Short and sweet - adding only 19 new numbers to my list of engine numbers.
Saw no foreign power - only BNSF. Had several questions and then remembered answers from the forum and answered my own questions!
One observation - saw a railroad bull come flying out of the city proper and park along the tracks - had an incoming mixed freight. The front 1/2 of the train was pigs and tainers. This is what he watched. He even moved his 4WD around to get a better look at some of them. Then when the last 1/2 arrived, which was tankers and boxcars, he left. It looked like he was looking more for something rather than someone.
The train was from the south - that’s probably part of the equation…(he has watched these tracks before) and if he was looking for humans, they could have baled off our side of the train and fled, since he was on the other side. Just looked to me more like he was looking for things not supposed to be there.
So…having said that - any thoughts on what he was looking for and how was he alerted (I know someone called him on the radio, but do you know of situations where this has happened in the past?)
Mookie
there could have been reports of stuff stolen out of those “tainers” wanted to make sure the doors were shut.A end and b end of coal cars means they are set up a certain way to go to a power plant and unload. that way they are all the same direction.
stay safe
Joe
If the coal hoppers have rotary couplers then they must be connected correctly for unloading in the rotary dumper. Each hopper has one fixed coupler and one rotary, when a car is turned in the dumper it is using it’s own rotary coupler and the rotary coupler of the next car. If the cars were connected incorrectly with two cars connected directly by the fixed couplers there would be severe damage to the cars and the dumper.
The B end of any normal freight car is the end with the hand Brake. The A end is the other end (on coal cars it’s most often the end with the rotary coupler). There are exceptions…some heavy-duty flat cars have hand brakes at both ends, and the ends have to be designated “A” and “B”. And a very few coal cars have rotary couplers at both ends. On articulated cars, the “A” and “B” platforms will be on the ends, just so the cars have ends that can be designated “A” and “B”. This is important, because cars also have left and right sides–determined by facing the B end of the car. For example, on the picture of your “holey” coal gon I posted on the other thread, you’re looking at the right side of the car.
Be sure and study all of this–there may be a test next time I come to Lincoln!
Trailers and containers from the south…perhaps looking for illegals, on the basis of a tip from somebody. You can bet the agent was aware of the contents (or lack of) in those containers, based on wheel reports or something like that. I doubt that a criminal drama would have ensued directly in front of you had he found something–more likely he would have phoned the yard and told them to yard the train on some accessible track where a suspect container could be converged upon.
It’s kind of interesting to see how–and when–double-rotary coal cars were built. One per train was about right, and companies ordered them that way until the mid-1980s. When cabooses disappeared, so did new double-rotary gons (the thinking being that if a rotary coupler were used next to the power, everything would be OK on a properly-lined-up set). Now they’re coming back --and I’ve seen at least one instance in which a power company added a second rotary coupler to a number of its existing cars. This is probably because they realized that the car do get turned around on occasion, or because there are distributed-power locomotives at both ends of a train or cut of cars (sometimes in the middle).
Actually, that’s the best reason for double-rotary cars–non-dumpable things on both ends of a cut. Because if you have a dumper that can unload two cars simultaneously, you can unload an entire train no matter which way the cars are oriented (sometimes you only move ahead one car instead of two, but it is doable)–as long as that joint behind the power has a rotary coupler!