About an hour North of Charlotte, the Southern Railroad had a major Steam locomotive maintenance facility in the town of Spencer. That rail yard is now the North Carolina transportation museum.
Over the weekend, a four day event was held called Streamlinere at Spencer
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/25645657/streamliners-at-spencer-railroad-event-rolls-into-rowan-county
Passenger locomotives from all over the country were sent to Spencer for this once in a lifetime event. One of the ones I recognized right away is a New Haven paint job FP9 that was still in service on the Waterberry commuter line as a couple years ago.
While this was an interesting event (I didn’t go), the five-year-old in the video is not learning much railroad history. I didn’t see anything on display that remotely resembles a streamliner.
Streamliners were integrated sets of locomotives and passenger cars – introduced in the 1930s to try to hold off the growth of airline traffic and the US Highway system. The very first strea liners were steam, then replaced with diesel locomotives after World War II.
Most of the 25 locomotives on display were 1950s era GM Electromotive diesels in various paint schemes. In passenger service, they typically pulled unrelated aging pre WW2 wooden passenger cars, just before and after Amtrak took over passenger rail service in the Zunited States. GM’s primary business was selling cars, not R&D on new high speed rail equipment.
All in all, pretty cool stuff. Back in my home state we have a small railroad that features the same vintage locomotives and the metal streamliner cars. They also have two of the domed scenic cars that were popular on cross country trips. One thing that is a blast is to ride on one of these passenger cars – recline the seat all the way and you still can’t touch the toes of the person sitting across from you.
Rail still has some advantages over other modes of transportation here in the northeast for medium distances… at least for now. They included cell phone usage and constant internet connectivity, and 120 v AC power. The airline industry is closing that gap quickly..
Also in the northeast where the big metro areas are still mainly “hub and spoke”, people live in neighborhoods where it is illegal to have significant business activity, and businesses are in areas where it is hard to build new homes. Furthermore, in many places, the two different types of government define “zones” are separated by rivers crossed by a rotting infrastructure of toll bridges. Elsewhere in the US, those conditions don’t exist, at least not on the same scale.
CC – Yes. A good point on the power and the internet access. Commuters are lost without the ability to work while in route. I have always enjoyed trains and am susceptible to bouts of nostalgia.
My house is about 100 yards from an active rail line that mostly runs freight and KY deep mine coal. Every so often an old, coal fired steam driven locomotive passes by on a scenic trip into the mountains. We’ve taken the trip, years ago, and it was fun. Being summer time and no AC, the windows were open to get ventilation. A little smoke and some soot from the coal fire would get through the open windows, but other than that it was a good trip. Like Art said, lots of leg room.
Also, on out last trip to New Zealand, 2007 we took a train from Christchurch, through the mountains and over to the west coast. That was a really nice trip. I think it was a diesel fueled steam engine. The scenery on that trip was awesome and we could walk to the rear car, which was an open air car. We’ll do it again if we ever get back down there.
When trains pass each other going opposite directions, to they keep to the left in New Zealand as the cars do? The passenger trains I have taken in the US that have parallel tracks are always on the right hand side here (I am sure there are exceptions).
People in hallways seem to keep the the right in the US. When I was in the UK, I’d often have to do a dance when passing people in the hallways before realizing that people there tend to walk on the left just as they drive on the left.
From memory, there was only a single track through the mountains. But yeah, in NZ they drive on the left side, or in my view, the wrong side. I remember there being a different way that people would peruse the isles in grocery stores and on sidewalks and so forth, so it must have something to do with driving on the left side and not the right side.
The Chicago and Northwestern RR is the most obvious exception. With commuter rail, stations are important while you are waiting in the morning for the train, irrelevant when you return in the afternoon. The Northwestern line has all its stations on the “left” side. This has the potential to be confusing as the other commuter lines are right side stations.
How trains “pass” is a critically important process. There was a simulator I used to play from a company in Pittsburgh (they make RR signal software for real). The jargon for the process: The dispatcher plans the “meet”. Typically one train has priority over the other (container train beats coal train, Amtrak beats freight if Amtrak is on time).
The train that has priority gets the mainline (straight) track, the inferior train pulls into the siding. For this to work, a couple things have to be true: The inferior train must arrive at the passing location first and be completely onto the siding before the opposing train arrives. Another key point is the siding must be long enough to hold the train. If the dispatcher makes a mistake or the plans go wrong, the superior train may have to wait for the train to clear the far switch. If both trains are too long for the siding, it is going to be a very long day.
Adding to the mess, railroad employees have very strict time limits – if things go wrong and the crew runs out of hours while waiting on the siding, a new crew had to be driven in by van. Since they may be hours away, that decision has to be made well ahead of time – otherwise that train will block the siding for hours creating more problems. When I was living near Chicago, these kind of cascading problems frequently clogged up the entire rail system in the Chicago area – where you have a number of places were competing railroads have tracks that cross each other.
CSX trains are dispatched from Florida – computers are used to facilitate the planning of meets. Stopping and starting a train consumes a lot of energy – so their goal is to closely monitor the speed of both trains and arrange it so that neither train has to stop at the meet. That gets tricky since a foul up could mean that one train might have to slam on its brakes and still needs to be able to stop in time.
“Adding to the mess, railroad employees have very strict time limits – if things go wrong and the crew runs out of hours while waiting”
Isn’t that amazing? It sounds just like airline pilots and long haul truckers. Regulations meant to improve safety end up making a mess out of things. What’s the saying? The road to Hell is paved with good intentions – or something similar.