Trains are also limited by weight as well as length. If you have too much weight, you will almost certainly break a knuckle, or even stringline the train through curves. The railroads have rules limiting the amount of horsepower at the front of the train for this reason. If you have a 6000 foot long train (roughly average size), you will have a hp/ton ratio of about 3-4. If you have more units than that, usually the extras are not online.
CSX trains enroute to Louisville from the north are restricted to 8000' due to siding capacity. Toledo-Cincinnati is supposed to be 9000', but that is routinely broken. Most of our sidings are in the 6500-7200' range, and trains are often too long to fit.
How Many Feet in an N Scale Mile? To many. Interesting discussion here regarding length and weight of trains. They will fudge on both if they can get away with it. Now who in the heck is "They"?! I have to operate trains based on the length of the sidings. Pretty much stuck to 50 car trains...sad isn't it. Grin!
Here is my yard. There are 6, 6' modules in it and 11 tracks. http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/attachment.php?attachmentid=13897&stc=1&d=1253732666 http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/attachment.php?attachmentid=13898&stc=1&d=1253732666
I work now for NS, when Conrail was here my longest train that I ever run was 17,850 feet long.. Thats right!! I am not kidding you.. 117 empty truck train cars 70 of them were 5 packs!! Although it was not a heavy train that is were the problem is, you could string line them on a curve or jack knife them bunching them up.. OH yes I did take it around the Horseshoe with a helper on the rear.. The longest loaded truck train I ever had was 15,700 feet long from Conway to Harrisburg, New Years Eve 1999.. The longest freight and by far the heavyest train I had was a freight train out of Conway in 1995, PIMO (Pittsburgh to Morrisville) 189 cars, 20,450 tons and 11,500 feet in length.. Here the real kicker my power was 2 GP40's, 1 SD40 and a GP38.. NS runs trains everyday here on the Shoe 8, to 12,000 feet in length.. For my layout my yard is 52 feet thats 1.575 mile(s).. I can fit 105 car trains with four Engines and it will fit end to end.. OH yes these are 50' cars or bigger too.. The yard will hold 2,500 - 50' box cars.. Check it out...
During the late fifties and early sixties my friends and i would routinely 200+ empty coal car B&O trains going through Lima, Ohio. There were only 2 overpasses in town and ,of course, these were very slow trains. i do not recall the length of these hoppers but probably 30 to 35 ft. Being from a NKP family these seemed very long and very slow. Jack
Q231 has been a MONSTER lately! It regularly comes in with 90+ racks. They are not only restricted because of siding capacity, but also because of terrain. It is funny how those long trains can come in from the north with only 1 engine LOL!!!
The trains may not be four miles long though, you have to have a bit of leeway, from 30 years as a railroader I've learned trains never break down where it's convenient. When I started in the job I heard a story of a station master who was told by a new to the job dispatcher that the local had twenty cars to drop off in a siding at his station, when he replied that the siding only held ten cars the dispatcher told him these should fit because they were empty. Then there were trains operated for a particular customer where the engine crews had trouble making time and on occasion needing a helper. The cars were loaded and weighed by the customer, one particular time a car was bad ordered enroute and the yard crew took the opportunity to run it over their scales and weren't too surprised to find it was considerably overweight. The story goes that when they reported to management they were told they would be fired if they did it again.
Yea, we had to add a unit in Walbridge Monday because it came in from the north with 1 unit. But it is built so that if it has the stack cars, it leaves Cinci with 8000' or less.
If we're going to talk about running long trains, I'm surprised no one mentioned the 500 car coal train that N&W ran back in 1967. My info shows it had three SD45's, 300 cars, three more SD45's, 200 cars, and then a caboose. They ran it from Iaeger, WV to Portsmouth, OH (a little over 150 miles). Total train length was a little over 4 miles and it was all loaded cars. Pretty impressive. If I figured it right, in N scale it would be about 133 feet long.
Yeah I'm gonna have to use selective compression. Who doesn't huh? HAHA. I will model a smidge of Belen Yard, but the rest of the benchwork in the trainroom will be protofreelanced. However, I will do my best to get the "idea" of Abo Canyon and try to get all seven bridges in there even if they're smooshed together somewhat. I will eventually model part of the Clovis Sub, and I will use a "behind the backdrop" staging yard representing traffic to and from Clovis/Belen. I'm pretty excitied about it now, since I will be modeling another section of Santa Fe's transcon with traffic going to/from fellow member's layouts.
We hold the official world record here in Australia when BHP ran a 4.568 mile long ore train back in 2001 with 8 GE AC6000's and 682 ore cars. There's a video of the train on Youtube but it takes 8 minutes for the train to pass at track speed. [nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LsuNWjRaAo"]YouTube - Longest train officially in the world[/nomedia]
I had to chuckle when I read this. Laughed out loud, when I remembered stories my family of rails told. As it was explained to me railroads are interested in the long haul and seldom get to interested in the actual weight. Pretty much done on a guess-timate. Those Aussie's run long trains...Eh?
I found it interesting that an earlier post suggested that too much weight might break a knuckle. Since my parents worked for the Trainmaster and Road Foreman of Engines for the NKP they only talked about investigations involving breaking a draw bar that holds the knuckle. They retired in the 70's so the metallurgy must be greatly improved since those trains were typically 70 to 100 cars with loads of 6000 tons ( that is what "they" reported in the 60's during my time as a "fireman" on diesels).
