Hotbox in the heartland
I greatly admire people who are purists. Sadly, I’m not one of them. So I’ll raise a toast from my can of non-beer that is helping me get through the difficulties of writing a monthly newsletter, badly.
Most of my purist friends don’t like setting their bikes up on trainers and riding indoors, but I don’t care, I like to get some exercise and sometimes it's fun to skip a day of interacting with the motoring public roaring by to get to whatever place people need to hurry to in an empty ¾ ton diesel truck with 36 inch super swampers and straight pipe exhaust. So inside, sure don’t mind if I do once in a while. But, to make things even slightly palatable, I need some loud television to watch, and it has to be something sufficiently dumb to keep me from thinking too much about the fact that I’m riding nowhere on some rollers down in the basement. The shows I demand are the modern equivalent of something like “The A Team” in terms of production quality and plot. Lots of machine guns, car chases involving brown 1970’s muscle cars, and Mopar police cruisers, things exploding, all that. But one of my most beloved themes is fighting on top of a moving train or hanging off the little ladder on the side, shooting bullets everywhere. Who doesn't love when the bad guy gets konked in the head by the tunnel, it never gets old.
There is a great scene that I love. The train somehow becomes uncoupled which is NEVER good, but the bad thing is made worse because the air hose for the brakes is just dangling and hissing and now it’s a runaway train and headed to disaster. That’s my favorite.
But sadly, we need to leave that train for a moment, careening to certain death with a load of dynamite or live alligators or whatever. Because it’s time for some more tedious train history.
In the 1820’s, Baltimore and Ohio started running freight railroads in America. One of the many engineering challenges of trains was the tremendous weight of the cars and all the momentum once that weight got rolling. Rail cars were fitted with manual brakes that operated by turning a large wheel on the roof. As a train approached a curve or station, brakemen would climb up on the roofs of the cars and put a club into the spokes of the brake wheel and wrench on the wheel until the brakes came on. If you have ever changed a tire on the side of the road, it’s easy to stumble when the lug nut lets go. So too, the brakeman would stumble and fall off the train, or under the wheels. In winter, the roofs were icy, making the job extra dangerous
The brakemen were also responsible for coupling trains and cutting cars from the trains. At the time, it required pulling a large pin on the coupling while standing in the space between cars, leading to more deaths. Electric switches were not invented yet, so the brakeman would have to run ahead of the slow moving train and manually throw a switch, like in the cartoons
The gold standard ridiculous job of a brakeman was the “flying switch” where one man uncoupled a moving train at the right moment while another threw a switch, sending a section of “orphan cars” down a siding and then backing up the train to attach to the remaining cars that were also rolling. More death ensued from this move, plus pedestrians were being killed by orphan cars rolling silently down the street. Maybe a day glow vest would have helped. So, I’ve had some stupid and dangerous jobs, but railroad brakemen in the 1800’s would be the show stopper.
To make an insanely dangerous transportation system slightly less so, George Westinghouse invented the air powered braking system around 1870. On a modern American train, a huge diesel engine turns a generator that makes electricity that powers motors that make the train go. One long downhills in the mountains, the motors can act as generators to brake the train, throwing off the waste electricity as heat through a big oven element thing up on the roof. The engines also power a big air compressor that runs the horn and wipers and the Westinghouse air braking system on the cars. A high pressure train line carries air to each car which is used to operate the braking system. The new “monster trains” that are up to 3 miles long lose so much air that a second locomotive is stuck in the middle of the train to add braking power.
So back to the guys in the movie after that boring paragraph on brakes. The cool thing about the Westinghouse air brake is that it requires pressure to release, so if a hose is severed or comes loose, the brakes automatically come on, so the runaway train doesn’t run too far which makes for a kind of boring movie. Similar to how fire hydrants don’t spew water into the air when a Caprice knocks one over. Who knew? I like it better the non-factual way.
I don’t want to over write about the recent derailment in Ohio, it’s been in the news so much and has sort of been covered well in the media. The NTSB released an initial report today that provided a bit more detail about the accident. The train was traveling just under 50 MPH when an overheated bearing on car #23 caught fire, quickly spreading to the hopper of plastic pellets in the car. Upon applying the brakes, the cars began to derail, sending 11 cars off the tracks, including 5 with DOT-105 pressurized tanker car placards. These used to be characterized as “high hazard” cargo, but were downgraded a while back. Reading the technical manual for these cars provided to first responders by the rail industry, they were pretty clearly nothing to trifle with in the event of a rupture or fire.
The cars split open and spread the fire to the cars containing vinyl chloride. The hazmat placards on the sides of the cars melted in the fire, leaving first responders unsure of what the spreading fire consisted of and how to safely respond. Hot bearing detectors stationed along the tracks did not set off an alarm in the locomotive until the box was already superheated and on fire.
Hot box detector
So, a little went wrong, then a lot went wrong. Regulations for the requirement that trains carrying hazardous materials be equipped with supplemental electronic braking systems were weakened and repealed after a flurry of lobbying efforts by the rail industry a while back. Would better brakes have stopped this disaster? Maybe, depends who you ask.
Our lifestyle requires a lot of petrochemicals. All the plastic stuff we use, the gasoline and diesel we need for powering every larger cars and trucks, fertilizers, solvents, compressed gasses. Trains, trucks, pipelines all have been responsible for tragedies and loss of life over the years. If there is one single thing we know about the rail industry is that they will not regulate themselves. Rail from the onset has always been the purest blue flame of unrestrained profit seeking in an industry that has been historically subsidized by the American taxpayer. Rail exists as both a public good and essential component of national security, as well as a small handful of monopoly providers owned by huge hedge funds. Rail is also highly regulated. Rail also applies tremendous pressure on elected officials. Funny that we are the only first world nation with a functional rail system that is not nationalized.
Maybe change will come from the attention on the problems of Precision Scheduled Railroading and the grinding working conditions of freight crews, the compromises we make to Amtrak service because of the shared track systems and the latest disaster in Ohio. This is a strong industry that needs a firm regulatory hand from the federal government and the will to protect our shared national rail asset, and the health of the people who live near railroad lines, which is many, many Americans. Let’s hope for leadership on this issue.