and what is the Horsepower? My idea was a to use something like the sidemounted reefer units as low power generating units that would power traction moters on a boxcar that would allow the car to move around the yard remote control without having a switcher. Instead of waiting for a interplant switch the customer could use the selfpropled units to move them around his yard to to the interchange point.
Those extra motors will add a lot more maintenance costs and train resistance. Easier to get a trackmobile, especially since most industries don’t need to move cars around at their sites.
At a grain processing plant I saw an amazing device.
It was a four wheel trolley with a standard coupler on one end.
You drove a fork lift up ramps (at the non Coupler end) and its powered wheels dropped onto rollers that powered the rail wheels.
The operator folded up the forks, sat in the fork lift and used it as a (small) switcher.
The trolley was light enough to be placed on and off the track by the fork lift (when it wasn’t in the trolley, of course) so it could face in either direction easily, and clear the track when locomotives arrived to deliver or remove the grain wagons.
I think they lost interest eventually, and only switched with road power. But I saw it working once with a 100 ton car.
M636C
The real problem with this is that it requires an enormous level of investment, in fact several interrelated systems each with an enormous level of investment, to provide even a primitive level of benefit.
I assume you have looked at what is required in putting a traction motor of any kind on a three-piece, foundation-braked freight truck. Multiply the costs involved by the number of trucks out there… or even by the number of cars needed to assure that a given shipper willl have at least the number of equipped cars needed to switch what he has when he needs it.
Then there is the cost of the remote control boxes, and the training for people to use them responsibly.
Now tell me who has the liability when a shipper is using a remote to control a car that gets away or goes on the ground, or runs over Raymond the hiding trespasser who wasn’t expecting that boxcar to move by itself. Lights, strobes, bells, horns, what other devices would you put on a potentially self-propelled boxcar? Cameras like backup cameras that give you views all around the car? All doable, but money doesn’t grow on trees, and the equipment has limited lifetime, will be operating in stringent conditions, and will often be unattended to the point that components with any ‘street value’ will run a high risk of being removed and, ah, repurposed.
Were you planning on providing the small genset as onboard power for an actual refrigeration plant or climate-control system for the car, or using the little ‘traction motors’ for dynamic
There is another option called a car puller. It is a Stationary geared motor with an attached loop of cable that has a short lead and Hook that allows an Operator to move cars.
Until you go around curves and get concerned about clearance & tripping hazzards. (have seen far too many of these improperly built and used)
You don’t need a lot of horsepower to move a railcar - the horsepower is needed for speed (and incrementally for more cars). Early switchers were only 600 HP - and could move lots of cars.
I’ve heard it said that you could move a car with a five horse Briggs and Stratton (and suitable energy transfer mechanism). Just not very fast.
Even grades wouldn’t really be a problem - the motorized mover just needs to be heavy enough to get traction.
It’s not unusual for a car to be moved with nothing more than a long prybar, say for final positioning. You better hope the handbrake is working…
Let’s not forget the front-end loaders, particularly those properly equiped to handle railcars. They can of course be used for normal front-end loader purposes (which can be numerous around large industrial concerns) when not moving railcars.
Perhaps the technology is not quite ready for remote-control distributed power on a rail car-by-rail car basis.
To what Larry (tree68) noted: [snipped] “…It’s not unusual for a car to be moved with nothing more than a long prybar, say for final positioning. You better hope the handbrake is working…”
When I was working in the Memphis area for a plastic container mfg. we used a’ prybar’ very effectively to move not only empty rail cars but to move loaded pellet cars, as well. Our spur was approx 1/2 mile in length, and the local switch crew would drop the inbound cars close to where they were going to be needed. Never exactly where they were going to be worked. Thus, our ‘switch engine’ was a prybar (see link for a photo of
Even if it was, the demand is not there. Use a forklift. A front end loader. A cable. A come-along. A yard truck. Heck, if your siding is on a grade, drop the car into place (for those unfamliiar, you release the brakes and let gravity do its thing. Just hope the handbrake works, or you may inadvertently do a derailer performance evaluation).
I knew a manager of a grain storage operation that would position hopper cars with his Oliver farm tractor and log chain. Monon would leave what ever number needed and they filled the cars with a large grain auger.
Considering the OP again, it sort of sounds like those neat patented ideas you’d see featured in old Popular Mechanics articles - ideas that never quite panned out (Usually a cool headline, though - “Light-Weight Remote Control Power Units Make Every Freight Car It’s Own Locomotive!”).
Of course, real railroading has individual powered cars - they are in passenger services, known as DMUs or EMUs (and some of the Metro/Subway services are automated/remote controlled)…
Weren’t car pullers at many coal mines nothing but a motorized capstan (like one on a ship or a tow boat) and a heavy rope with a large hook on the end? All it would take to move a couple of hoppers with that would be attaching the hook to the car, looping the rope around the capstan a couple of times, and keeping a little tension on the rope beyond the capstan. The advantage of this was that the rope wasn’t attached to the capstan so it didn’t have to be “unwound” for the next pull; just pick up the hook and walk it to the next car(s) to be moved.
Even though I was born and raised in coal-mining country, I never saw this done at a mine but I do remember seeing one man move 10,000 ton barges this way on the river. I always assumed the same method was used at coal mines.
Were/are capstans or other car pullers used around large grain elevators? It would sure be cheaper than tying up a switcher.
At the steel warehouse where I worked during the summer of 1972, I recall seeing the hub of a car puller just outside the building in which I worked. The car puller was no longer functional and probably dated from sometime prior to WW2 when the plant was owned by the Pressed Steel Car Company.
This thread covers a similiar concept:
http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/90871.aspx
There is also an interesting patent held by an engineer who has done work for GE on projects like the Hybrid GEVO locomotive:
http://www.google.com/patents/US20100186619
The patent covers energy storage systems for locomotives and railcars and includes descriptions of self propelled freight cars using hybrid diesel-electric-battery systems…
That’s precisely what a large aggregate yard near me does. They get 15-20 cars of aggregate every couple days, which they unload by pulling the cars over a pit and opening the bottom doors of the hoppers. They pull several (4-5) cars at a time easily with a fairly large front-end loader. The spot the empties on the next track, ready for BNSF to pick up when they drop off the next set of loads. They can empty a car in about 3 minutes (it would be faster if the load could exit the car faster), and don’t need any specialized car-mounted equipment.
But, an A for the ingenuity in the original poster’s idea. It does have the merit of getting extra duty out of an power source that’s a uni-tasker.
The Idear here is to save whats left of light branch lines and have the Self propelled car roll at 15 MPH down to the junction which might be 3 miles away where it is picked up by the main line freight.
And how is it controlled for it’s 3 mile trek? Magic?
Arduinos!
And a guy with a beltpack RC unit somewhere…probably over there, or maybe down that way…
Here’s the OP’s chance - remote FMU contol via modified quadcopter!