Roughly 2,700 feet long when the yard crew is through.
Obviously they haven’t been afflicted by PSR.
What is that, like a yard cut over here?
about half a yard cut or less - 10K foot train in the Recieving Yard shoved over the hump for switching into 5K foot bowl tracks and 3 bowl tracks get made solid and pulled to the Departure yard for dispatchment as a train.
2,700 feet. Just long enough to say “what was that?” when it goes by…
Especially if you’re used to seeing 12,000 footers…
Hell, the B&O wasn’t running 2700 foot trains, except by accident, when I hired out in 1965 - the norm was 4000 - 5000 feet.
When the B&O single tracked the line from Baltimore to Philadelphia in the early 1960’s the nominal siding length of the resulting CTC operated single track line had 9000 foot sidings which were expected to hold two trains for meeting trains in the opposite direction.
For most of the time I was a Chief Dispatcher, CSX considered 9000 feet as maximum train length on most territories - some specific territories had limits of 6200 and 7500 feet on trains in a specific direction.
Of course no railroad in the USA uses a ‘link & hook’ coupling system that puts employees in such a dangerous position in the normal course of their duties as does the German system.
In North America though an Employee must get between the cars to connect the air hose.
Anyway the train must have been a bit shorter as that would exceed the maximum allowed length. About 2450 feet including locomotive is the maximum.
Yes, or so i thought.
Pardon my ignorance, but why is this considered a “Long Train”.?
When i first read the title, i thought maybe they meant 2700 meters.
When I used to watch the Dutch railcam on a regular basis, I would opine that the trains were all less than 2,700 feet. A 2,700 meter train would come in just under 9,000 feet, which would be fairly common here, I believe. The note on their couplers does bear consideration.
We’ve gotten so used to the land barges we see here in the US that anything shorter surprises us.
US employees don’t have to go into a waist high box that is formed by the buffer plates from each car and then put in place the linking device and use the attached ratchet device to tighten the coupling as well as connect a braking hose.
US employees are not ‘boxed in’ when they kneel in for 10-15 seconds to couple the braking system air hose.
My suspicion is that there was a ‘problem’ with this tale from the gitgo… 1st of al, the unit of measure in Europe is the ‘Metric System’… You might get away, sometimes, in the U.K. with descriptions in the inch and feet method[U.S. Customary Unit System] (?). But in Europe,currently, it always seems to be the Metric System…
I would doubt that in this country, a 2700ft train would anything ither than a local transfer cut or some type of ‘special’ dispatch. Here in this area, they regularly seem to be around 5k in length.
When one sees one of the ‘land barges’(?); Those seem to run with 2 to 4 units on the head ends; a couple[DPU’s] in the middle of the train(? and at least 1 or 2[DPU’s] pushing on the rear. Subjectively judged, their length seems to be between 10k and 15k. No idea as to the tonnage, one like that will weigh?
A easy guesstimation of weight is a ton per foot of length or more for a mixed load/empty manifest train.
At one point in time the ‘yard clerks guesstimate’ for figuring tonnage was 30 tons for each empty and 70 tons for each load. In today’s world, with the integral use of computers in all ‘yard clerk’ type work processes UMLER (Universal Machine Language Equipment Register) is used in the calculation of empty weight and length for all cuts of cars - in trains or on tracks. Local company data bases will add in the weight of contents for each car based off the billing information available for each car.
Obviously time is not of the essence when putting a German train together, considering how much effort it takes to couple the cars.
It surprises me too they hadn’t gone with the Janney type of coupler decades ago.
One thing about it they are hauling freight by rail.
It is my understanding that siding lenght in Europe is relatively short. One rarely sees pictures of European freight trains longer than approximately 30 “wagons”, and even then, each wagon seems to be much shorter in length than the typical freight car in North America.
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/732088/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/731549/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/730989/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/730769/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/730272/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/730173/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/730046/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/729013/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/728875/
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/728816/
I’ve had a 15154 foot train of 243 well cars. All empty containers for the most part. just north of 8000 tons. One unit on the head end and one in the middle.
Watching the video, it says this particular train has a waiver to operate at 2700 ft. Otherwise the narrator says that trains are limited to 2400 ft.
Jeff
A couple years ago they did a test period of running Q101 at over 16,000 feet west of Edmonton, usually in a 1x1x1 DP configuration.
The train itself ran fine, but it took too long to build in the yard, and once it got out on the road there was almost nowhere it could be stopped without blocking at least one crossing, not to mention that it would not fit in any sidings.
How are the relaxed airflow regulations on DP trains working out?
I believe the Kiruna iron ore trains can be pretty long, although nothern Sweden is pretty sparsely populated.