Hello Mike and All -
I have had my allocated Leinenkugel so I'll offer this:
What they have had for the past 25 years or so is extended range dynamic brake.
This can bring a train down to
a couple m.p.h. A light air brake application will then bring the train to a
complete halt.
Back in the good ol' days - CB&Q (and Santa Fe and Rio Grande) had FTs with
dynamic brake, but......
the brake grids could handle only about 600amps. The FTs could generate a lot
more amperage getting a train
started than they could getting it slowed down. Lotsa go - not much whoa. Up
in the mountains tonnage would
be matched to the ability of the locomotives to hold the speed on the downgrade.
The initial cost and the maintenance for dynamic brakes didn't seem worth it on
a Mid-western roller coaster railroad.
(Had a stretch in western Illinois with double hogbacks - there was a moment
when the train was going uphill-downhill-
uphill and downhill all at the same time).
And diesel fuel was 12 cents a gallon.
When the price went up and up and up fuel conservation became the watchword.
Locomotives were shut down when
not needed - even locomotives in a consist moving down the main. (Found a lot
of units with bad batteries - the next
morning). So nowadays engineers are taught to control their train with the
dynamic. Period. On roads with train
control - like the C&NW - engineers who get a penalty air brake application are
told to let the train come to a stop
and then recover the air and start the train from a standstill. Back in the
day, we'd recover the air on the fly and the
train would never stop.
Old heads knew just where to 'stretch 'em out and put little air under 'em' to
get over a patch of bad track.
And what do the pups (piglets) do with a rock train or an ore train? The whole
train seems to come over the top of the
hill in one bunch and then it pushes real hard against the motors.
Life in the 21st century. Must be why I retired in 1999. PAW
________________________________
From: "mdecker@gwtc.net [CBQ]" <CBQ@yahoogroups.com>
To: CBQ@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 8:16 PM
Subject: Re: [CBQ] Train handling question
I'm an "air man", but I still managed to collect quite a bit of money in "fuel
cards" :>) The Trainmaster asked "How did Decker get a fuel card?" Mostly,
any time I wasn't having to pull a load uphill, I could time shutting off so
that the "drift" would keep it pretty near track speed. Coming down out of
Newcastle, I used to "drift brake". If you did it just right, you could go
for miles with a "minimum" or 10 pounds in a coal train, and never touch the
dynamic :>)
I heard that one of our young "piglets" that I had for a Conductor a couple
times, told my Daughter's boyfriend that "Mike breaks all the rules, but he
stopped that train like a car. I thought we were going to get "dinged" for
it." The Company's got the new guys so afraid of touching the brake valve,
that most of them won't do it until they are just about by the red one. Most
people out there running now would likely kill somebody on a waycar.
Mike
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