Caught a BNSF H train through here last night and right before he got into town, the dispatcher wanted him to stop as a passing motorist noticed all kinds of sparks coming from the middle of the train on the engineer’s side. So the conductor got off for a roll by and sure enough, hand brake left on! It was one of those huge white BNSF reefers.
Judging by how often I hear rolling stock go by with a flat spot on the wheels, does this happen a lot? Is this the most common way to get a flat spot on a wheel? Will emergency braking do the same thing?
(1) Dragging them against a set handbrake in the yard
(2) not releasing the handbrake and leaving the yard for the main track
(3) broken/ defective car brake air system. sets & then fails to release
All fairly common. Usually a HBD Hot Wheel Detector catches them on the road.
…and yes putting the train in emergency can leave flat spots on the wheels, though depending on conditions (speed/distance the train travels in emergency) they may just be very small flat spots…
The thing about flat spots, though, is that once you have a small one, it can turn into a bigger one very fast, once it gets to a certain size the wheel will always come to rest on that flat spot, and the wheel will slide instead of turning at lower speeds. It doesn’t take long before you have yourself a good thumper.
I notice flatspots alot on hoppers. When I stay in Cresson, Pa at The Station Inn, I casn often tell when a heavy coal drag is passing by in the middle of the night, just by the sound of the flatspots every few cars…wonder why so many hoppers have this condition. Dave Williams http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nsaltoonajohnstown
Mainly be\cause hopper cars are usually always filled to that Max (around 100 tons) and can be left in sidings for long periods of time if its a smaller reciver/ slower emptying method. WILD detectors usually pick up the bad (close to being a derailment) kind of cars, but depending on where the car is going/comming from may mean it will nerver hit a WILD detector.
Shippers and receivers create a great deal of the flat spots as they like to shove cars around in their tracks with wheel loaders, farm tractors, fork lifts, TrackMobiles, etc., and for their own safety and efficiency they do not release the hand brakes because they have no way of stopping the car from continuing to roll once it gets started. Eventually this practice will be put to a stop, both for rail fatigue issues and for environmental reasons – noise reduction. Railroads are getting more and more pressure to reduce noise when passing through communities, and noise-reduction programs are cropping up any time a railroad wants something from a community, e.g., the EJ&E merger. The rail fatigue issue is important for getting longer life and for achieving heavier axle loads.
I have noticed that except for well cars, UP seems to have anywhere between 1 and 4 flat wheels on a train, where the BNSF I have only heard 1 or 2 flat wheels ever. It seems that every UP train has a flat wheel somewhere on it. Is this a sign of the difference in car maintenece practices?
I seriously doubt it. It’s more likely a difference in the type of trains you are witnessing and the corridors you are looking at. Intermodal and autorack trains, and tank cars, will have fewer flat wheels; cars in loose-car freight, particularly covered hoppers, centerbeams, and open-top cars of all kinds, will have more, because of the way they are loaded and unloaded. Unit coal trains that are never broken up for unloading will rarely have flat spots, unit trains that are always broken up will often have them.
Does anyone have any figures on whether empty-load brake systems (I don’t have the correct word) are working to reduce problems such as this? It’s fairly easy to see which hoppers, Bethgons, and covered hoppers have these things on their slope sheets.
It’s a long-held theory of mine that we’re hearing more flat spots these days not because there are more flat spots, but because welded rail, without the noise of rail-joint batter, allows the flat spots to be heard more distinctly.
Most embarrassing flat spots I ever heard were the last time the UP E9s came through.
And, passenger cars get them, too. A few years ago, my wife and I were going to New York from Washington on the Vermonter. As soon as we left Washington, I noticed that we had a flat wheel on the Business car, and the car was taken off in Philadelphia, and we were forced to find seats in a coach. I was wondering, but did not ask, why the car had not been changed out in Washington the night before. No other car available? It was believed that the flat spot was not too long, and it grew to the point that it had to be taken out in Philadelphia?
Load/empty brakes would help because you wouldn’t have to have such high braking ratios on the empty cars. As the load to tare ratio of the equpment increases, you have high braking ratios on the cars when empty in order to get stopped at all when loaded. So, the number of occasions when wheels will slide on empty equipment increases as the cars load/tare increases.
One of the big drawbacks of L/E braking is if the sensor gets stuck in the “load” position. Slid flats for sure, then, when empty!
I’m hoping that ECP would make strain gage based L/E sensors happen. They’d be almost bullet proof.
I remember in the last millennium, I was sitting at the tracks near a flour mill waiting for some trains to come by. The flour mill had an early SW type switcher they used for switching. While I was there they dragged some hoppers to load; they did not release the hand brakes. The sound and smell were horrible.
A very good way for a set of wheels to get flat spots that I know of is to leave the handbrakes on the car and attempt to push or pull the car. Unfortunitly it is done quite often. As the previous poster noted above the smell and the noise is horrible!! The smell is very sicking. Though sometimes you have to leave the brakes on to spot a car in a industry. This is true of tank cars or auto racks that are loaded…I know one thing…no conductor wants to have their cars run off the track or hit a customer’s building. I garantee that the conductor will get fired [:(!]
Flat spots can also happen when the slack adjuster on a car sticks. This happend to me once when I was on an over the road train. I had get out and walk 1/2 mile down the train to the car that was hanging up. I spent two hours in the middle of the night with a hammer and chissle (sp) knocking out the pin that held the slack adjuster together. That wasn’t fun…it was dark out and on top of that I held up other trains on the main line.
Not sure why, but it seems that CSX open hoppers are notorious for having flat spot on their wheels. I’ve seen and heard unit coal trains where most of the cars in the consist had wheels with flat spots.
I was told by an engineer buddy that at a couple of coal mines in VA and/or WV routinely practice shuffling cars with hand brakes set the entire time citing reasons previously mentioned. It is at one of these two facilities that Titan America receives their coal from. I say CSX should charge these companies accordingly for the damage they are causing to their equipment or hold their own crews accountable if it’s CSX who’s doing the switching, which I doubt is the case.
Here’s another video I shot, further exemplifying what we’re talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjV_cyso9RY&feature=channel_page It’s not CSX rolling stock, but still on topic. Larry was definitely right when he pointed out that empties amplify the noise substantially.