Know any little tricks for when your operating? Post them here!
“Kicking” cars off
When sorting cars into sidings, use this little trick:
Set the couplers on the car your seting out and the car or engine coupled to it in delay, when entering the siding, at the very throat of it, accerate quickly then slow down, the momentum will “kick” the car away from you and it will roll down into the siding slowly (It helps if the cars wheels are very free rolling) I’ve done this several times during operating sessions and it works well, I’ve done it with cuts of cars up to 10 cars long. But takes some doing to get the speed right. Of course dont use this on any manned equipment or explosives! Make sure theres room in the siding to kick the cars away and its not wise to use this while switching industrys, if its a yard track with a cut of cars already in it make sure to kick the cars off a foot or two from the rest of the cut so they will gently roll into the rest and couple smoothly.
‘Kicking cars’ into the bowl of a yard for classification is normal. As you mentioned, kicking a car into a siding or spur is not normal. In ‘flat yard’ switching, a good crew can kick a car and then kick several more before having to back up out of the yard ladder to start classification again. I do not tend to see this done as much anymore, as many railroads have restrictions on car handling, and there is not a lot of flat yard switching done(mainly ‘block swaps’).
sometimes when i’m trying to switch too many cars i use the old “taking slack out of a train trick” for example, tonight i took off with a train (with intentions of running it on the mainline) and before the train got up to speed (i use a power pack with momentem) it stalled ,spinning- so i turned OFF the momenntem and opened the throttle in reverse , full power, the train would back up a few inches and stall, then i slowly pulled forward until the last car just barley moved, i then gave it full power in reverse again and proceded to do this until the train moved about 8’ (back where i could switch cars out of the train) now you might think all this ramin’ and jammin’ would derail cars but i backed up around an 18" curve using this method w/o a derailment and some of my cars are way underweight
I actually saw a CSX crew ‘kicking’ cars just the other day! I’ve heard about it, but I’d never seen it in real life. They were flat switching and wound up with cars both in front of the loco and behind. They dropped off the cars behind them about a 1/4 mile down the mainline, at the bottom of a shallow grade, then moved back up the grade toward the siding and ‘kicked’ the cars in front of them just before the loco got to the siding. The brakeman riding the cars let them roll almost to the top of the grade, and the conductor threw the switch for the loco to move onto the siding, all while everything is still rolling. Once the loco was on the siding and in the clear, the conductor religned the switch for the mainline. The cars that had just been kicked up the grade had now started to roll back down the grade, and the brakeman rode the cars all the way down to the cars that had been dropped off at the bottom of the hill. The loco then moved back onto the mainline, and lo and behold… was at the head end of the string of cars that he started out in the middle of.
Kicking cars is a very normal switching operation and use every day in flat switching.This saves time …You can kick your pickup(s) back into your train but a set out at a industry must be spotted where the customer wants the cars.Now sometime a industry has "overflow cars that can not be spotted in the loading/unloading dock.These cars can be held short of the loading/unloading area as long as these cars doesn’t foul a street or plant crossing and doesn’t foul the derail.
Jim,Actually there is more to flat yard switching then the "block"swapping you mention.These crews can classify cars into trains just like a hump crew.This is done by kicking cars…A heads up crew can classify several hundred cars into trains during their normal shift.Please do not confuse a puller car going about their work as flat switching…There is a difference.
jshrade,What you saw wasn’t the crew kicking cars as you thought…By what you said the crew did sounds more like a flying switch move instead of kicking cars into a yard track or a local kicking cars back into their train.
You see this move was made to put the cars behind the engine…That is why the engine went into the clear so the cars could roll back into the train.
