Posted by Chicago Railfan on September 28, 2007
Cool video! |
Posted by K100DS on October 8, 2007
Entertaining AND educational! :-) |
Posted by rrvideoman on October 8, 2007
Very nice . Men at hard, physical work. There's something that we don't see a lot of these days. Very interesting Marc. |
Posted by Rockwall Tim on September 1, 2008
What's the "new" way of doing this? |
Posted by Bicot (Marc Caya) on September 2, 2008
The new way is by using Herzog ballast trains at high speed; it is now an unmanned operation as the vannes are opened pneumaticaly using GPS tracking... |
Posted by SoEasy on February 7, 2013
No hard work there. Try that from coal hoppers, chaining the doors to limit how much they open. Start with 1 or 2 crossties in front of the wheels of the trailing trucks of the front 3 or 4 cars. Knock open the doors one after the other while the engineer moves the train along. Keep enough rock flowing out so you don't leave gaps and don't let so much out that the crossties can't keep it push off the rails. Then as a car empties, you've got to push the doors up enough to get the chains off, move them back down the train and put them on doors again. Jerk out crossties, then slide them under another car so it is ready to empty as it comes to where the rock emptied from the lead cars. The doors have to be opened by swinging up a locking cam then knocking the latch (basicly a hook), upwards with a spike maul (hammer). Some wouldn't open very easily, remember you're walking sideways or backwards on a sloping berm, swinging at a latch the size of your thumb at just the right time. If you are by the river, you may have to hang onto the car to keep from slipping down the slope and into the river and swing the hammer one-handed. All on rthe fly. One more thing...Don't get run over by the TRAIN!!! |
Posted by Big Gandy Dancer Joe on February 18, 2013
Been there, done that. Including the method described by SoEasy. Another thing that's tough to deal with is if you're on the leeward side of the cars from the wind you eat, and I mean eat, a lot of dust off the ballast. Nothing like showing up for work in the morning and getting the word, "Ok boys, we've got a 100 car train of ballast to unload today!" |
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