Unless there is some leakage or very obvious discoloration (which is relatively rare) there is no way to visually tell a bad bearing from a good bearing, and smell only works if the bearing is hot and is leaking, when it sits in a yard it cools off.
I'm going to go (not far) out on a limb and say that,even if this is wonderful and doggone near perfect, railroads will resist conversion to such a system simply because it's not only a cost per car, but a cost per bearing. And, there are a LOT of bearings. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
Maybe not. The people that will scream aren't the railroads, it will be your dentist and other people who own or invest in the car leasing companies and private owners (and their investors) will be hit more than the railroads since there are about as many, if not more private cars than railroad owned cars. The car owner will foot the bill for upgrades to the cars. Actually, it will be a profit center for the railroads because they can charge the car owner a charge for upgrading the car. The nice thing about the proposal is that it just involves replacing the roller bearing adaptor, which is a fairly quick and easy repair.
How many years would it take to convert all (or most) active rolling stock? Or would they only require conversions on Hazmat?
While I generally agree with a great deal of your comments. I will respectfully, dis-agree with your statement that plain "babbet/friction" type bearings are more reliable than "sealed, roller type" bearings. All due respect, but such a conclusion can not, and should not so simply diluted. The type of bearings you propose, were rated to carry about 1/2 of the tonnage per axle than modern trucks do. Having worked with enginmen and trainmen that operated both, all, have told me that there were many problems with friction bearing type trucks. A couple told of times when they had to stop the train, use track jacks to jack up the side of a truck and reposition the "brass' after it had shaken its way out of placement, as well as replacing the brass all together on the road. And these were all when there were cabooses, on every train, with qualified people in the cupolas watching these trains in real time. Of course there would have been less catastrophic failures. I would like to see friction bearings return, as it would add tens of thousands of good paying Union jobs nation wide, just to keep the journal boxes full of oil, another reason we won't see the return to friction bearings. When you take a few minutes to think about this... the axle loading alone has a small part in this, the train lengths have a part in this, perhaps the biggest part in this is the RR's PSR approach to double and even triple train lengths, layoffs of thousands of qualified RR carmen, by forcing brakemen and conductors (no extended professional type training) to do a journeyman carmans job, inspecting cars in trains, with trained eyes and doing roll by inspections trying to squeeze another drop out of that proverbial turnip. Here in GJ we have seen carmens workforce reduced from 4-5 carmen per shift reduced to 3 carmen total in GJ, we used to get inbound and outbound roll by inspections by RR carmen in days past. The carmens workforce has been reduced to the point that conductors/brakemen are being saddled with the responsibilities of trained carmen. Thats not right nor safe in the long term. So, we used to have say 105 car trains, excluding the power, has 420 axles, double that to 840 bearings, and that is for 1 train not counting the powered axles, and nowadays thats a small train. If you take into account there are many thousands of similar trains operating many hundreds of miles a day, well you can see the Timken roller bearings were a good thing. In my RR career, I never had a Timken bearing failure, to the point it burned thru a side frame and went on the ground, now I know there are failures but they are not very common. This whole de-railment in Palistine OH, is a most very unfortunate thing, I have no doubt that Lawyers have not gotten out of grade school yet, that will be litigating this for decades. In my opinion. It may not have been preventable with todays operating (PSR) practices. But we used to have better safety practices in place before the carriers lobbyist took over, thats not political, its a fact. I fear that unless some things change, we have not seen the last of this type event, just hope we dont see similar take place in a major population center.
Good points. I hadn't considered the impact railroad cost cutting had taken to expect trainmen (with little or no qualifying training) to do carmen's jobs. While some eyes are better than no eyes, trained/qualified eyes are always better than stopgap eyes.
WOAH! WOAH! WOAH! I am not now nor have I EVER postulated that Friction Bearings are preferable to Roller Bearings. What I am saying is that NOTHING is absolutely fool proof. Whenever humankind moves there is always the potential for some form of accidental happening. Get out of bed in the middle of the night to visit 'the facilities', step wrong and fall braking your hip. Roller Bearings have been a VAST improvement over friction bearings. Roller Bearings are the heart and soul of modern railroading both from the standpoint of reliability as well as being able to be built to handle the ever increasing load requirements of present day freight cars, but they are not totally fail proof The reality is that roller bearings are just like anything else that is man made - IT CAN FAIL. Despite the best efforts of the bearing manufacturers and the carriers failures can happen, failures WILL happen. Man made means no matter how hard men work, how hard the perform inspections, how hard they apply technology to indicate incipient failure before the failure becomes catastrophic - occasionally there will be a catastrophic failure. Nothing I am saying means we should not try harder to develop new technologies or do anything else necessary to prevent catastrophic bearing failures. The industry from both the carriers side as well as the suppliers side need to redouble their efforts to eliminate catastrophic bearing failures.
But the sheriff has issued a "shelter in place" order for all residents. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
My bad. I must have not understood what you meant in the post below. My apologies. Another NS train on the ground. Just what NS needed huh?
NTSB investigating NS 'Safety Culture' https://news.bloomberglaw.com/envir...-southern-culture-after-string-of-incidents-1
Should be interesting. NTSB doesn't pull punches when it finds neglect, mismanagement, etc. I would expect a rather blunt report.
I heard a quick clip on the radio news that a NS conductor was killed in a grade crossing accident Monday? NS is having a very bad year so far....
As unfortunate as NS's misfortunes are currently in the limelight. I think the systemic failures will be nation wide in the long term, as long as the "PSC" operating model will endure. Canada has since abandoned PSC as a whole in practice. Also a NS Conductor lost his life yesterday after a truck proceeded into the side of a train that was switching. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/07/us/cleveland-norfolk-southern-conductor-killed/index.html Again while I am not a huge fan of NS nor any other class 1 outfit anymore, it is maybe hard to blame the carrier for this latest fatality. Again. I am certainly not a fan of todays Class 1's. What with wall-street running the outfits nowadays. But same can be said about most any big business anymore, common sense is long gone, it seems for corporate management, with no end in sight. I am glad that I am retired now, makes me sad cause I really did like pulling a throttle, and enjoyed working with the people I worked with. As a Local Chairman for 23 years I enjoyed the respect, and respected the Superintendents/General managers and others I made agreements and worked with over the years. A special treat was to work with a senior MNGMNT guy that was there to run trains. Sadly now the MNGMNT you work with have no craft seniority, with no industry history, no clue, no conscious.
