well, we had 123 cars in the train from hell lol.
They are distributed power trains from the UP which means there is an engine pushing from the rear of the train. For those that dont know trains itll be hard to understand but when doing the brake test the brakes on the rear Loco wouldnt bail off. tried everything for like two hours or so. then just cut the engine away and ran it conventional with an End of Train device (EOT). Except we couldnt find an EOT at the power plant (hmm then why do we have an EOT rack???) so we had to run with a flag until another crew came brought a marker for us. all in all it could have been worse and it was still fun and i got an hour of OT so im happy. it was a good first run without any real problems.

And no i dont wear the hats lol.
Cameras while running are a personal electronic device so until im covered by the unions i can very very easily be fired for having one on. And cell phones... they will hang you out to dry.
I was in training for about 5 months.
They call them locomotive Engineers.

I think i got all the questions answered. but soom enough ill have pictures.

Scott

 

Nice man, congrats on your first run! Of course there had to be a hiccup, they had to make sure you didn't get away with it being too easy!

I'm surprised you'd need a pusher for 123 empties, they were empties right? 1 or 2 up front?

 

Congrat's on the solo run, good story later for the grandkid's.

 

wow!!! guess im the only one with a dirty mind

 

hows the drivers seat look, a lot of gauges, or what? have cameras to see behind you?

 

Thats awesome man. I used to be so into trains when i was younger, I would watch all the trains going up over Donner Pass and they usually had multiple helpers to get up that steep grade.

 

That pic from a guy named "squirtbottle"?

 

They run them as unit trains, the only time they are seperated is to set out bad orders or if they have problems with the motors and one needs to be set out, otherwise it just goes back and forth from wheatfield IN to the Powder River Basin coal mines in Wyoming. thats where the pushers come in. 17-18,000 tons loaded and track speed out there is over 60 im sure.

Not a whole lot of gauges really for the engineer to see, mostly just speed, air pressure, and a air flow meter. newer ones have computer screens. all the vitals are controlled in a computer that will automatically shut stuff down to avoid damage.
And no cameras to see behind you. There is a distance counter for the engineer to use and you set it up so that when you go over say a defect detector you push the button and itll start counting down your train length and itll beep when you clear it. thats kind of your eyes back there.
The EOT tells you if your rear ends moving, how many lbs of air you have back there, and you can dump your air to send the train brakes into emergency from the rear also with the EOT. all sorts of neat little things lol.

 

I wish we had cool stuff like that around here, its all flat except for one hill. but that gets exciting sometimes lol

 

I forgot to ask, what model loco are you operating?

-NCSU

 

i cant remember for sure what they were but i think the ups we were in were AC4400s or something like that. But we have a lot of EMDs and GEs and some older GMs. NS has quite a few SD40s and Dash9s. i need to start takin the camera lol

 

Hey man, just checking in to see how things have been going.

- NCSU

 

Pics Pics we want pics.....



James

 

hahaha

 

I bet that was cool.....