I was watching the local freight switch a customer today when they ran into an unexpected puzzle. I thought this might be something that could be used randomly at operating sessions to add a bit more challenge. As if we need to make things more difficult :o Some background - The industry is a Construction Debris transfer plant called AWD. The siding is about 20 cars long and is worked as trailing point. They get empty high-side gondolas and ship loads about 5 at a time. The total car count is usually around 10. When the loads are pulled there is usually still 5 or 6 empties left on the siding. Loading is done starting with the car closest to the switch using a large machine with a heavy claw on a boom and moves on treads. Movement of the cars during loading is done with a CAT front-end loader with a coupler fixed to the rear. When they are ready for the daily car swap, the loads will be closest to the switch and any empties deeper in the siding. Quite often the loading process will damage one of the hoppers making it unsafe to move. That’s what happened today. Here is the CAT pulling one of the new gondolas…
Normal operations are to spot the empties on the main, pull the loads from the siding to the main, hitch on to the empties and pull them beyond the switch, then shove them all back into the siding spotting the first car at the dock. The operation is finished when the empties are cut and the loads are back on the main coupled to the end of train that was left waiting there. When switching AWD, any bad order cars must be shunted to the far end of the siding and left uncoupled from the rest. It will be serviced at a later date by a mobile car knocker shop. This requires getting at the bad car, keeping it accessible while shunting cars back to the main to clear the siding. Today the crew was lucky, the bad order car was the first one in the string, but often it is buried in a string of loads requiring many moves. This would be an interesting element to ad to a regular operation. Pick a car awaiting pick-up at random, and use something to mark it as bad-order. [I mark my real bad-order cars with a white twist-tie through one of the top handrails]. The crew working the siding would then need to do any switching necessary to get the bad order car in a position where it is not in the way of operations and not blocking any loading areas. At the same time they need to pick up the balance of cars to be taken and leave cars as their switch list demands. If the siding isn’t long enough to accommodate the bad order car plus the drops, then the dispatcher would need to instruct the crew where to spot the excess car. I’ll have to remember this one when I get some industries on-line. JR
You know half way between 1:22.5 and 1:20.3. I’m a big believer in how does it look. In Jon’s picture, that payloader looks mighty small next to that hopper.