Don't mean to be dumb

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A locomotive is known as a "hog" hence the operator is the "hogger" or "hoghead"(among other names)

Hostler is a name from the "horse & buggy" days. A hostler is the person who took care of your horse in the stable, fed it,watered it,cleaned it. Hence the name stuck with the person who cared for the "iron horse".

Charlie

 

I must agree with you there! And you dont have the advantage of dynamic brakes on that
Mike either! A 2.5 grade is not your ordinary hill either! I can truly say I would have loved to hear that 2-8-2 start talking when she started to drag the hill.

Charlie

 

Im no expert on EOTDs (a.k.a FREDs), do they have GPS capabilities? A GPS-based measurement from the End Of Train Device to the cab might give a fairly accurate number.

When I was on the train crew last fall and winter, we had a calculation that determined the train length on the engineer's report. I think each car was regarded as 50' cars, our 6-axle power (when we still had regular 6 axle locomotives until this spring) as 60' and the 4 axle power as 50'. We didn't have to worry about longer cars since we don't have to handle autoracks, 89' boxcars, etc... However on second thought, this isn't really an accurate way of determining train length since most cars considered 50' long are actually 55-ish or longer across the knuckles. (We get 60' 4-pocket soy bean hoppers from time to time, also) That extra 5'+ can make a difference with an 80 car train with the additional 400+ feet unaccounted for.

If your just looking for a general idea, perhaps have a person on the ground (MoW crew waiting in a siding, for example) tell you when your last car passes them. You can get an idea of length by how far you traveled from when the lead locomotive met the waiting crew and when they reported the last car going by.

 

Another possibility if the locomotives slip and the train stalls on a hill, would be to back the train off the hill and cut the power off from the train and run up and down the hill with the sanders on. Then couple back to the train, pump up the air and make another run for it. Proven quite effective, especially when the sanders on only 2 of your 6 or 7 units actually work from time to time..... oh, the shortline life. :rolleyes2:

 

The conductor taking a long walk wont do much unless he has a pedometer. No!detectors only give you the axle count, temp and defects or not,on the BNSF they are ineffective if you are traveling too slow and the voice in the box will tell you "Too Slow!"
Those computer generated lists are supposed to be accurate since they give the length from the car reporting marks statistics. Another way we could do it, and only at the beginning of the trip, pulling out of Cicero Yard, you would hit the counter button when the lead loco reaches a point where it enters the main track its authority is on, you would call the U-man or carman that was doing a roll by of your brake release and ask him/her to let you know when the rear end of the last car passes that point. This should give you a reading similar to what your stated train length is. Of course this all depends upon the counter being calibrated correctly. The "measured mile" is well past Cicero Yard, so what you then have to do is take a "measured mile" count at the appropriate point and see how accurate your counter is and then make the adjustment up or down on what your counter told you the train length was upon leaving the yard. The devices we used had a calibrating tuner to adjust the device to the wheel diameter of your lead unit. I only used it once or twice. On the story I told about the train length, we were accepting the train length on the Wheel Report as being valid. The crew we relieved made no mention of any problems with train length. There was no way we would have known the length was wrong except for the meet we had. Apparently the crews prior to us had no problems or at least nobody
else made any mention of it.

 

Interesting,the CSX defect detectors around here give the train length in feet.

 

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Could be the BNSF does that now. I dont know. I retired 5 yrs ago. I'll have to check w/my sources.

Charlie

 

Great insight reading these last posts since i was here.But now you are making me ask a probably real stupid question.Detectors:I presume a computer generated voice actually tells you the stuff that its suppose to "detect"?????Would heat be wheel bearings?or brakes?If what i have written is sort of correct,what did they do before the technocially(cant spell!)?Thanks stu.PS keep talking amongst yourselves,its very interesting.:tb-cool:

 

I put defect detector reports at the end of most of my videos nowadays,here's one for an example:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWS9i6PXiPA"]YouTube - CSXT J768-24, Glendale,KY 8/24/2009[/ame]

The one over on the Paducah & Louisville(PAL),about 7 miles west of this CSX line in the video,has defect detectors that give train speed and the air temperature in the area.

 

Hi Guys - I had a little hiatus from my computer for a while but I'm back and figured I'd 'answer the call' and fill in some details for Charlie.

There was and still are a lot of factors that go into how a train is made up and what power gets assigned as was mentioned earlier. Tonnage, length, power restrictions, route grade etc. as well as the desired speed for any given train all have to be considered. The 'Power Desk', Trainmasters and others decide what you'll get for engines based on all that along with the plain fact that sometimes you just have to go with what's available, not what's ideal.
To use me for an example: I work on territory that's almost an endless series of ups and downs (rip-rap, undulating...pick your term) with stretches of heavy grade thrown in to keep it interesting. The train is mostly empties in one direction and almost all loads in the other but uses the same power both ways. That means that even though it originates very light, it will return very heavy and so must be dispatched with too much HP at the outset, but it often has to have more added along the way to end up with enough to get the extra tonnage back. In the meantime, they're always looking at absolute minimum fuel and maximum equipment usage. All that has to be figured in before I ever sit down at the throttle. It's an incredibly complicated game, more so because they do not consider breakdowns, unit age or individual unit charecteristics when assigning power. The philosophy is usually to put on 'just enough' to do the job unless you've got a hotshot and as I was sternly reminded once, "We don't plan for failure", so you don't get a lifeboat you can start up if another unit conks out. I often think that at the end of the day they just surrender to their own complications, roll the dice, hand you whatever's first in line on the engine house departure track and hope for the best. When you figure that they repeat this a zillion times every day with almost every train originating on the system, it's a miracle anything works out but somehow it does.
:confused3:
Keep 'em coming

 

the technology that was used for dragging equipment/hotboxes was quite simple...eyewitness. The crew in the caboose would perform a "roll-by" inspection of the train at meets. a brakeman or conductor standing on the rear platform of the caboose would "eyeball" the train for defects. The brakeman/conductor in the passing caboose would be doing the same thing! If a hotbox would be detected by noticing flames or smoke, the crewman would pass signals to the passing crewman. A hot-box would be indicated by holding ones nostrils closed(as in"man that stinks!") and then patting ones head or backside to indicate whether the hotbox was in the front or rear of the train.Cant remember the sign used for dragging equipment,but normally dragging equipment will cause problems before you go too far. In the old days there were always speed restrictions over bridges in order to reduce the problems of severe damage caused by dragging equipment.
When I was a student conductor we had a car in our mixed freight train that had some brake rigging come loose enroute to LaCrosse. The detector caught it before it could do any damage. We were able to remove the offending parts and set the car out in a siding
which,quite fortuitously,already had a set out car in it. We tied our bad-order on to it since the brake system was inoperative,the linkage was gone!
I used to use the "head/rear" sign when I would yard my commuter train to indicate to the hogger where I wanted to ride the loco upon yarding the train. He would then stop the loco so I could board at the desired location. And by that I mean I was riding on the outside ladders so I could readily access switches and visually protect the movement.

Charlie

 

Tonnage:I presume as far as bulk loads go,that car loads wouldnt be weighed.Do they work on the theory that a certain type of car holds a certain amount of product and work on that for the weight?Or are the loads somehow weighed before loading?At a fertiliser plant that we used to pick fert up from for the farm it was weighed out before it hit the deck of the truck.:tb-cool:stu.

 

I know some cars were weighed. I worked a couple of times out of Ottawa IL on the former Fox River Branch. We weighed the sand hopper loads at a sand quarry in Ottawa.
I never did it myself, the conductor did that. We used to have a scale,scale house and track at Eola.(East Yard track 11) but that was inactive during my time although when I first started the scale house was still standing. There was a scale installed to weigh tank cars at the Dial Soap plant in Montgomery. That was worked by the "Armour Job".
I never did work the Armour Job after they put in the scale. I had moved on to suburban service by that time and never did go back to yard service until I was an engineer, and that was only for a relative instant in time. I think the purpose of the scale at the soap plant was to determine the weight of the contents after evaporation and leakage since leaving the loading facility. We actually "warehoused" the tank cars of tallow,oils,glycerine and potash at Eola for the soap plant, so some of them sat in the yard for a while.

Charlie

 

I don't know much about weighing cars myself. I've seen scale tracks in several places but none are active that I know of. I'm assuming most are weighed by the shipper if necessary and I know that test cars are still around to calibrate shipper scales. If I remember correctly, many bulk materials are weighed as they're loaded by the equipment at the plant. All I know for sure is that the wheel report always shows the total tonnage and may show individual load weight as well, especially on unusual stuff such as High-and-Wides or excessive tonnage-per-axle cars.

 

Ah so then is that the only reason for test cars?Or is there another.Seen them as models and wondered "why would i want one of them?"cheers stu:tb-cool:

 

Test cars are still around because there are still working scales out there...just not any that I deal with directly. I know that periodically the local coal-fired generating plants hereabouts will have a test car in their train so they can calibrate the in-house scales they use to make sure they're getting what they're supposed to from the coal shippers. All the cars are is a chunk of known, verifiable weight to compare with the readings the shipper/reciever is getting on his own scales. The intricacies of electronic weighing-in-motion and other technologies is out of my realm so that's about all I know on the subject.

 

Do they still have special handling requirements? I know there were SSI instructions regarding their handling.

Charlie

 

Charlie might be the man for this one,lol.When an engineer swaps from doing freight to passager trains,does he find he operates them differently?eg:smoother ride for people than freight cars,Or is it "shell be right mate!"now no lying please,hehe.cheers stu:tb-cool: