41–50 of 106 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And excavator and backhoe workers too as well as heavy presses.
Eh, /r/watchpeopledie has taught me that heavy equipment will murder you in a violent fashion if you don't respect it.
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The locomotives, not all the rolling stock. I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard/expensive, but it seems better to spend money on things that will be useful for decades rather than stopgaps that just kick the can a little further up the road.
If you remove the block signaling system and use in-cab signaling, you still need to know where the back of the train is. Otherwise a train could run into the back of another in the fog or heavy rainstorm. Currently, railroads use FREDs (flashing rear end device) on the last car of the train. Some FREDs are more intelligent than others but would benefit from being able to send out their location via GPS. https://en.w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you remove the block signaling system and use in-cab signaling, you still need to know where the back of the train is. Otherwise a train could run into the back of another in the fog or heavy rainstorm. Currently, railroads use FREDs (flashing rear end device) on the last car of the train. Some FREDs are more intelligent than others but would benefit from being able to send out their location via GPS. https://en.w…
Longest trains are under five miles so you could use that or whatever the limit for that line is as a safe baseline. Unless you're worried about trains separating.
I got a chance to drive a couple of different engines at the Plumas rail museum. And one of the things that does is help you internalize the amazing amount of mass and momentum a train carries around all the time. The engineer who was with us spoke of freight trains that were a hundred cars of iron ore that, even though they were travelling at only 5mph would take nearly 1000' to bring to an "emergency" stop. While I…
>> 5mph would take nearly 1000' to bring to an "emergency" stop. That seems far fetched. 1000' is a long way at 5mph. The number of engines doesn't matter. Each car has its own brakes in an emergency. Cut pressure in the line and every car will brake itself. Perhaps they meant situations involving hills, not uncommon for ore trains heading from mines.
We're currently fighting a whole genre of fire at work that boils down to the fact that a particular system, with many many finicky integrations both inside the company and with rickety old 3rd-party systems, was designed with the assumption that there was a so-called "junior QA" team who would be manually looking for trends in error logs and failed task logs. This position was eliminated with a corporate reorganization, and the many many moving pieces are slowly getting rewritten with different assumptions about monitoring, alerting, and logging, but in the meantime there is not anybody covering this function. This means that we typically only have a chance to fix things after they've started to be an actual nuisance to someone and they complain, whereas with the old team in place we had a better shot at identifying problems before they became a major nuisance and fixing them before anyone complained.
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This is an old urban legend. Feel free to Google it, and you will see everyone who has worked near trains knows a guy who knows a guy who this exact thing happened to. Edit: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-last-kiss/
That particular story is an urban legend, but fatal shunting accidents are sadly not. See https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/fatal-accident-at-grosmont-n... for a recent example (an amateur on a preserved steam line in this case; the mainline railway in the UK minimises manual shunting as much as possible)
https://historicpittsburgh.org/collection/pennsylvania-railr...
Many of the photographs feature gnarled old railroad bridges because of the hills and rivers in the region. Because of the region's steel industry, many photograph also feature smoke stacks and dirty skies.
Here is how the collection is described:
"""The Pennsylvania Railroad collection, held by the Archives Service Center, includes 345 (nearly all of which are 8x10 in size) gelatin dry plate images of railroad infrastructure dating from 1907-1917. Many of the images depict construction and repair projects to the company's lines, both within the city of Pittsburgh, as well as across the Midwest. Featured prominently in the collection is the renovation and construction of the second track for the Ohio Connecting Railway Bridge, located just north of downtown Pittsburgh. The collection also includes numerous views of track re-grading operations which occurred in Pittsburgh, as well as other major cities including Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Detroit."""
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Eh, /r/watchpeopledie has taught me that heavy equipment will murder you in a violent fashion if you don't respect it.
I am amazed that such a subreddit exists, and yet cannot bring myself to watch it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The locomotives, not all the rolling stock. I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard/expensive, but it seems better to spend money on things that will be useful for decades rather than stopgaps that just kick the can a little further up the road.
If you remove the block signaling system and use in-cab signaling, you still need to know where the back of the train is. Otherwise a train could run into the back of another in the fog or heavy rainstorm. Currently, railroads use FREDs (flashing rear end device) on the last car of the train. Some FREDs are more intelligent than others but would benefit from being able to send out their location via GPS. https://en.w…
More often these days, trains have extra engines on the end (and middle) that are controlled from the front in Distributed Power Units (DPU's). By spreading power out, you have more control, less stress on the couplers, can run a longer train, and the air brakes respond faster (closer to each engine for pressure changes and recharges).