Story Notes: Emmet St. Bridge (Destination Unknown) · 11:45pm Sep 30th, 2021
Remember how I said I should write more stories with ponies and trains? I wrote another story about ponies and trains.
Pre-read by AlwaysDressesInStyle who also loves previous gen ponies.
I have to start this with a disclaimer. First, it is illegal to ride a freight train. Secondly, it is dangerous to ride a freight train. Experienced railroaders, who work with trains as their jobs are often killed by moving equipment. The same goes for riders. Trains are heavy, often operate around tight clearances, and can be deceptively quiet for how big they are.
Some of my inspiration for this story came from watching Hobo Shoestring and Stobe the Hobo videos on YouTube. Stobe was killed by a train.
Sweetsong is a G3 pony with a mandolin cutie mark, and while she wasn’t ever in G4 as a character, there were toys of her as a pegasus (she was an earth pony in G3).
There’s also some fanart of her, but not much.
As I’m sure you will have guessed, locations in this story are real, as are the railroads who run there. Battle Creek, for instance, is known as Cereal City since W. K. Kellogg started his company there, and it’s still doing a roaring business. Their first product was corn flakes, which were invented by mistake. At some point (I didn’t read the Wikipedia article) they decided to frost them as well.
Sweetsong, despite her name, is more of a unfrosted Corn Flakes girl, although she wouldn’t be opposed to Frosted Flakes for dessert.
Gondolas are open-topped rail cars that do not have a bottom discharge. They’re used to carry cargo that won’t be damaged by exposure to the elements, such as rocks or scrap metal, and they often aren’t cleaned well between uses.
These days, coal is usually carried in high-side gondolas, called bathtub gondolas. They’re designed to be turned over to be dumped out when they get to their destination. They’ll have a rotary coupler on one end, which is marked with a painted stripe on that end of the train, and for obvious reasons all the cars need to be facing the same direction.
Some gondolas are also designed to dump to the side (side-dump gondolas).
For human riders, they’re not a good choice of car. There’s no cover inside them where one can hide, and there’s often leftover cargo or dunnage in them. For a pegasus, who can just fly out the top if she’s discovered, it’s not as bad an option, so long as it wasn’t carrying anything too nasty.
Container cars, or well cars, are designed to carry two shipping containers. The well looks like a potential place to hide, but it’s not that great. The sides are low enough that a rider is easily spotted, and since many containers carry high-value cargo, they’re often watched with more scrutiny than a gondola would be. Also, a lot of them have an open floor, so a rider would have to perch on cross-bracing.
Grainers are a colloquial term for covered hoppers.
They’re loaded through hatches or troughs on the top, and empty under the car. They’ve usually got two, three, or four compartments, and carry a wide variety of dry bulk products, such as grains, plastic pellets, and cement. They come in a variety of shapes, but the sloped ends of them with a platform beneath is a typical design. They’re extremely common on freight trains, and some of them have really good hiding places as well as some protection from the weather.
Autoracks are freight cars designed to carry new automobiles or trucks, and due to incidents of vandalism and theft in the seventies, they’re completely enclosed.
It’s not impossible to get in them, but due to their cargo, they’ll also have a higher scrutiny than a normal car.
“Unit trains” are ones that carry a single cargo and generally stay together as one unit from where they’re loaded to where they are unloaded, such as a coal train. “Mixed freights Manifest freights” carry a variety of cars, and are often split up in yards with different blocks of cars going to different final destinations.
Trains have several types of brakes. They’ve got air brakes on all the wheels of the train, and the locomotives also often have what are called ‘dynamic brakes.’ Most modern locomotives don’t have the diesel engines connected directly to the wheels, instead the engine runs a generator, which powers traction motors on the axle. Since electric motors can be turned to produce electricity, the dynamic brake turns the traction motors into generators, which slows the train. It’s basically like an engine brake for a train. Sometimes on electrified railroads that power can be fed back into the grid, but for a diesel-electric locomotive, there’s no way to store it, so they’ve got huge resistance grids on the roof and turn it into heat.
Like truck drivers, train crews have a maximum number of hours they can be on duty,* and there are set crew change locations where the crews are changed. Oftentimes, that’s not in the switchyard (I assume to avoid causing problems with normal yard operations), but typically somewhere close to a yard that has good road access.
To avoid this blog post being insanely long, other railroad car types and practices will be mentioned on the chapter where they’re first encountered. Or if I forget something (which is likely to happen, let’s be honest), I’ll bring it up in the blog post for the next chapter.
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*One bit of railroad slang I particularly like is when a crew hits their hours-of-service limitation, they’ve “died on the clock.”
Yeah, there's a reason this is typically only done by hoboes (desperate with nothing to lose) or the young (ignorant and impulsive at best).
Afaik from a YouTube video, Kellogg's partner wanted to add frosting, but Kellogg disagreed since he wanted to keep his cereals targeted at the health and medical sector. They got into an argument, and his partner went off to form his own rival cereal company that made frosted flakes.
In road vehicles, this is called "regenerative braking", though I guess you knew that. The terminology is not as apt for trains though since as you described, many diesel electrics just burn off the power rather than "recovering" it by recharging a battery.
Another fact you probably already know is that almost all F1 racing vehicles have regenerative braking, because refueling takes precious race time and friction braking would be wasting the fuel that was put into getting up to speed. Plus, it saves the friction brakes from wear and getting red hot. The wheels are still primarily run from the engine, but there are also motors on the same axle. The regenerated power is put into a small battery, and when the car gets back onto a straight section, that battery power is used to run the motors for an extra boost in acceleration.
I read that as "Emmet Saint Bridge" and wondered who it was. :O
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There are people who do it for fun—and I’d say he fell in the latter category—and perhaps for other reasons. From watching his videos, I don’t think that Hobo Shoestring needs to ride the rails, but he chooses to. Still, I don’t recommend anybody try it.
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That could be, I do recall that Kellogg intended his food to be nutritious and wholesome and not loaded with sugar to make it taste better. I think (but could be wrong) that he was vegan, even. Pretty sure that Kellogg’s is the one who makes Frosted Flakes now, so I guess that the rivalry got sorted with a takeover.
Yeah, and that was kind of the holy grail for hybrids and full electrics. Various schemes have been tried on locomotives (usually changing it to mechanical energy, like a flywheel) and I think it’s Wabco that’s now got a full battery electric road locomotive, although I don’t know much about it.
I actually did not know that about F1 cars. It’s not a sport I pay that much attention to, to be honest. Doesn’t surprise me that they thought of it, I’ve seen a few YouTube videos describing various schemes F1 teams tried back in the day to get an advantage.
I think in terms of road autos that’s what’s called ‘mild hybrid,’ where you can use a supplemental electric motor to get more power on acceleration, which lets you have a smaller gasoline motor, and I suspect (but don’t know for certain) that’s what some of GM’s hybridized cars like the Malibu were doing (it had a drive-motor alternator and some batteries and all I really know about that system is that it shreds serpentine belts).
For some kinds of stop-and-go driving, like city driving or delivery vehicles, recapturing as much of the braking energy as they can could mean huge improvements in fuel economy. I think that the US Postal Service is looking into that as they search for a replacement for the LLVs.
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Heh, he’s the one who got sainted when he put a bridge over the rail yard.
Thanks for writing, blog post and story both. :)
This is incorrect, it is a Manifest, not mixed freight. Take it from a train nerd to a train nerd. Learn the proper terminology.
I unfortunately know about the Quack Kellogg:
He was a quack. He was convinced that sex is bad and that defecation is good. He encouraged the surgeries of Prepucectomy and Coloectomy for preventing masturbation and making people cdontinually soil themselves. Although other Doctors new that he is a quack, they adopted his surgeries because they are "Billable Procedures". Colonectomy did not catch on, but Sexual Genital Mutilation did.
He invented cornflakes as an healthfood. His brother started mass-producing it. He had a falling out with his brother when his brother added sugar to cornflakes. His brother named the company after himself.
Hundreds of millions of minors suffered unconsenting medically necessary nontherapeutic.sexual genital mutilation because doctors adopted a quack-procedure because it is billable because it is billable. Atleast, we do not all have our rectums removed at birth so that we should continuously soil ourselves.
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That’s the kind of history that the Kellogg Company probably doesn’t promote on their cereal tour (can’t say for sure; I’ve never been on it).
On the pro Kellogg side, during the depression, the factories ran 30-hour weeks so they could employ more people.
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Just remember that the CerealCompany is the work of the brother —— ¡not the quack!
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Yes, true, although they usually do mention the sanitarium when they mention the origin of Kellogg cereals.
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The flakes were an experiment in HealthFood from the quack which the brother manufactured. GrahamCrackers and SodaPop started off as HealthFoods too.
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I suppose soft drinks are healthier than alcohol, and graham crackers are pretty good, too. Especially when crumbled and used as the crust for a cheesecake or as the top and bottom of a s’more. Or just dipped into frosting. . .
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Technically, like MudBriar, soft drinks are in drinks not hard (alcoholic). I believe that you mean "SodaPop".
DietSodaPop is almost as good as plain water. It is the sugar which is bad. A can of SodaPop can have nearly 40 grams of sugar. If one drinks a 6-pack daily, that is nearly a ¼ of a kilogram of sugar or ½ a pound. This brings up a personal PetPeeve:
Many minicipalities have SodaPopTaxes. Evidently, they believe that it is the carbonation which is the problem —— ¡it is the sugar! I wonder ¿how many people gave up diet SodaPop and took up juice with 50 grams of sugar per serving instead? They should tax the sugar in beverages instead —— ¡not the bubbles!
Let us suppose that SodaPop costs 1.00 U$D per can . We put a tax of 1 cent per gram of sugar. Diet SodaPop will still cost 1.00U$D, but sugary SodaPop will now cost 1.40 U$D. The cost of the aforementioned juice with 50 grams of sugar will increase 50 cents.
¡SodaPop taxes miss the whole point! We should tax the added sugar —— ¡not the bubbles!