Calling Coal Dragger

[1_click_off]

Is mainline rail a standard rating throughout the country? I want to say 110 or 115lbs? A place I worked at had 90lbs from what I remember. Was told this is the weight over a 3’ span? Maintenance said they were ok with every third cross tie being good. Man did we have a lot of derailments until they reworked the yard. One year we needed to put loads in the empty yard. That was a disaster. Got a lot of new rail and ties that year!

Was also told most derailments happen 14-19mph because that match’s the natural fq of the cars swaying with the typical splice lengths.

Have some tribal learning for operating an engine, but that is about all. That was 20 years ago. I still remember opening up the cabinet and throwing that knife switch to juice it up for a start. Anyone know if the above tidbits are close to accurate?

[Pacific5th]

Is mainline rail a standard rating throughout the country? I want to say 110 or 115lbs? A place I worked at had 90lbs from what I remember. Was told this is the weight over a 3’ span? Maintenance said they were ok with every third cross tie being good. Man did we have a lot of derailments until they reworked the yard. One year we needed to put loads in the empty yard. That was a disaster. Got a lot of new rail and ties that year!

Was also told most derailments happen 14-19mph because that match’s the natural fq of the cars swaying with the typical splice lengths.

Have some tribal learning for operating an engine, but that is about all. That was 20 years ago. I still remember opening up the cabinet and throwing that knife switch to juice it up for a start. Anyone know if the above tidbits are close to accurate?

Mainline rail is 132-140lbs now. The industry standard is like 286k cars now and you have to have heavy rail if you want to do that every day with multiple trains. Hell the average grain train I run is 15,000 tons coal trains are pushing 20,000 tons. Where I work we run 30-50 trains a day. They have lighter rail on branch’s and yard tracks though. I know of some 85lbs rail from the late 1890’s still in use in some obscure service and industry tracks.

13-21mph or something like that is bad on jointed rail. The cars will rock side to side and can derail at those speeds. We have instructions that state if your on jointed rail and can’t do above 21mph then you have to stay below 13mph. Most heavy main line track is continuous welded rail though and it’s not a issue.

The knife switch is the main power switch, kill it and you have no battery power. So yes it has to be on for the locomotive to function in any way.

[pinzgauer]

Pinz, freelance or prototype?

I'm rusty on the terminology, but I used the more appropriately scale flex track. I forget the exact math, but I want to say it was decreasing squares.

The interesting thing is I could not get it to match any ellipse. So it's something unique. It makes sense for a railroad engineer to use the approach they do because they're not making loops that need to look optically similar. But the official railroad approach is a pain to make matching curves on a small layout. (Think 4 by 8 flat top)

A properly radiused curve is a thing of beauty and is more noticeable in model railroads than full size. Then again I believe all full size curves are radiused, so we don't have a comparison. Well, maybe not the short loop tracks at the local railroad museum.

[jpmuscle]

NAD83 (2011) masterrace.

NERD

Somewhat related but Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, PA is a pretty cool engineering structure to behold.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hors...(Pennsylvania)

I’m trying to the pics I took when I was there last.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk