Might not have been all that underpowered - although I’m not up to speed on HP/T calculations and certainly have no idea what numbers to plug in for that example.
Underpowered was the ICG train I saw back in the 70’s in Rantoul. Normal loaded coal trains had around 90 or so cars, and plenty of power.
One night I saw a rather dim headlight coming south, quite slowly.
Two locomotives passed the station, pulling for all they were worth (there’s an upgrade coming south into Rantoul), and on a hunch, I started counting cars (easy - they weren’t exactly flying by). I don’t recall the exact count, but it amounted to about double a normal loaded coal train.
I figure they were short power but needed the empties, so these two locomotives were left to slug their way south with two trains worth of cars. In today’s horsepower terms, that was about 1.5 locomotives worth for a ? two mile long train.
I know just what you mean, CBT. I’ve seen a couple on the UP that I wondered how the power was managing to move them at all but they were moving right along at or near track speed.
The trains I’m talking about were headed by a single unit (hp?) with another single unit DMU shoving on the rear of 80 or 90 cars. I’m guessing they were empty but why so many empty auto racks moving west at Rochelle?
Of course, any time I see a single unit on anything other than a very short local it looks strange to me. We (NYC/PC) never let a train out of a yard with less than two units but that was as much a matter of reliability as anything.
But our ML (MultiLevel) trains from Detroit to the East Coast invariably had 5 or 6 of the best power available (3000 hp GP-40s) at the time. The rules said no more than 6 but I once saw 8 on an ML-12 at Collinwood (Cleveland, OH). I asked the inbound engineer about it and he assured me that only 6 were online. Riiiight. Then why did I see 8 plumes of exhaust when the train pulled out? [%-)]
I would expect that a carrier would expect a given train to be able to maintain a certain speed and would normally assign the appropriate power to achieve that speed. Especially on a busy corridor, having all trains running at their “design” speed would be desirable, otherwise things could get balled up even worse than they can otherwise.
Witness the effect Amtrak or a “high/wide” has on a double track corridor.
Crews are an issue as well - while the CSX St Lawrence Division was a 25 MPH line, it took two crews to get a train from Syracuse to Massena. Now, at 40 MPH, they can again do it with one.
I would opine that an underpowered train would likely occur due to one of a couple possibilities - one, the example I gave where the train was bigger than usual, the other, where the normally required power was not available for some reason (power shortage, unit failed enroute, etc).
That doesn’t surprise me. The auto industry has had problems with rail transport for a few years now due to engine shortages. That shortage has increased the overall delivery time for new orders getting to the dealers and has caused a lot of complaints.
A few years? Try 40+ that I know about. There was a GM assembly plant somewhere along the Hudson River (Poughkeepsie? High Bridge? Yonkers?) that frequently had “shutdown” cars. These were car loads, usually of engines but sometimes other parts, that had to be delivered to the assembly plant “yesterday” or the plant would be shutdown and cost GM millions. There were times, of course, when NYC was at fault but it was more normal that the car had not been released by the engine or other parts plant in time to make the cutoff. I remember many times when a crew would be called and a “train” of one or two cars dispatched from Selkirk to that assembly plant.
I think a lot of you guys are so used to seeing well powered trains that when you see one that is ‘normal’ powered you think it’s underpowered. Loaded auto trains are not near as heavy as other loaded trains. An empty auto train will do just fine with one unit where there are no substantial grades.
Worked territory that served two GM Assembly plants. Daily train originating in Michigan would handle 80-120 car loads of parts for the two plants. In the days of cabooses, a cab would be the ‘cut car’ between the blocks for the two plant’s cars.
Upon arrival at each plant’s serving yard, cars would be switched as ordered by GM - some from the arriving train and some from the on hand inventory and they would get placed in the plant to support continuing production of the assembly lines. Frequently some of the arriving cars were considered ‘shut down’ cars by GM. In some cases the shut down cars had been delayed by the railroad (shopped for various reasons); some times they were ‘shut down’ for reasons known only to GM - whatever the reason, the carrier cooperated with GM to solve the issues. Worst 'shut dow
I think the GM plant was in Tarrytown, NY - methinks they made minivans there. Really bad minivans…
Back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, a lot of so-called JIT systems were that in name only - in a lot of cases, it was just a matter of using the same old supply chain and forcing your vendors to shoulder all the costs of inventory and supply management. The suppliers eventually learned how to identify the real costs in this process, and today’s systems usually drive the overall costs right down to the optimum level, no matter who is paying the bill.
Having been a operations manager for a large less-than-truckload trucking company in terminals that supported major vehicle plants, I can verify that “shutdown shipments” were the bane of our miserable lives. Typically, we’d see 40-50 LTL shipments from as many suppliers arrive at the delivering terminal every day. The phone would start ringing about 4 AM, telling us which particular parts were needed at which dock at what time that day. If all or part of a shipment wasn’t needed that day, we were expected hold it until directed for delivery. At times, we could have 40-50 trailerloads of LTL shipments stacked up in the yard - and of course, they never called for them in the order we had loaded them. It wasn’t unusual to handle a given shipment 5-6 times before we delivered it.
Sometimes we’d have as much as a month of shipments from a particular supplier stacked up, especially for parts that were used only when a plant was producing a certain option package for a few days a month (say, rear spoilers for a “sport model” package). Of couse, we’d get the dreaded 11 am call telling us to pull the all eight pallets of the Wombat Widgets shipment from four days ago, the two pallets of part ABD from their shipment made sixteen days ago, and just 1 pallet of part CED from nine days ago
Yes, the GM plant was indeed in Tarrytown, NY. I grew up in Yonkers which is about fifteen miles south of Tarrytown. The GM plant was in the shadow of the Tappan Zee bridge on the east bank of the Hudson River and I passed by it many, many times as a kid and young adult.
I just clicked onto the Rochelle webcam and a split second later I heard a horn and what did I see coming eastbound but the UP office car special train with one G.E. unit (couldn’t tell what model as it is still somewhat dark here) and a whole pile of office cars including at least three or four domes. Such a nice thing to wake up to on a Saturday morning.
The loss of tractive effort on a single engine anything - even a light engine move will have at a minimum near catastrophic results ending in lack of movement. If the engine doesn’t have the abiltity to move it isn’t much good as an engine.