At some point, one must look at modern fright cars and think that after 150+ years of evelution, there’s nothing more to improve on them. What kind of things are being/could be changed to improve the economics of various kinds of railcars?
Well, if boxcars are going to survive, even the big ones, IMO it will be necessary for them to give much better access . . . I don’t know, something magnetically sprung, on the top, gull wings, something. There may be something of a market for LCL’s that can’t wait for a consolidator to slowly fill up a cube . . . ?
In my experience it has been weight reduction and air brakes .
Weight reduction seems simple to grasp:lighter materials, better designs. What has or will changed on air brakes?
What is a carknocker?
A carknocker , inspects and repairs trains .
Air brakes are slowly becoming electronicly controlled . They will still use air but assited with electronics from the locomotive , it is currently used on some coal trains , I have seen them on some intermodal cars .
Because of the fundamental loose-car railroading concept, there is a need for interchangeability, and with the number of cars involved, any change that affects compatibility meets tremendous resistance. Even if the intent is to change all of the rolling stock with an improvement, it takes a lot of time to accomplish that task.
In the meantime, cars must remain in service and interchangeable. If the improvement affects car compatibility, the improvement needs to work with other cars that may or may not have the improvement. This makes the improvement more complex than it needs to be in order to simply execute its own intent. And that extra complexity is multiplied by all the cars in the U.S. and Canada.
And furthermore, once the improvement is applied to all rolling stock, the extra complexity needed for compatibility is unnecessary, extra baggage. The new improvement can then be streamlined by the removal of the extra features needed for compatibility during the changeover. However, removal of these un-needed features may once again pose compatibility issues during the phase of removal.
Some of the biggest and best yielding potential improvements are the ones that come up against this compatibility requirement because that requirement has forestalled those improvements while the ability to technically execute them has progressed. And also, as the industry has grown, so has the total potential reward for those improvments.
There is great potential benefit in improving braking and coupler systems, but they are subject to the compatibility problem. The same is true with the concept of an automatic air hose connection that would automatically make an airtight connection as the cars are pushed together, just like the knuckle couplers make a mechanical connection. There would be tremendous benefit to the elimination of the need to go between cars and manually couple air hoses.
Another pot
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Even in the dedicated train concept all cars will have to be able to handle all loads struturally. Loading and unloading locations are not all the same and do not necessarily handle trains sequentially from first car to last car. Some places have limited track space and my load or unload unit trains in 15/20/30/40 car cuts. Additionally train sets need to be turned to equalize the wheel wear that occurs in dedicated service. Throw in the need to shop and repair cars within a train set and abandoning the loose car concept creates many more oprational problems than it would solve in dedicated engineering. Operationally, on some routes trains must get run-around as they traverse some trackage because of the lack of directionally correct wye track facilities at line junctions…therefore, what started out as the head end of the train at origin will become the rear of the train at the junction after the run-around.
In the early Streamliner days of the Pioneer Zephyr etc., the railroads tried the ‘dedicated train’ concept with articulation between the cars to reduce tare weight. In practice they found that the load factors varied and required addition or reduction of cars to the consist, which could not easily be accomplished with an articulated train consist.<
BaltACD wrote:
Just because some things are possible, does not make them practical
Reminds Me of something that my Late Grandfather told Me:
“Just because You CAN do something, does not mean that You SHOULD do something”
This has turned out to be very sage advice, many times in my Life.
Doug
I agree with the post below yours, about all the cars in the trainset having to be pretty much the same. However, would it appear that operations with dedicated trainsets-cola movements for example-would be the ones most likely to see some experimentation?
Murph, I think cola movements in dedicated trainsets would probably be a fizzle.
Having been an observer of freight cars for a pretty long time (check out my signature), I’ve often been surprised to see what comes up and when. The “radical” changes have usually been something that appeared once before, a long time ago.
There was a company called Tomco Railway Supply Company or similar, and it shipped lumber on a fleet of bulkhead flat cars with A-frames back in the 1960s. Yet it took another decade or more for that strange idea to evolve into the center-partition cars that are now the prime choice for lumber transport (meanwhile, somebody made the partition bear the load, eliminating the center sill and increasing capacity).
Aluminum coal cars? Southern was doing that in the 1960s as well, with its Silversides gons–they held up pretty well! But other than Southern and Detroit Edison, you didn’t see the aluminum cars anywhere else until the mid-1980s.
The Budd Company (remember them?) introduced a flat car called the Lo-Pac 2000 back in the late 1970s, IIRC. Its original intention was to transport truck trailers in wells between the wheelsets, reducing clearance requirements, possibly for east-coast intermodal service. In 1983, Thrall got hold of the idea, and [i]voila![/] the articulated stack car was born. It eventually beat out the bulkhead-type stack car, and nowadays well cars for doublestack are practically all you see.
Along the way, there have been many ideas that have come and gone–the LU cars, with nothing but doors on the sides, really couldn’t protect the lumber any better than plastic wrap and Center-beam flat cars. Hi-cube cars–nothing has replaced them yet, so they’ll become extinct pretty quickly (60-foot cars have survived and grown taller).
Can you improve on the auto rack? People have tried to articulate it, lower the load, do both, but nothing has been able to supp
[quote user=“CShaveRR”]
Murph, I think cola movements in dedicated trainsets would probably be a fizzle.
Having been an observer of freight cars for a pretty long time (check out my signature), I’ve often been surprised to see what comes up and when. The “radical” changes have usually been something that appeared once before, a long time ago.
There was a company called Tomco Railway Supply Company or similar, and it shipped lumber on a fleet of bulkhead flat cars with A-frames back in the 1960s. Yet it took another decade or more for that strange idea to evolve into the center-partition cars that are now the prime choice for lumber transport (meanwhile, somebody made the partition bear the load, eliminating the center sill and increasing capacity).
Aluminum coal cars? Southern was doing that in the 1960s as well, with its Silversides gons–they held up pretty well! But other than Southern and Detroit Edison, you didn’t see the aluminum cars anywhere else until the mid-1980s.
The Budd Company (remember them?) introduced a flat car called the Lo-Pac 2000 back in the late 1970s, IIRC. Its original intention was to transport truck trailers in wells between the wheelsets, reducing clearance requirements, possibly for east-coast intermodal service. In 1983, Thrall got hold of the idea, and [i]voila![/] the articulated stack car was born. It eventually beat out the bulkhead-type stack car, and nowadays well cars for doublestack are practically all you see.
Along the way, there have been many ideas that have come and gone–the LU cars, with nothing but doors on the sides, really couldn’t protect the lumber any better than plastic wrap and Center-beam flat cars. Hi-cube cars–nothing has replaced them yet, so they’ll become extinct pretty quickly (60-foot cars have survived and grown taller).
Can you improve on the auto rack? People have tried to articulate it, lower the load, do both, but nothi
[(-D] New glasses+fat fingers+brain fade= whoops![D)]
I am not advocating dedicated train-sets; only pointing them out, along with automatic air couplers and bleed train lines, as having exceptional potential. But there are a lot of drawbacks as well. The more an industry grows and the more it becomes standardized, the harder it is to make big changes. Yet, I think the possible big changes need to be dreamed up and kept in mind. For a long time, it will appear that too much is stacked against them, but the big picture keeps changing, and one day all the pieces may line up to make a big change doable.
For example, there are processes in the energy business that previously were economically infeasible, yet as oil prices rise, they suddenly become economically feasible.
In regard to dedicated train-sets, that idea actually was advocated strongly by John Kneiling. It is true that the cars need to be the same structurally throughout the train-set in terms of their weight carrying ability. But they don’t need to be the same structurally in terms of their couplers, draft gear, and the structural portion of their center sills that exceed the load carrying requirements. I am referring to the portion of the center sill structure that is needed in order for a loose-car to withstand the pull transmitted through it if it were the first car in a long train. I don’t have exact numbers, but I suspect you could take several tons out of that car’s structure if it were always the last car of the train.
So in a dedicated train-set, theoretically, every car would be structurally different, with the structure and its weight diminishing from the first car to the last car. Moreover, because dedicated train-sets would likely be shorter than average loose-car trains, all the cars in the train-set would be structurally lighter than a loose-car. So this dedicated train-set concept does have the potential to eliminate a very significant amount of tare weight i
I’d have to check the book (which I have), but I don’t think John Kneiling advocated less structural strength as one went further back in his integral trains. In fact, he advocated mid-train power. Today we have distributed power, often shoving against the rear of the train. I’d rather have the drawbars be just as strong for anything that could happen with the slack back there.
The drawback with dedicated trains is that if one part breaks down, the whole thing is lost for a time (including the power, if I remember Kneiling’s stuff right). Despite the fact that locomotives spend too much time idling as it is, the loss of power and cars isn’t going to be tolerated.
It’s possible, now that railroads have come up with a way of changing out wheels without breaking the train, that you’ll see some sort of compromise along these lines–cars similar to today’s articulated in units of five or six, with drawbars between them. It won’t save much weight, but it would save moving parts, and eliminate a bit of slack action.
As for a separate line to bleed an entire train, I don’t see a need. One rarely has to stand and wait for the air to bleed completely any more–just gve the bleeder rod a push or pull and move on. If a whole train is being bled off, it’s most likely in a yard where the train is being walked for inspection anyway, so no time is being lost by the manual bleeding. And if a hand brake (more likely plural) has to be applied to a cut of cars being left somewhere, I’d rather have the air applied at the time to give me a hand cranking it up–impossible if everything’s going to be bled off.
I would have to check back into my Trains collection to refresh my recollection of what all Kneiling had to say in relation to this matter. I have never seen his book, only his columns in Trains. I recall him often making the point about
There’s a book by Kneiling?[:P] Can you provide me with the name of it please?
??? No slack? How would you start a heavy train? I always understood, that slack helped the locomotive start pulling a train one car at a time.
Why would it be shorter?
The name of the book is/was Integral Train Systems, and it was published by Kalmbach in 1969.
I’ve heard of two downsides of electro-pneumatic brakes:
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Older equipment (naturally) doesn’t have the control wire.
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The state of the brake pipe isn’t the same for ECP and non-ECP usage, since a non-ECP car (and anything behind it) has to use the brake pressure for signaling brake applications as well as for charging the reservoir.
Does anybody know why #1 couldn’t be done wirelessly? After all, if you can reliably talk to your EOT device from the head end via radio, couldn’t you reliably talk to whatever’s in the middle? Granted, it’d require an automated set-up protocol (it’s Not Good if somebody else’s engine winds up controlling the brakes on your train), but that’s a solvable problem (see: wireless LAN’s, with the advantage in this case that you actually have some control over the hardware).
Once the wire requirement is relaxed, then the ECP-equipped cars behind the first non-ECP car become, in effect, additional EOT’s. Anything in front of the first non-ECP car is in a solid ECP block, and can run in ECP mode. As the number of ECP cars in the fleet increases, you get larger and larger proportions of your trains running in ECP mode, but it all still works in the traditional mode.
You also wouldn’t need a bleed line, as you could just tell the cars to bleed themselves via the radio link.
Is this simply a cost-benefit thing? What I’ve described is surely feasible technically (correct me if I’m wrong, naturally).
Peace,
–Peter
That is true. A feature could also be incorporated that would eliminate the need to manually set and release handbrakes.