That’s our situation too. But it is rarely enforced, and in reality no one cares. Lots of guys will step out on the nose for a smoke if you are moving slowly.
Plenty of managers smoke too, and they treat their company vehicles the same way we treat the locomotive cabs.
Had a crew get into a fist fight over it - both got discipline after the normal formal RR Investigation.
Thanks, SD70Dude. Seems simple enough. I had all kinds of ideas swirling around in my head.
I had one fall off at 60 mph. A train going in the opposite direction found it. They said “It took a lickin’ but it quit tickin’.” They volunteered to take it to the next terminal and place it in the dumpster.
Mark Vinski
There’s a device that can be inserted to keep the coupler on the rear car from rotating. Back when we were heavy with loaded/empty coal trains, we would always ask a passing train to see if our EOT was leaning when we had comm problems.
Jeff
Not to confuse the issue, but I saw a BNSF coal train today that did not fit the pattern.
The train was southbound, with NRG cars, which tells me it was headed to the Houston area. For the first half of the train, the color panels were faced in the direction of travel. But for the second half of the train the panels were uniformly faced to the rear of the train. What gives?
So long as the train has only 2 cuts of the colored ends - it can be easily handled as long as the dumping operators make a cut if the train has the non-colored ends coupled together - if the colored rotary ends are coupled together the train can be dumped without incident.
So the first half of this train was striped south (forward), and the rear half was striped north (rearward).
Was there a double rotary car in between the two halves?
As coal sets cycle from mine to destination and back individual cars may be set out for maintenance and new spare cars will be added in their place. Sometimes the new cars are not facing the right way and are not turned before being added to the train, either due to lack of a wye or loop at that yard or the railroad’s own incompetence and lazyness (the mixed up stripes are usually not a problem until the loaded train arrives at its destination, so the supervisors and yard crews who make up the trains will not be affected by this decision, their main goal is to get the train out of their yard as fast as possible).
This was a common and frustrating problem for all the years that I regularly worked on coal trains. But if there is a double rotary car in between the two directions your train is just as dumpable as a perfectly striped one (all the cars facing the same way with the double rotary on the correct end)
Just as a note: unit trains have to be periodically reversed (or their trucks do) to equalize wheel wear. The easiest way to do this would be just to swap ends on the consist periodically, but this might put the ‘wrong end’ type out… and over goes your DPU in the dumper, film at 11.
I did not see a double rotary car between the two halfs. But, to be candid, I am not sure that I would have recognized one.
Quite a few times I have watched coal trains on the Rochelle cam and tried to spot the double-rotary car, but I’ve never caught it. All of a sudden I realize that the painted panels have switched ends. I’m convinced that they exist, and that I just missed them. It’s hard to stay alert for 70 or so cars.
They have stripes on both ends. I has a link to a picture of one but it had some weird permission scheme that expired, and in the meantime Paul noted he was well aware of what they looked like. Use rdamon’s picture below for reference.
I know what they look like, I just can’t keep my attention focused on every single car.
NDG mentioned in the past that CP would wye their trainsets on a regular basis, usually at the crew change point of Fort Steele, BC.
Most of the western Canadian mines that CN serves do not have loops, but all three Pacific coast coal terminals do. So our trains get reversed on most of their trips.
Can’t make the link work!
