" Warning: before welding on this car..."

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

Warning: before welding on this car, contact Herzog Contracting" said the sign painted on the sides of dozens and dozens of ballast cars.

Why the sign? More specifically, is that a frequent peril that car owners need to worry about? That 3rd parties will weld on cars that don’t belong to them, without being asked/told to? I’d be mad as can be if I was a fleet owner,and started getting cars returned to me with the paint blistered off the sides of them.

Or is this just protection from people who might perform spot repairs that they would like to invoice the owner for?

2

If you set the spray-on lining on fire or mangle/short out the mechanical working innards (including solar powered battery controls for GPS dumping system, etc.), the job you save might be your own.

3

If a car is bad-ordered, or perhaps damaged in transit, I believe it’s normal procedure for the railroad in question to perform repairs and bill (if appropriate) the owner for the work.

I’d presume that if the cars are being ferried between jobs they may not be accompanied by Herzog personnel, so could be exposed to repairable damage and the possibility of repairs thereon.

Linings could sustain damage from either arc or gas welding, as MC points out. Arc welding could turn electronics into useless junk, never mind the possibility of physical damage to said equipment if cutting or welding takes place near wiring and components.

I’d imagine that the cost of a case of spray paint and a couple stencils may be less than the cost of recoating or re-wiring a single car.

4

The current used for arc-welding is a few million times what it would take to fry and vaporize the microscopic wires and chips that comprise the electronic/ electrical components and controls for them . . . [:-^]

Also, you’ll often see a similar warning on the frame rails of truck tractors and trailers. There, the steel is a special alloy and/ or heat-treated, and the intense heat will change the metallurgy and strength and ruin it - even to the point of making it brittle and prone to shattering under impact loads ! So that could also be a secondary concern here.

Later on I may try to find a good photo of that warning on railcarphotos.com or a similar website.

MC, I didn’t know they had a “spray-on” lining. What kind, and what for ?

  • Paul North.
5

Electric arc welding and electronics are not compatible.

Herzog ballast cars, for the most part, are used in computer controlled, GPS guided ballast train service where the entire train can be dumped in a hour or less as the ballast train is moving at 15 MPH, the cars have a lot of electronics on board. When welding is required on equipment that contains electronics, the electronic equipment must be disconnected to protect it from electrical fields that are created in the welding process.

The ballast trains are used prior to the arrival of surfacing gangs, with track time on Main Tracks being a scarce commodity the use of the Herzog (and Georgetown), computerized continuous motion ballast trains have facilitated getting ballast laid better than any prior operations the carriers have used…

6

Wow!! those little A-frame panels on top sort of looked like a solar array, but I figured that unlikely since I never would have expected to see solar panels on a ballast car…

So then I guess the cars dump the ballast automatically (on top of the ties) , and some other critter must follow along and raise the track long enough to tamp the ballast in underneath?

7

I never would have imagined that ballast cars had so much tech onboard. [8)]

8

About 2 minutes into this video the Herzog cars are distributing ballast. Normally Herzog trains are followed by MofW personnel to ensure that switches and road crossings are cleared of any potential overflow or ballast within the switch points.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLMEi71GpxE

Also the Herzog promo video

http://www.hrsi.com/railroad_services_plus_train.php

9

You will also find a warning “do not ground to coupler assembly when welding” on a lot of boxcars and flat cars with hydro cushion drawbars.

Hydraulic fluid does funny and dangerous things when it boils.

One reason some car owners want to be contacted before repairs are done is that they may have their own shop, or may simply want to provide information on specific repairs they will allow foreign shops to perform.

Running the current from an arc welder through metals like aluminum rivets and cast steel parts can set up corrosion problems also.

Gas welding is normally used to cut and remove damaged parts, the preferred manner to repair and add parts is electrical arc welding, it is more precise and the heat dissipation can be managed better…arc welding only heats a small spot around where the weld is being performed, gas (flame) welding heats a larger area.

10

Link to a typical photo (none of these photos are mine) of one of these - HZGX 8404 - but it’s too coarse, you can’t really read the warnings: http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=709

A slightly better view of the warnings, particularly zoomed-in:

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1576611

Ahh - here we are: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2403524

And one of the ‘slope sheets’ warning:

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2403528

Close-up photo of the “patents” placard - note also the small box to the left: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2403520

Which has the push-button version of the electronic controls in it:

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2012378

  • Paul North.
11

A good view of the “A”-frame-shape solar panels:

http://www.fortwortharchitecture.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4198

Manufacturer’s newsletter article from 2004 about the panels and how they recharge the batteries:

http://www.pulsetech.net/about/pulsetalk/2004/PTALKDLR904.PDF

  • Paul North.
12

Besides frying the electronics and setting the lining on fire there are other considerations. Parts of the car can be made out of a special alloy of steel that resists wear better than mild steel. These alloys need different processes and or pre and after heat treatment. Also different alloy welding rod or wire. With all the differing alloys of today’s metals there are an equally numbered special procedures in dealing with repairs or build up of them.

We started using a new type of wear metal in our loader buckets. The strips of this metal were falling off after a few hundred hours of use. The welds were worn off but the strips were barely worn. After an engineer from the company came out and looked at how they were welded and with what. The procedures used were changed. Now they are pre heated and welded with a special rod and hard faced over with another special rod. So far they are holding up well after a few thousand hours.

Pete

13

SO then the one question that has not been addressed directly, has been answered by default?

It IS common for foreign roads to perform repairs on rolling stock belonging to others, without permission? So they just send whatever bill and expect it to get paid?

14

It is understood that routine repairs will be made to cars that are off the owners property (carrier & privage owner). There is a entire segment of the rules governing the interchange of cars that deals with the interline billing of repairs.

15

Yes minor repairs were performed on all railroad cars and billed to the owner. things like adjusting brakes or replacing brake shoes or air hoses were common. Yards often had individuals whose job it was to find things and fix them. An article in the PRR Historical Society magazine several years ago was by just such a person. he made a career out of adjusting brakes since it was one of the easiest jobs and always made sure he carried the wedges necessary to do the job. The road doing the work was probably more concerned with avoiding wrecks then car repair but they go hand in hand. Another couple of reasons for not welding on cars is because I have seen hoppers have an angle iron welded to them in the winter to shake the daylights out of a car to free frozen coal in a steel mill. Cars have had various brackets and structural shapes welded to them to fix odd loads like on a flat car. That eventually results in someone having to smooth out the deck again. Cars like covered hoppers can have coatings designed to resist corrosive effects or make the product slide easier for unloading. While ballast cars wouldn’t have this ruining several thousand dollars of coatings requiring removal and recoating is expensive. Lots of reasons all with the same result. They cost the car owner some serious money to correct and they have a justifiable reason to want to have input. I’d be willing to bet they are all inspected when returned for damage also.

16

Con 1…

Car repair can be and often is a profitable part of railroading business.

As stated, there is an entire rule book, the Field Manual of the A.A.R. interchange rules that covers everything, from the type or grade of bolt used in a given repair to what a given gasket for a specific tank car has to be made of to how many hour must be billed for a repair, it is even more detailed than your auto dealers “shop rate” on automobile repairs.

And of course, it tells you what to charge for a specific part too.

Most RIP tracks and car repair shops buy in bulk, so while the book might say charge $150.00 for a crossover platform, your shop may have bought 500 of them at a 20% discount, so you profit.

It works like this on my railroad, and this is typical on most roads.

Say one of our member lines yards a train here, and during the routine bleed off and inspection, our car men find 6 bad order cars, with defect ranging from missing or badly worn brake shoes to a broken bell crank on a hand brake to a car that was cornered in a collision.

They write these cars up, and during switching, I place them in a rip track at our yard.

Our car department repairs the cars, and bills the member line who delivered the BO cars to us.

That’s also why every outbound train is inspected, not only for the initial terminal air brake test, but to find any cars that have defects not noticed during routine handling of the car and removing them before we forward them.

By finding and removing these cars from the outbound train before it is handed off to another railroad, a railroad saves the cost of someone else repairing the car at AAR rates, your own shop fixes the car at your cost, not the AAR rate.

By inspecting every inbound car for defects, you can generate profit for your railroad repairing defects.

By inspecting every outbound car your railroad saves money.

Now for something major, like a car shows up with the side ri

17

Excellent explanation, Ed - thanks once again ! It’s consistent with what little I know about that process, and well-organized and stated better by someone who’s clearly more familiar with it. Perhaps it ought to be formally published as a little article or as an “Ask Trains” column in a future issue.

Which leads me to another related question I’ve been wondering about: While the recent/ current economic recession has clearly led to layoffs at many levels for most railroads - have the carmen been able to minimize that impact on their ranks by being - um, a little more, say, ‘zealous’ - in their diligence and scrutiny of cars within their purview for defects. Not saying that anyone has fibbed or billed for or fixed something that didn’t need fixing, but more in the nature of a more stringent scrutiny of each part. To invent an example, suppose a grab iron has a little bend in it and is loose at one end, but is clearly still solidly attached to the car. In the boom times, that might be passed over to avoid delaying the car and its load, even though it could have been written up to be “shopped”. But now, the heck with worrying about delaying the car - if it’s got a defect, that defect gets fixed, regardless of how severe it is.

What led to this thought was about a year ago, there was a short thread here about an issue with the carmen on CN at North Fond du Lac, as I recall, and an FRA inspector who was zealously marking up cars as having defects - an awful lot of cars - even though those cars had been in transit and arrived without anyone taking exception to them before that. Sure, the operating management wants to move trains and cars, not switch them out to be repaired - so that might have led to some pressure on the car people to let some marginal cars slide by. But the self-interest of the car inspectors in generating more work for their colleagues down at the Repair-In-P

18

Carmen shopping cars and NFL officials calling holding are in relatively the same position…The NFL official could call holding on every play if they desired…the Carmen could find a reason to shop every car he inspects if he chooses to. From time to time and location to location you will have some ‘overzealous’ Carmen make a statement with their shop tags, which will tend to get managements interest to find out what the root problem is at the location.

A high incidence of shops at a location, in today’s railroad, does not generate the need for additional Carmen…it generates the idea of ‘outsourcing’; sending the cars to independent car shops (ie. Progress Rail and others of their kind). Today’s railroads want to move income producing trains, they don’t want to be saddled with operations other than those that are absolutely required to move trains and collect the income from moving them.

[quote user=“Paul_D_North_Jr”]

Excellent explanation, Ed - thanks once again ! It’s consistent with what little I know about that process, and well-organized and stated better by someone who’s clearly more familiar with it. Perhaps it ought to be formally published as a little article or as an “Ask Trains” column in a future issue.

Which leads me to another related question I’ve been wondering about: While the recent/ current economic recession has clearly led to layoffs at many levels for most railroads - have the carmen been able to minimize that impact on their ranks by being - um, a little more, say, ‘zealous’ - in their diligence and scrutiny of cars within their purview for defects. Not saying that anyone has fibbed or billed for or fixed something that didn’t need fixing, but more in the nature of a more stringent scrutiny of each part. To invent an example, suppose a grab iron

19

As BaltACD stated, if the Carmen wanted too, odds are they could find some small AAR defect with most cars.

In regards to your question, any loose safety appliance is a FRA defect and has to be repaired before the car can be used.

A bent grab iron or stirrup, as long as it is not bent beyond a certain point, and is still firmly attached and serviceable will be overlooked, but a loose grab iron and or stirrup will shop the car.

Safety appliances account for a large portion of BO cars, carmen and us ground pounders are quite aware of their importance, and on my railroad I am empowered to BO any car I find with a safety appliance missing or defective, from grab irons bent inward to the point I cannot fit may hand around it to a loose crossover platform or a handhold on the end with bad welds…in fact, I can bad order any car I find that has any defect, from a defective anglecock to sharp wheel flange.

I know on the UP and BNSF down here, most employees can BO a car in the same manner.

Stirrups and ladder rungs, along with hand brake wheels seem to be the attachment point of choice for the dummies in the industries and plants to hook their tow rope to when they want to move a car.

For some reason, they never want to use the hole or bracket designed for just that use, so we find a lot of brake wheels and bottom grab irons all bent to heck.

And because the bottom grab iron sticks out the farthest, it always seems to be the part of the car that gets wiped out whenever there is a close clearance issue.

Our carmen have a neat tool they carry, it looks like a pry bar with a bearing on or at the crook of the bend, they can straighten a bent grab iron in a few seconds with it, and as long as the rivets or bolts are still firm, it’s good to go.

And to answer the second part of your question, yes, if the car department feels like furloughs are getting close, and or business and traffic are slacking off, they do find more bad orders than “normal” but

20

I have been a welder most of my life and spent much of it welding on locomotives and rail cars. Arc,Tig,or Mig welding does not fry any electronics either on locomotives or cars running or not. If you use a voltage meter to a car or locomotive when welding you will not get a reading. The reason is the arc is formed at the point of contact and flows from positive to ground and ends there. There is no reason for the electricity to flow anywhere else but the point of contact since electricity always takes the shortest route to ground which is from the electrode to the piece of metal it contacts. If the electricity did flow to other parts of the locomotive anyone touching it would get shocked every time you stuck a arc. Even if you melt the rod and ground it out completely(no arc but rod stuck to the metal) you still won’t get a reading as the current is still flowing from the rod straight to the ground. The only way you could short out electronics would be to ground the rod (no arc) straight to the computer so the electricity flows from the arc,through the computer and then to the ground. Even then I doubt it would do anything since arc welding is low voltage and high amps. Most arc welders put out 20-50 volts which is not enough to even pass through many electronics to do anything let alone short anything out. Anything under 20 volts wont even break the skin which is why you can grab both posts of a car battery and nothing will happen despite the amperage being 500 or 600 amps.

The main reason they do not want you to weld on certain parts of cars is because the metal you are welding on isn’t made to hold down heavy objects with out ripping pieces of the car off or breaking the welds. On many heavy duty flat cars they have places that tell you where to weld and where not to weld. The places where you weld have very thick metal that is reinforced under the car to take a heavy strain. It is also thick so it can take the constant welding and removal(gouging) of the steel when you are cutting the