee, you think is pretty general knowledge even in the public domain. Fun fact: One of the biggest rail fan forums here in Australia had to enact a forum rule that 'sightings' of trains had to be phyiscal sightings, rather than simply guys listening to the control radios and basically regurgitating every detail they heard, as the 'sightings' megathread was just getting overwhelmed. They're that obsessed.
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Jun 20, 2011 07:02
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Nerobro posted:Got any examples handy? I wanna laugh. None off-hand and I couldn't find any in 10 mins of looking, but this entire site is pretty amusing to read how obsessed they are. Like, guys contacting the manufacturers of the new passenger trains to get drawings so they can hand-build models of them, but then saying they need more detail because they don't know the exact positioning of the coupling hoses on the front end.
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Jun 21, 2011 16:17
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some texas redneck posted:
I think there's a video earlier in this thread showing attempts to blow up railway track in WW2 for derailing trains. They're surprisingly capable of jumping extremely large gaps in track and staying forward and upright, if not completely railed.
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Aug 9, 2011 15:29
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Muffinpox posted:I never knew that was a common thing, my step-cousin is autistic and loves trains. Every time I talk to him he wants to know what train I took. I think it's the whole 'gigantic complex system designed to run perfectly on time' thing. They probably also blow their loads over old mechanical watches too.
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Aug 16, 2011 12:28
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9axle posted:At my terminal, all the power is inspected and minor repairs done daily, and when major stuff is required, they are sent west to a bigger shop. You don't spend millions on a locomotive and not change the oil or check the water. Some of our yard engines are almost 40 years old, and run well. They get used hard every day, 3 shifts and its rare to see one out-of-service. Aaaaaahahahahaha wow. Once a day? Our locos run 24/7 until they break and get dragged in dead or they hit their ~3-week maintenance block and come in for inspection. That is to say, they go mine<->port in a constant loop, stopping every 10-12 hours (as they pass the stations near the ports) to do a crew change but otherwise run literally 24/7 (or close to it) in most cases. New crews will bring in replacement water for the bar fridge onboard and will cook their meals onboard in the ovens, etc. we give them. Fun fact: a colleague of mine came in to the tech room on site one day laughing because he'd seen a loco come in with a fault. Looked up the fault code, turns out it's the fault that says you haven't had a fault in 28(? or so) days and to check poo poo to make sure it's still working.
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Sep 7, 2011 15:00
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Untagged posted:Looks very similar to this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhJF_hTJ2Rw . Which leads me to believe they are dumping slag from a steel mill of some sort. My god the number of things that could go wrong...  In the first vid, you almost see the wagon overbalance. All it'd take is a decent tip combined with just a little more erosion on that slope and the slope-side rail will sink and the wagon will topple. I wonder how often that happens. Also, is it being in Russia the only reason there's no environmental issues with doing that?
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Nov 18, 2011 16:19
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BlackShadow posted:We'd probably scrap it anyway if it's a problem with the flange. I don't know to be honest, just seems to be the thing that's done. If in doubt, throw it. As I understand, for us it depends if you can get the flange back in profile or not. If you can get the profile (P2, P3, etc.) back without going under minimim thicknesses on any key measurement, they'll turn it. e: I presume 'gash' means 'surface defect' not 'crack through flange thickness'.
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Jan 25, 2012 12:57
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Our locos have air-ride seats in most of them (the newer ones, basically) and we've had extensive work done to try to combat the smell in the chemical-based shitters.
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Mar 21, 2012 12:06
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BlackShadow posted:I would imagine the fuel savings come from running diesel locos at their most efficient throttle settings for the longest period of time, a bit like how in a car it is less efficient to take off quickly than use a gentle, gradual acceleration. It's also (as you learnt today  ) due to the fact that around corners, the geometry of two adjacent wagons under tension through their couplers creates a lateral thrust towards the centre of the curve, pushing the inside wheel flanges in to the rail and increasing friction. This is purely a function of the longitudinal tension in the consist. Putting a remote loco in the middle of the consist means that the tension forces are reduced due to: a) the middle loco pushing the front wagons (putting compression back in to that half), and b) reducing the overall tension on the rear half as there's only half as many wagons in pure tension behind the rear-most locomotive. Doing this reduces fuel consumption as there's less induced friction from corners which, as per a presentation Blackshadow and I saw today, can be of the order of ~25% of the total drag on a consist (including drag induced by grades, eg: going uphill - which is relevant because your tightest corners tend to be in the same place as your steepest grades through winding hills).
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Sep 11, 2012 11:52
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I struggle to believe that's real. Those things weigh around 150-180 tonnes. You can't just push that like that.
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Oct 18, 2012 09:18
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BrokenKnucklez posted:Steel wheels on steel rail have a gently caress off low rolling friction. How else do you think you can move 20,000 tons with only 12,000 hp? I know this, I design the things. People can't accelerate that much mass that quickly. All those 'pulling huge weights with teeth' are at a snail's pace. I wasn't referring to them being able to move it, rather that it gained that much momentum that quickly.
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Oct 21, 2012 03:51
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No Pun Intended posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_air_brake I wrote a bunch of words in the GBS thread about this. If I made any mistakes, deal with it as it was off memory. I also commented on the uncoupling. For the locos to roll for a kilometre then stop suggests they had brakes and were dragged for the kilometre before uncoupling. The most common uncoupling event that I know of is a vertical impulse - normally it's track dips from pot holes but I observed 2 weeks ago that a level crossing can have just as bad a vertical impulse as a severe track dip. A rolling train could be going fast (causing more issues with the vertical impulse) with relatively low coupler draft forces (dragging brakes may not necessarily be that high a load on the locos) and hit a large vertical step over a level crossing. I could picture that causing an uncoupling event in certain situations (e.g.: certain coupler types, loco vs. wagon couplers at different heights, etc.).
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Jul 9, 2013 17:07
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for those who aren't sure on their operation (the principles haven't changed much since 1868)
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some texas redneck posted:What happened? Separate circuits and they tripped but the traction systems didn't? I'm guessing since it's almost 1/3 the world away from me and I've never actually seen the system.
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Jul 27, 2013 06:54
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