Ok hump yards are great. Sned a car up AEI reads it the computer decides which train its going in and its assigned track. Down the hill it goes switches throw automaticly for the car(s) and retarders put pressure on the wheels of said car to slow it to the proper speed for load or mty.
Many men? two at the hump engineer at the loco 3 guys. another possible 6 guys running both ends of the yard maybe more to run non humpable cars to the tracks themselves. those 6 broke down to 2 switchman and a n engineer crew or just 2 switchmen with an RCO
Some yards are flat switched. two on the ground one in the cab or as above. one throws switches one reads bills and pulls the pin. off the car goes…KER-BANG! Not as pretty but its what you have to do sometimes.
That’s not the clearest definition of humping I’ve ever heard. Try this: the cars of arriving trains are pushed up a small hill known as a hump. At the crest of the hump the cars are uncoupled and allowed to roll down into the classification or bowl tracks, based on destination. As they roll down, they pass through retarders which slow the cars so they don’t slam into the stopped cars too hard.
This is BNSF Northtown just north of downtown Minneapolis. The retarders are the tracks between those green fences.
The CP also has a hump yard east of downtown St Paul. The UP has only flat yards in this area.
I guess the original question really meant, “since so much of rail traffic is unit trains and intermodal container trains, how important is carload freight in the present day?” Yes, the railroads have hump yards and do carload freight, but what part of the big picture?
Willard Ohio still uses skates !!! How does that work anyhows?
CN Symington (Winnipeg), CN MacMillan (Toronto) has two humps.
CN Flatrock (Detroit), CSX Frontier (Buffalo)
If I am not mistaken, quite a few hump operations have been closed over the past couple of decades. I am not sure just how the economics work out, but at some point, a drop in total volume of loose car business or the number of separate blocks (a block being a group of cars for the same destination) makes flat yards more economical.
I have heard that flat switching can be as efficient as a hump yard operation. If edblysard come on here, he may have more insight.
Jay
Each one of those yards that have been mentioned as hump yards probably hump about 1500-2000 cars per hump per day. A double hump yard like N Platte (one for east, one for west) will do double that. The UP probably humps 30-40,000 cars a day.
Dave H.
Green Bay,
There used to be one in Cicero til I think mid 90’s sometime. It is now strictly an intermodal yard. No more humping here![:D]
Shrek
Well flat switching is a fuel guzzler, and I doubt that it will ever be as efficient as a well run hump yard. As for north platte, they actually hump about 7 to 8 thousand cars a day…UP loves to expand on this number, but the truth is between putting stuff on the ground and managers getting in the way. my friends tell me a 7 thousand car day is good there. As for the biggest, somewhere I read that a yard in Hamburg, Germany averages about 11,000 cars a day.
Wait, I read that Hamlet had been made into a flat yard when the SAL line was downgraded and most traffic routed over the line through Florence. Can someone check on this for me?
Here’s a couple more CSX humps
Selkirk near Albany NY
Frontier - Buffalo NY
NS humps are:
Allentown,
Enola (near Harrisburg PA),
Conway (near Pittsburgh),
Elhart IN,
Bellevue OH,
Roanoke VA,
Linwood NC,
Chattangooga TN,
Birmingham AL,
Macon GA,
Sheffield AL
Knoxville TN
Conrail humps:
Oak Island (Newark NJ)
Pavonia (Camden NJ)
Jay, if there has been a loss of humps, perhaps it is due to mergers creating redundancy.
Earlier this month I watched the Union Pacific’s hump engine at Gravity Yard in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Another hump cut was awaiting its turn over the top while the first cut was shoving. How many other hump yards use this technique of two hump engines. It seems to speed up the operation as when one cut is shoved the other can start. The hump engines were being operated remotely.
Using two engines on a hump is fairly common.
Dave H.
The hump yard in Hamburg is huge, probably the biggest outside USA, approximately the size of North Platte but of couse the 11,000 cars humped are much smaller cars then the ones UP humps.
The smaller the cars the more you can hump, but it doesn’t neccessarily increase production.
If you are switching cars in longer cuts like 10 cars-12 cars- 1 car- 10 cars- etc, flat switching can be more efficient sometimes, but if it is 1 car- 2 cars- 1 car- 1car- 1 car- etc, obviously the hump becomes more efficient.
A highly skilled full crew (hogger, conductor and at least two brakeman) for flat switching can switch very fast, but a realy good reliable yard crew is hard to come by and a “less compitant” crew can be realy inefficient. There are many other factors in deciding weather to keep the hump or to flat switch.
I’ll put in another plug here for Clearing’s unique bi-directional hump. Not only is it common to have one cut going over the hump in one direction with another cut on deck, it is also normal to have cuts shoved over the hump in each direction at the same time.
CSSHEGEWISCH,
Yeah, Clearing is quite an operation. I brought in westbound freight that was humped from the east to the West Classification yard and then made into a train that went into West Departure yard. And vice versa for the eastbounds.
Flat switching can be efficient if you have the right crew and equipment. Using Remotes in Flat switching automatically kills production. I can work a conventional job with an engineer and get almost twice the amount of work done in the same time. Also, any switching operation is only as good as its crews and yardmasters. If you get a crew that has worked together for awhile including the yardmaster it is amazing how well things can work out. I worked with a buddy of mine on thirds in the winter when the Remotes broke down and we were getting quits every night. Working the road, I often have fond memories of working thirds having fun knocking cars together and making up trains. ALSO, it is a lot easier to have a real live engineer with you when you are working industry jobs, especially those with tank cars. Remotes hesitate and you have to guesswork your way through spotting tank cars, which usually have to be spotted perfectly with top load platforms. Having an engineer takes all the guess work and I can have him/her creep until the cars are just right, their arms might get tired, but at least we take about half the time to spot the cars.
Do they have a worker who stands near the cars and connects the hoses?
Once a track is finished being filled during the humping process, a puller crew will come and stretch the track out and make sure it’s all together, and then after that they pull out cuts and bring them into the depature yard. In the departure yard, a carman hooks the hoses and inspects the cars. That’s the way it goes where I work anyhow.
I would think it would be too dangerous, not to mention inefficient, to have men down in the bowl tracks with cars flying around.
Not inefficient at all…
In my yard, the carmen line the switch for the lead, and lock the switch, so nothing came get in there with them.
We work around this stuff all the time, so being near moving cars isn’t a big deal.
In bowl and hump yards, the hump master locks out the switches for the same reason.
One of the efficiencies of flat switching is that I can get the tracks together, and swing them over, or spot them in place, for ground air.
I can flat switch a 120 car train in about 2 hours…with my regular crew.
Another of the better parts of flat switching is I can pre-block or classify on the fly; I am not restricted to which track a car has to goes to.
If I need to slough off a car for a while, I can stash it, and pick it up later…flat switching is a lot more flexible that hump yards…
Hump yards require a little more switching after the cars go over the hump…cover cars have the be turned head outs, spot cars have to be lined up, sometimes the entire track has to be re-switched in order to line up the cars in the order the train will need to work on it’s way.
But hump yards are huge, and can run steady, 24/7, which helps make up in volume what it lacks in finesse.
It all depends on the type of business and the type of customer you serve.
Ed