TDestination Unknown
MLP: FiM
Slice of Life
“Tour America by Rail!” the sign said, and so Sweetsong does. Everything she needs for a journey fits into her saddlebags, and there are plenty of trains to choose from if she’s resourceful enough.
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Admiral Biscuit · 59k words · 185 4 · 2.2k views

Chapter Notes: Big Sky Country (Destination Unknown) · 3:40pm Dec 16th, 2021

Is this the most efficient route west? No, it isn’t. Sweetsong will get there when she gets there; it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.

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In many built-up urban areas in the US, large stores or factories are required to retain a certain amount of water on their roof, in order to prevent overwhelming the municipal storm drains. How this would typically be accomplished was with drain pipes that could only handle a certain outflow (specified by local code/ordinance), and the rest of the water that didn’t drain would pool up on the roof until it could.

Obviously, sooner or later you’re going to get too much water on the roof, and you can’t rely on some kind of automatic valve to open bigger pipes. One solution is to have the larger pipes set above the depth you want to allow on the roof (let’s say a maximum of a foot, for an example), and once it overtops that, you let it drain through the bigger pipes.

The other solution is to have wide openings on the roof perimeter—the scuppers Sweetsong has observed—much like the emergency spillways dams have.

So the roof flooding she’s noticed on flat roofs isn’t a mistake, it’s a feature she just doesn’t know about.

By law, in the US, railcars with hazardous cargos are required to be a certain number of positions back from the locomotive or any other occupied car (if you had a caboose, for example). There are specifications for how far back it has to be, depending on the cargo.

Railroads can make a lot of money running what’s called ‘unit trains.’ Ideally, they’re all identical cars with identical cargos departing the same shipper and being delivered to the same receiver. Say, for example, coal from the Powder River Basin. Locomotives and some number of coal cars all go to the loading facility, and then deliver the load to a power plant or dock without ever having to switch a single car in or out of the consist.

Ethanol and crude oil often move that way, as well, both of which are hazardous. While I can’t quote the regulation exactly, it says something like “cars of ethanol need to be sixteen cars away from any occupied equipment wherever possible, and no less than one car apart.” The intent, I’m sure, was if you were picking up a five-car freight to take to a small town, it wouldn’t be practical to haul another 12 buffer cars so that the one ethanol car could be on the very end of the train. How railroads have interpreted that is figuring that they have a hundred tank cars and one buffer car and that technically meets the requirements.

(Usually they have one on each end; that way they don’t have to switch it to the other end of the train when they go back to the shipper.)

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As far as I know, it doesn’t matter what the buffer car is, so long as its cargo isn’t dangerous. Hoppers filled with sand or rocks are common. I presume the load is to help with train dynamics, I don’t think the law requires the car to be carrying a cargo. It’s typically an obsolete car that the railroad wouldn’t make money with.

Sometimes lighweight cars are used as buffers, not for hazmat loads, but for weight purposes. I’ve heard of it for oversized loads (yes, the railroads sometimes carry those, too) to avoid putting too much stress on bridges, but also for rail-marine operations where the locomotive is too heavy to go on the loading apron or the ferry itself. In those cases, they often use flat cars or gondolas so the crew can see over them. I think they’re commonly nicknamed something else, but I can’t remember what at the moment.

I think I mentioned it the last time that Sweetsong got a cab ride, but the locomotive number is everywhere in the cab, since the crew needs to know it. While trains have some sort of timetable identification (such as MRVPW-13), that’s not going to be obvious to anybody but the dispatcher. What is obvious is the big numbers painted on the locomotive that identify it, so in the US at least, trains are typically identified on the radio by the lead locomotive’s number.

As such, you really don’t want the crew to forget what locomotive they’re in. I can tell you when I drove wrecker, I was typically assigned to 15 and was used to responding to that number. One night I was in 22, dozing behind a car dealership, and the dispatcher kept trying to reach me. When “Radio 22” failed to get a response, he switched to “Radio 15,” and I immediately replied. (On our trucks, the number was only painted on the outside.)

The solution is put the number on everything in the cab, so no matter where the crew operating the train is looking, or what they’re doing, they’ll find it.

Since the trains travel on rails, there’s no need to spend the money to put an actual deck on the bridge, and many bridges are actually open between the ties. If you’re walking across a railroad bridge (which you should not do!), you want to be careful where you step.

If you jump to about 5:23 in this vid, you get a brief top-down shot through the open ties:

And if you want to see what it looks like going across the same trestle in a train:

Did I mention they don’t make the bridges much wider than they need to be, either?

I forgot to mention this in the last blog post. Kicking a railcar (or a cut of cars) is uncoupling it from the train while the train’s in motion, and letting it coast where it needs to go. Believe it or not, back in Ye Olde Times, some passenger stations in England were served by uncoupling a car from the express train as it went by, and letting it coast on a side track into the station.* I assume later it was picked up by another train.

Depending on the railroad and what you’re actually doing, kicking cars on the main line is discouraged or outright prohibited; it is, however, often done in rail yards. Once the cars are uncoupled from the train, the only control you’re going to have over them is if you’ve got a crew member riding on them to set the brakes at the right time. Different switching circumstances sometimes make kicking the cars an attractive option, either to save time or to avoid having to push cars backwards for a long stretch (which usually involves a crew member riding the front-most car with a radio so he can report to the engineer, or going slow enough that a crew member can walk alongside).
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*If you kick a car into a facing track, that’s referred to as a ‘flying switch,’ and now you not only have a car going that’s not attached to a train, but you’d better throw the switch at the right time, or you’re going to be derailing equipment. If the car doesn’t make it all the way (say, it’s not going fast enough), you’re going to foul the switch and depending on the track layout, you might wind up with your locomotive stuck on the wrong side of an industry track.

Here’s a video of the Southern Pacific performing a flying switch back in the day.