When extreme cold weather is predicted, like with this polar vortex event, do the Class Ones move traffic south? It adds miles, but it could keep traffic moving and avoid Chicago as an intetchange point?
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Dominic Mazoch posted:When extreme cold weather is predicted, like with this polar vortex event, do the Class Ones move traffic south?
No.
It adds miles, but it could keep traffic moving and avoid Chicago as an intetchange point?
How would UP and BNSF freight traffic avoid the Chicago area, with traffic from Northern California or the Pacific Northwest?
It's WINTER! It gets cold in the winter. It has happened before. It will happen again.
If traffic is destined for Chicago, where else are you going to send it? There is no point in keeping traffic "moving" if that traffic is not headed for the place where it is supposed to go. Railroading is a BUSINESS, and the added cost of diverting dozens of trains to somewhere where they are not to supposed to go just because it's cold makes no sense.
What do you do when it warms up? Truck the stuff from where the train is to where it was supposed to be? Move the train to where it was supposed to go in the first place? Either way, it's very expensive to do that. Extra crews, extra fuel, etc.
Isn't that how they make frozen orange juice - reroute the Tropicana run to Chicago instead of Kearny? 
In Canada we shut down completely, but can switch to hotter steam power whenever possible.
Seriously though, here's CPR's winter contingency blurb, more for political feather-smoothing I think, given on-going criticism of both CN and CP by shippers and government.
https://www.cpr.ca/en/about-cp...Contingency-Plan.pdf
https://www.cpr.ca/en/about-cp...18-19-WhitePaper.pdf
Cold !! You think this is cold ?? In the old days this would be balmy weather.
An Excerpt from “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid,” by Jean Shepard
The narrator is Ralphie Parker of A Christmas Story fame.
Early December saw the first of the great blizzards of that year. The wind howling down out of the Canadian wilds a few hundred miles to the north had screamed over frozen Lake Michigan and hit Hohman, laying on the town great drifts of snow and long, story-high icicles, and sub-zero temperatures where the air cracked and sang. Streetcar wires creaked under caked ice and kids plodded to school through forty-five-mile-an-hour gales, tilting forward like tiny furred radiator ornaments, moving stiffly over the barren, clattering ground.
Preparing to go to school was about like getting ready for extended Deep-Sea Diving. Longjohns, corduroy knickers, checkered flannel Lumberjack shirt, four sweaters, fleece-lined leatherette sheepskin coat, helmet, goggles, mittens with leatherette gauntlets and a large red star with an Indian Chief’s face in the middle, three pairs of sox, high-tops, overshoes, and a sixteen-foot scarf wound spirally from left to right until only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing told you that a kid was in the neighborhood.
There was no question of staying home. It never entered anyone’s mind. It was a hardier time, and Miss Bodkin was a hardier teacher than the present breed. Cold was something that was accepted, like air, clouds, and parents; a fact of nature, and as such could not be used in any fraudulent scheme to stay out of school.
My mother would simply throw her shoulder against the front door, pushing back the advancing drifts and stone ice, the wind raking the living-room rug with anger fury for an instant, and we would be launched, one after the other, my brother and I, like astronauts into unfriendly Arctic space. The door clanged shut behind us and that was that. It was make school or die!
OK, by your theory of a train goes through no matter what the weather, you would have run trains through the Houston Terminals in Late July and Early August of 2017? Which I think is SUMMER.
Any time part of the rail system in this country goes down, whether by extreme cold or flood, customers and railroads are losing money because freight is not moving. Plus I would think the reset cost to the railroad would also be high.
A car or container to the Windy City has to go there. Traffic along the BNSF Northern Trancson, and CP and CN would be hard or impossible to move outside the Chicago gateway.
But I mentioned INTERCHANGE. The shortest distance between 2 points is a straight line. If Chicago freezes up, however, interchange could to places like St.Louis, KC, or Menphis. Places SOUTH of Chicago.
Do the Class One's have detour MOU's? If not, why not? Think outside the box. Keep the traffic moving.
FORMER OGR CEO - RETIRED posted:It's WINTER! It gets cold in the winter. It has happened before. It will happen again.
My thoughts exactly Rich. It's winter, it's supposed to be cold. I was born in 1994 and have heard winter horror stories from my parents and such. It appears that most, if not all winters that I have seen have been pretty mellow compared to prior ones.
Dominic Mazoch posted:When extreme cold weather is predicted, like with this polar vortex event,
Polar vortex LOL! I remember when it was just called cold.
Run for your lives!
I was born i 1934, we had coal furnaces, no storm windows or doors, few garages but not that many cars. Everyone walked to the trolley stop & school. We lived half a mile from those, warmest clothes were wool-none of the wonder stuff today. The trolleys weren't very warm, they kept opening the doors. One house we lived in there was an unvented gas heater in the fireplace where the dog and I kept warm. The mornings were chilly because the furnace died down over night and had to be stoked. The one house we were in I slept in the unheated attic under couple of blankets. The kitchen was usually the warmest place. There wasn't all the hysteria about cold weather either. It was winter, part of life. Deal with it.
Dominic Mazoch posted:OK, by your theory of a train goes through no matter what the weather, you would have run trains through the Houston Terminals in Late July and Early August of 2017? Which I think is SUMMER.
Any time part of the rail system in this country goes down, whether by extreme cold or flood, customers and railroads are losing money because freight is not moving. Plus I would think the reset cost to the railroad would also be high.
A car or container to the Windy City has to go there. Traffic along the BNSF Northern Trancson, and CP and CN would be hard or impossible to move outside the Chicago gateway.
But I mentioned INTERCHANGE. The shortest distance between 2 points is a straight line. If Chicago freezes up, however, interchange could to places like St.Louis, KC, or Menphis. Places SOUTH of Chicago.
Do the Class One's have detour MOU's? If not, why not? Think outside the box. Keep the traffic moving.
I'm sorry, but cold weather and flooding are a false equivalence. In flooding the tracks are impassable. Cold weather is just cold. The trains don't really care. The crew just dresses for it or better yet stays in the heated cab if possible. Not rocket science.
Now deep snow could slow train movements, but it has to be pretty bad to do that. This winter has been fairly mild so far, especially in terms of snow. Right now the temperature is -24 here in the Twin Cities, and that's not wind chill, that's air temperature.
Having said that, it looks as if Amtrak has canceled the Empire Builder, but freight traffic seems to be moving normally.
Both the hottest and coldest decade in the US was the 1930's... so those stories may be accurate. Weather wise we are very average this year. A little less drought, tornadoes, and hurricanes... a little more snow... but pretty average. Oh. The. Humanity.
Jon 
I have an Iowa Division thermometer from the C&NW that I acquired in the mid eighties. There is a warning to leave locomotives running at temperatures below 32° (no-brainer). It also shows train lengths being reduced as the temperature lowers. At 20°, train lengths are indicated at 120 cars; at -10° that train length is reduced to 65 cars. I'm sure rolling resistance increases as traction decreases from snow and frost. I recall being told that train lengths were decreased but the frequencies increased to better keep the road open from drifting snow.
GTW posted:I have an Iowa Division thermometer from the C&NW that I acquired in the mid eighties. There is a warning to leave locomotives running at temperatures below 32° (no-brainer). It also shows train lengths being reduced as the temperature lowers. At 20°, train lengths are indicated at 120 cars; at -10° that train length is reduced to 65 cars. I'm sure rolling resistance increases as traction decreases from snow and frost. I recall being told that train lengths were decreased but the frequencies increased to better keep the road open from drifting snow.
More like, long trains are subject to lots of train line air problems, in bitter cold temps.
It is now -30 here in the Twin Cities. Freight trains are still running, though the light rail suffered a cracked rail, which was quickly repaired. Trains still got through on the other track, but ridership was lighter than normal. Businesses and schools are closed, and there is no mail today because of the cold.
What a bunch of weaklings people are becoming! Close the Schools! Stop the Mail! It's Cold!
Good Night. Our ancestors would be ashamed of this, and for good reason.
Hot Water posted:GTW posted:I have an Iowa Division thermometer from the C&NW that I acquired in the mid eighties. There is a warning to leave locomotives running at temperatures below 32° (no-brainer). It also shows train lengths being reduced as the temperature lowers. At 20°, train lengths are indicated at 120 cars; at -10° that train length is reduced to 65 cars. I'm sure rolling resistance increases as traction decreases from snow and frost. I recall being told that train lengths were decreased but the frequencies increased to better keep the road open from drifting snow.
More like, long trains are subject to lots of train line air problems, in bitter cold temps.
A neighbor of mine, who has since passed away, was a conductor on the Nickel Plate and worked out of Delphos on the Clover Leaf. He once told me a story about butting heads with the trainmaster over train length. It was extremely cold and the locomotive on a train headed for Toledo had a mechanical failure. The trainmaster decided that they could add the cars to another train heading that way. The combined trains had over 100 cars. My neighbor told the trainmaster that they couldn't run a train that long in that cold temperature. The trainmaster ordered him to take the train to Toledo. He complied, with the stipulation that the train didn't move until the brake pressure in the caboose was was at minimum requirement. The train sat in Delphos for 12 hours and didn't move an inch. The trainmaster finally agreed to break the train back down and send it out on the next shift.
Tom
palallin posted:What a bunch of weaklings people are becoming! Close the Schools! Stop the Mail! It's Cold!
Good Night. Our ancestors would be ashamed of this, and for good reason.
To that end, the National Weather Service recalculated the wind chill chart with a new formula, back in 2001. The result was to make it sound worse outside than it used to. While I believe in science, I view this move as "weather terrorism", and move toward the wimpification of America.
I remember standing on the corner waiting for the school bus when it was -40. It was OK, I survived.
Big_Boy_4005 posted:palallin posted:What a bunch of weaklings people are becoming! Close the Schools! Stop the Mail! It's Cold!
Good Night. Our ancestors would be ashamed of this, and for good reason.
To that end, the National Weather Service recalculated the wind chill chart with a new formula, back in 2001. The result was to make it sound worse outside than it used to. While I believe in science, I view this move as "weather terrorism", and move toward the wimpification of America.
I fully agree! The local news media here in Chicago, are all always caught up in the HORRIFIC wind chill. I remember one station's "talking head" some years ago, was warning people about protecting the vehicles against the "Horrifically low wind chill"! I phoned up the TV station and finally got some "young person" in the News Room, and explained high school science to him. On the next newscast, they had dropped the story about "protecting you vehicles against the wind chill". Go figure.
Now, on at least two of the local TV stations in Chicago, last evening, they were explaining how METRA is dealing with the bitter cold,,,,,,,,,,they are "Setting the tracks on fire.", and showed views of all the flaming switch heaters working beautifully in the Chicago Union Station terminal!
As Rich is prone to state; Journalism is dead!
I saw that "tracks on fire" clip this morning.
What some people don't know about railroads.
Just found an interesting article on MSN.com about lighting tracks on fire in Chicago.
It was said of arctic cold weather:
"The trains don't really care."
Trains do indeed care. Subsequent posts to the above comment already mention some of the issues cold introduces.
Also, under some conditions, if an Engineer gets lax, enough brake linkages can ice/freeze, and you have no brakes after an application is made. (A good friend of mine had this happen to him while descending several miles of 1.7% grade with a 14,000 ton coal train.) Air hoses/gaskets become stiff and can pull apart easier (some Conductors/Brakeman will actually duct tape the glad hands together to help prevent this.) You better have a good supply of fussee's in the cab too, 'cause you may need them to thaw some of the brake valves/etc. OH, and to thaw frozen switch locks. More on this below.
The track also gets cantankerous: It's more brittle and thus more prone to vertical rupture (broke rail), switches freeze/get clogged with snow, on and on. I've already mentioned frozen switch locks.
Cold, foul, weather with snow typically added an hour or more to ANY day out on the rails. On rare days it can stop you. (Can't make a grade on account of the snow/etc.)
However, in all my years of railroading, I've only experienced ONE TIME that the railroad shut down and sent us home. I was working a switch job. It was a historic ice storm, and the ladder grabs, walkways, ground, et al, were getting thick with ice and it was so treacherous, even when stopping the movements to get on/off, the risks weren't worth it, so they shut us down and sent us home. Getting home was "interesting", as well.
Andre
In six months we will forget all about "wind chill". Everybody will be talking about the "heat index."
I've always wanted to make a thermometer that didn't have numbers. "Stupid Cold - Cold - Chilly - Comfortable - Warm - Hot - Stupid Hot". That's all I need to know.
Tom
