You can't imagine how much stuff gets tore up going over a hump. I mean I've seen doors get torn off of box cars from lading flying out of the cars. Especially if the retarder operator was playing Packman in stead of squeezing the wheels, thereby air mailing a car down into the bowl tracks waaay faster than it should be going. One time we had a flat car load of lumber go over the hump and when it made the joint busted a bunch of banding and the lumber went kind of awry. It got sent to the RIPs were Carmen and laborers spent almost a shift redoing the load, one of the last moves of the day was to send it over the hump again, where it made the joint and busted all apart again.
I read an article in a magazine about CN's "calibrator", the guy who travels the entire system when necessary to calibrate those retarders. There was one incident, IIRC, at CN's Taschereau yard where freight cars were regularly rolling downhill on one branch of the hump and colliding (not coupling) with their trains at speeds up to 20-25 mph! The Calibrator was called in when a load of very fragile merchandise ended up in a gazillion pieces when the boxcar that carried it hit its train at way too high a speed. What I don't get is how the hump operators - and supervisors - didn't notice that (or didn't care) until then. Isn't that the definition of insanity? Repeating the same actions and expecting a different result?
When your humping 15 or 20 trains a day the DO NOT HUMP signs gets to be a kind of joke. Like your gonna take the time to shove the entire train your humping to a nice easy joint. Consider this. When a train is to be humped, every car on that train, has the air bled off, meaning no brakes, it has to be that way for the hump operation to work. If a car in the middle of a train has NO HUMP, you have to stop, air up the entire train, use the air to ensure a less than damagable coupling, pull that trainback over the hump, if you have the power to do it, bleed all the air out again, and resume hump operations. So, at best your depending on using the hump powers brakes to stop this entire train, which might work on a uphill hump, but not so much on a down hill hump. The best hump power we here in GJ were a couple SD9's, yea they were old but they had those cast iron brakes and they just worked, and they looked really good doing it, those massive trucks. They tried to replace them both with one SD50, didn't last long. All the $$ shippers spent for special handling was based on "hope and speculation" I fear. That and "we have a claims dept for that". It wasn't just hump operations that tore stuff up, just the slack action could wreak havoc. Like I said they be a claims depth for all that. Beans at 11:00.
My Dad managed a food distribution warehouse in suburban Boston in the early 1960s. He shared with me that they'd sometimes use snow shovels to assist with unloading boxcars of mayonnaise. The New Haven would send them over the hump at Cedar Hill and the glass jars would break. The New Haven claims man was a frequent visitor and wrote check after check. Just a cost of doing business it seemed.
The blue GTW boxcar looks like one with the slogan "The Good Track road", which my Dad photographed a year earlier in Ste-Thérèse (and which I already posted on this board). Cool!
Most of those NE6's I saw in NJ and PA had had small bay windows cut into the sides and the cupola windows blanked.
