[?] Does anyone have info on Untah Ry. narrow gauge in Colorado ??
Cannonball
See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uintah_Railway and
http://home.bresnan.net/~bpratt15/index.htm
http://www.abandonedrails.com/Uintah_Railway
http://utahrails.net/utahrails/uintah.php
http://illianaroad.com/railroading/gilsonite-and-the-uintah-railroad/ - includes a 2:43 video of ancient B&W motion-picture film
There are others here who are more expert on it, I believe.
- Paul North.
Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg wrote Narrow Gauge in the Rockies. The book is long out of print (I think) but has a nice chapter on the Uintah Railway.
If you can get your hands on a copy, check it out!
Uintah - one incredible bear of a railroad when it ran with nasty excessive curves and grades up to the Gilsonite mines.
The 66 Degee curve must’ve been a sight to see negotiated, some streetcars don’t turn that fast.
I noticed in the vdeo that the brake hoses were elevated. I also read in one of the links that Uintah had special couplers for the tight curves. I’m guessing the long hoses were elevated to keep them from dragging.
A DVD was released by Machines of Iron several years ago that is a video history of the Uintah Railway. The DVD is still available from Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Uintah-Railway/dp/B0009H67UG
The railway was replaced by a pipeline and very little remains of the former right-of-way.
I remembered the pipeline from Beebe’s Narrow Gauge in the Rockies, but all of the links in the thread said the RR was replaced by trucks. I checked the book and on page 184 found out the trucks which replaced the trains, were in turn replaced by the pipeline in 1957.
Upon further research I found a site on current production of gilsonite.
In 1973 the pipeline shut down and (as of this 1985 reference) they are back to dry mining, and the product is back to trucks and containers hauled to Craig, CO for shipment on the former D&RGW now UP.
[:)] I want to thank all you fine folk who posted info on the Uintah railway. The folks at Cross Farm are doing a great job of saving history one piece at a time. We were there aon July 4 , 2003. I took many photos of the equipment. The one photo of the caboose had the stovestill in there. I am glad to get such responce to my question. As soon as I can get my great grand daughter to show me how to post my pics of my time there. She is 12yrs. and quite the wiz on puters.
Thank you gentlemen.
Respectfully, Cannonball
What a treacherous piece of railroad to operate!
So that these operating parameters can be better appreciated:
Grade was 7.5% westbound, 5% eastbound.
A 66 degree curve has a radius of 91.8 ft. by the ‘railroad’ / chord definition of curvature. As MC notes, there are some trolley and LRT lines that prefer nothing under 150 or even 100 ft. radius.
Some sources say 65 degrees and 88 ft. radius, but those corresponding figures are from the 'highway / arc definition of curvature, which I very much doubt is applicable to this situation (it was a railroad, after all; and the highway/ arc definition was not widely used when the Uintah Rwy. was built in the 1902 - 1911 time frame).
- Paul North.
The rail fan thinks about the difficulty in climbing the stated grades - that is the easy part of the railroader.
The HARD part for the real railroaders that operate the territory is getting trains down those grades safely. If you have trouble going up, you can always add more power. In the days before dynamic braking - all the brakes you had were the air brakes on the engine and train - use them wrong and watch the train run-away (with you on it).
Could the hand brakes be partially set to help, since it is all most all down hill?
Brakes generate heat - beyond a point that is defined by the material used in the braking system, increasing heat causes loss of braking. Getting trains down hill is using the brakes enough to control the speed - but not so much as to cause brake fade.
Class I freight cars of the 20th Century had and continue to have what is called a ‘Retainer Valve’ when this valve is manually activated on a car, that car will retain a brake application, even when the brake line is being recharged and would otherwise release the brakes. A routine process during the steam era (before the implementation of Dynamic Braking on diesel electrics) was for the train to stop at the top of the grade, brakemen would walk the train and ‘turn up’ the retainers on a special instruction specified portion of the train. After the retainers were activated the train would begin decent of the grade. Once at the bottom of the grade, the brakemen would
Keep in mind that those amazingly sharp curves added quite a bit of friction to the train’s passage, both upgrade and down. At the commonly accepted value for “curve compensation” of 0.04% per degree of curvature, those 66-degree curves were the equivalent of a 2.64% grade - say, 2.6% practically. So going uphill, such a curve in the midst of the 7.5% gradient (presuming it wasn’t reduced as compensation) would have the same effect as a 7.5 + 2.6 = 10.1% grade on a tangent. Interestingly and in contrast, going downgrade those curves would reduce the effect of such a grade to 7.5 - 2.6 = 4.9% on a tangent - which is still plenty steep, though !
- Paul North.
Keep in mind that the heat generated is the product of weight, gradient and speed. I kind of doubt that the curvature on the Uintah allowed speeds high enough for brake fade to be a serious problem. Running out of air with automatic air brake reservoirs would have been a different matter, hence the retainers. The retainers allowed the engineer to put the brake valve into “release” and thus recharge the brake reservoirs while maintaining some braking effort.
- Erik
An excellent article on this, by a noted authority:
“Monarch Branch revisited - using several kinds of brakes”
by Blaine, David G., from Trains, March 1977, p. 30