I’ve read about hump yards and how a freight car is pushed over the hump where gravity takes over and it rolls toward its assigned classification track and (hopefully) couples with the cars already there. The computer controlled retarders slow the car just enough, taking into account the car’s weight, any wind conditions, the initial speed of the car, among other factors. My question: can more than one car go over the hump at once? …i.e.can a cut of three cars that are going to the same classification track all roll over the hump together as one unit, or must they be uncoupled and go individually over the hump?
Depending on the size of the hump and the yard, but most certainly multiple car cuts can go over and into the designated track in most cases.
At our primitive hump yard (computers didn’t control the retarders–I did!), the rule was that two loads or up to ten empties could go over at once. There were sometimes large blocks that would be shoved over, and cut off and held in the retarder, then “put away” either after the shove was completed or by another job.
Now that I’m retired, I can say it…the two-load rule in our yard made little if any sense–we could get better control of bigger blocks, and could slow them down to amazingly slow speeds at which they would continue to roll into the track.
While the video is not of a US Hump yard, the time lapse operations are representitive of a hump yard on either side of the pond
A couple yrs ago BNSF had a issue w/ a meat packing facility loading tallow into tankcars. The loads were hauled to Kan City and switched on the hump. During the loading process some of the tallow had contacted on the back inside of the flange. When the cars were pinned on the hump to go to whatever trk the cut was lined for, the retarders were not able to brake the cars and instead of a safe 4 mph coupling, the result were joints being made at 12-15 mph w/ some bypassed couplers and perhaps a car on the ground. Not good in the bowl of the most busy hump terminal on the system. The shipper was ordered to clean the wheels of tallow cars or they would not be pulled from the plant.
We had similar instances on many occasions. The railroad (first CNW, then UP) would send someone to the loading facility to inspect. This usually resulted in cars not being pulled or spotted until the area was cleaned up.
Some powdery substances were also bad actors–if they got on the wheels they’d act almost like graphite would. Corn sugar was the worst offender (this was different than the high-fructose corn syrup that is called corn sugar nowadays), and flour could do it at times, too. I found that in both cases, rounded-side covered hoppers were worse offenders than ribbed-side cars. The ribbed-side cars had wider bodies that overhang the trucks; cylindrical cars usually had plenty of open space above the wheels. Again, it took a visit to the shipper and an order to clean up their facility so the cars weren’t standing in the stuff when they were loaded, or instructions to use a little more care in their loading.
In that video, what are those things that go back and forth down the track?
they looked like a form of brake skate.
Someplace recently I read that the software that now controls most hump yard operations has trouble processing more than 1 or 2 cars at a time - I suppose it can’t decide which set of data to use, or how to sum or average it, etc. As a result even a string of similar cars that are all going to the same destination has to be uncoupled/ broken up and humped singly or in pairs, instead of as a solid block, or else flat-switched or otherwise bypass the humping operation.
[:-,] In other words, the computer isn’t near as sharp as Carl is ! [swg]
- Paul North.
If you had a good organic computer (Carl), no problem…If you had a greenhorn wannabe humpmaster learning (the hard way) how to do it, can I get a set of bleachers and a popcorn vendor?
I suspect the “dumb rules” were a least common denominator attempt to keep the hump functioning and the cars moving. The track, signal and mechanical guys want some semblance of a home life instead of hanging out at the hump picking up and fixing track behind a bonehead operator.
Sounds like a Windows based system. Probably still running Win95.
Whut’s the DOS command for that there Windows '95 thingy?[swg]
Isn’t it an AFU package that works like the new Google mail snafu system.?
Wait, so your saying it’s no longer Fubar compatible?
Here’s a case where UP sued customer Idahoan Foods in an attempt to recover damages for a hump yard derailment, blamed on potato flakes on the car wheels:
No recently visited the UPRR Colton Yard Hump Tower & asked that question of the humpmaster
Here is the link to the view from the hump tower
cool…thanks for posting. That’s a good example of simple human ingenuity at work…
What happens if there’s a bit of error and the carr doesn’t quite roll far enough? I guess at that point they have to halt the process and get a yard engine in to give the car a bit of a push. I would imagine that someone would be called to account for that…but who would then be responsible?