In the late 70s early 80s I encountered friction bearing hotboxes on two
ribbonrail trains. The first occurred on my train at Aberdeen, MT. Examination
revealed it was smoking but not yet really hot and it still had oil. We had
some of those hotbox lube sticks (I forget what they were called) if needed. So
I was going to "baby" it to our home terminal of Sheridan, WY. I had done that
before for short distances with freight trains on a couple of occasions. Since
the max speed was 35mph on a ribbonrail anyway I figured running 20mph with
frequent stops for checks should work and only add about 25 minutes to our
arrival home. I should have done just that but I decided to be a nice guy and
inform the DS that I'd be running a little slow to Sheridan because of a
hotbox. I was told to remain where we were and the wheel truck would be sent
out. It was over 3 hours before we were rolling east again. Moral to that story
is "just do it". Keep quiet and "sneak" into town.
The second time I was on a coal empty west of Anita, MT and came up behind a
stopped ribbonrail train that had a hotbox. They had called the DS and a wheel
truck had been called out. A couple of hours later when the truck got there the
carmen/trainmaster/roadforeman had us cut our power off the coal empties (5
units) and couple onto the rear of the ribbonrail train. The carmen uncoupled
the ribbonrail train just behind the hotbox car and I pulled the rear end of
the RR train back about 30 feet... sliding the train out from underneath the 40
strings of rail. The bad order car was jacked up, its truck rolled out from
under it into the gap between cars, its offending wheelset & bearings replaced
then rolled back under the car, and the car lowered onto its truck. Now I had
to shove the rear end of the rail train ahead to make the coupling. To do so
the ends of most of those 40 strings of welded rail had to be hand guided back
thru their respective support rollers on the last car. The many sectionmen,
carmen, and officers managed to do that as I shoved ahead inches at at time.
Amazingly no one was hurt.
But the mess wasn't over. The ribbonrail crew, my crew, and several other crews
all went dead on the hours of service that evening on the far west end of the
former CB&Q.
AK
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