I thought I would start this thread for railroaders real and computer as well for people just looking for a laugh or two.
As for my goofs, I am playing a train simulator and have done a few goofs. I thinks some of you real engineers and other railroaders will get a laugh out of this.
1/Heading down a hill, forget to put on the dynamic brakes and end up getting in trouble for going over the speed limit.
2/ Brake hose comes loose and have to go into emergency fouling a station and delaying an enroute passenger train.
3/ Coupler falls off because I wasn’t careful with speed while switching cars.
4/ Forgot to apply car brakes on a string of loaded coal bethgons and they ended up rolling off the coal pier into the sea.
5/ Wasn’t paying attention to bridge clearances and tried to run a double stack train underneath it.
Luckily the mistakes I’m making aren’t real and are decreasing rapidly.
Alot of thease goof ups is because I didn’t know how realistic it would be until I played it.
A new one I discovered is watching for avalanches. Didn’t cra***he train since I was going 10mph in unfamiliar territory. That is my motto now. Go slow and take notes.
A few years ago my then 4 year old son had me instal a simulator on the computer out in the studio. He always had to run huge road freights with 4 year old results.
A few weeks later we got a letter from the FRA.
Mitch
Junctionfan- What Sim do you use. It sounds real realistic.
I have MSTS and my mistakes include and not limited to; accidently flipping a switch that lead into a short siding. Side swiping a grainhopper that I thought I had put back far enough.
Great game but make sure you know what is going on. Even in my simulation, I forgot to complete track and derailed a 70mph intermodal…not pretty except pretty dopey on my part.[banghead][#wstupid]
I used the ultimate simulator once-I was a dispatcher for the Indiana Rail Road. That was a way to simulate trains. My career was cut short due to a real goof up.
Hopefully nothing like mine. Not to assuring when you make mistakes like the one I’ve made but then again, most of thease problems would have not occured if I had a conductor, audio dispatcher and MOW crews. Not too sure why the game doesn’t account for that but maybe Auran plans to do it in a next version.
When dispatching, I sent a train into a work zone…fotrunately for me and the others involved, the two crews got in contact with one another before anything bad happened. I was deemed a “safety hazard”, not allowed to make any decisions without my supervisor approving them, and then two days(happened on a Thursday) later on Monday I was fired. That is the technical explanation of what happened. There are many other factors that went into my short career. Forgetting the Form C was the thing they got me for. If that hadn’t happened it would have just been a matter of time before administration would have fired me for other reasons.
I was riding atop a tender oil tank on the Guayaquil & Quito Railroad in Ecuador when I got a chance to see what an emergency application looks like from the cab end. This happened in 1999 in Riobamba, the division point midway between the two namesake cities; we were out for a tour trip up to the summit of the line at Urbina.
The yard extended (if memory serves) off a wye and our engineer wanted to take the mixed consist he was heading south. The railroad was largely out of service, so the whole place was unattended, and it took a little while to get steam up in the engine (a 1953 Baldwin 2-8-0) and assemble the train. Then he backed it down onto the mainline so the train was facing south. Then he whistled off, opened the throttle, and started to move. It was a light train, so it picked up speed quickly, but the main made a long, shallow curve to the left through the yard space, and he had it up to about twenty miles per hour when the locked iron gate that filled the opening in the low masonry wall around the yard came into view.
The engineer immediately twisted both the independent brake and the train brake all the way around into what appeared to be the “emergency” position. He then pulled the Johnson bar back with a single heaving motion that suggested it took quite a bit of work (he was a big guy, though), and let the steam work against the engine’s motion; I don’t remember whether he shut off steam to do this or whether he opened the cylinder cocks, but the train came to a stop VERY quickly. We both grabbed stanchions and hung on without any trouble, but the draft gear between the coaches was unsprung, so the run-in of slack on even our short train must have made it feel like an accident (starting, even under the best of conditions, felt like a controlled crash).