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Additional 3 hose and 5 hose MU things to consider. During the 1950-1970 loco air brake change-over from the Brake Cylinder Equalizing system to the Actuating/A&R system an engineer often got a witches brew of differing loco air brakes in one consist. It was VERY important when picking up locos enroute to position these various locos properly in the consist and also to properly position the various air brake valves in the cab. Getting it wrong meant you could have all kinds of problems. Such as no brake on some units or no brakes on all units behind the one improperly configured. Or it could be that when you baled off the loco brakes during an automatic air brake set the improper connections caused a trailing unit(s) brakes to apply fully and slide the wheels. One afternoon I was called from the Sheridan, WY engineer extraboard to DH to Clearmont, WY to relieve an engineer who was dieing on the hours of service. When I got there I found a mess. Due to a derailment a couple of days before a through local freight train had been tied down in the Clearmont siding. This engineer had gotten the next local freight out of Gillette and was ordered to stop at Clearmont and pick up the previous train that was tied down there. Upon stopping he cut his power off his train and coupled it onto the power of the train in the siding. He MU'd the two sets of power but he got something wrong. He ended up with 8 units of various ages and brake systems. GP9s, SD7s, GP30, U23C, SD40, whatever. He pulled the train from the siding so it could be doubled onto his own train sitting on the main. Pulling west of the west switch at Clearmont is a steep grade. When clear of the switch he stopped and then reversed to couple the two trains together. But he could not stop in time and rammed his own standing train with enough force to crumple a CB&Q water service tank car and derailed another car. When I got there the tank car had been toppled from the track and the other car rerailed. That engineer left for Sheridan in my van after telling me there was "something wrong" with the brakes. The consist was such a conglomeration of brake systems, hose couplings, and cab valve positionings that I didn't even try to figure out what was wrong. I uncoupled EVERY MU hose between every unit and started over from scratch. I'd couple up the hoses between the 1st and 2nd unit and position their control valves then do a complete loco air brake test. When that worked I did the same between the 2nd and 3rd units, then the 3rd and 4th and so on until I had all the brakes on the entire 8 unit consist working properly. By the time we departed Clearmont it was getting dark, The first thing I noticed was I had no gauge lights. The crash had knocked the filaments out of almost all gauge lights in the consist! So I checked the headlight on the lead unit. Yep, no working headlight. I had to find one that worked on a trailing unit, remove it, and install it on the point. Mixing 6BL, 24RL(of different types), and 26L brake systems in a single consist was always fun. Not! __._,_.___ Posted by: runextra@gmail.com __,_._,___ |