Brian Solomon (1) (1966–)

A clear and well written discussion on what’s involved in converting wood, coal, or oil into movement on a rail line. Previous books mostly discussed what a steam locomotive engineer did (The Locomotive Engineman’s Manual, The Engine Driver’s Manual) or how to go about building a locomotive (rel="nofollow" target="_top">Superpower); this one covers what’s actually going on to make the drivers turn. I am reminded that the actual “engine” in a steam locomotive is the pair of pistons at the front that work the drive wheels; everything else is boiler and valves and connecting rods and miscellaneous other appurtenances. But there was more to learn there as well; some engines had three cylinders (the middle one was connected to the front axle by a crank; the arrangement was abandoned rather quickly due to difficulty of access for maintenance) and some had double expansion systems. This last was interesting; double, triple, and even quadruple expansion engines were popular on steam vessels and were introduced on steam locomotives. In some cases, the second expansion to took place in a larger cylinder on the other side, giving these locomotes a rather strange asymmetrical look and leading to the nickname “slam-bang” engines, due to difficulty of getting the cylinders tuned. Eventually double expansion engines went to two sets of cylinders on the same side- and then were abandoned altogether and converted back to single expansion, as other improvements (notably the superheater) gave the same power with less complexity.

I also learned, finally, how a Westinghouse “K” brake works. The first air brakes were “straight”; air came from a compressor on the engine through a hose to each car; pressurizing the hose pushes the brakes shut. Although this was better than the earlier system of manual hand brakes (which required the brakeman to jump from one car to another cranking the brakes down with a handwheel) they still had the problem; if the air line broke every car lost braking ability. In the later air brake system, each car in the consist has its own air reservoir, which is kept full from an air compressor on the engine. The brakes are held open by pressure from the main air line that connects every car. If this line brake, the individual air cylinder on each car pushes the brakes closed. The system is sophisticated enough to brake the rear cars first; this keeps the train “stretched” as it comes to a stop and prevents it from breaking apart due to accumulated slack when it starts again.

Very instructive, well written with lots of pictures and clear explanatory drawings. Recommened.… (meer)

Rails Around the World: The Trains and Locomotives That Shaped Railroading from 1820 to Today by Brian Solomon is a splendid trip through rail history via the trains themselves rather than concentrating on the lines.

What little I knew about rail history has been centered on various lines, who tried to gain key locations and lay the first and/or best lines. The ways in which cities were often arranged and rearranged based on how the rail companies serving that city fared (Atlanta is a prime example in the US). So this look at the technology and advancements within the engines and cars themselves is a wonderful way to gain new perspective with a little less emphasis on the politics and more on the engineering.

As for first hand knowledge, my grandfather was a section foreman and for years I used to joke with my father because where he was born, at the time a section house, was nothing but a clump of weeds and shrubs alongside the tracks. But that was all before my days, I never met my grandfather and other than a free pass my grandmother had to ride I knew next to nothing about the workings of the railroad. Kinda sad. And now my own father has been gone 30 years, so time just keeps rumbling along.

This book works very well at offering just enough engineering information to let the reader know what advances or differences there were but also making sure the reader understand how these vehicles fit within the larger picture, which national rails used what and for what reason. I found it all quite fascinating.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)

The next book in my attempt at self-education about railroads. The chapters are “Track”, “Detecting Track Defects”, “Ballast and Roadbed Maintenance”, “Surfacing Equipment”; “Rail Grinding”, “Speeders and Hyrail” and “Snowplows”.

Track nowadays is mostly continuous rail; somewhere on the Web (and I think in archives here somewhere) is a dramatic picture of what happens when a trainload of this hits a bulldozer. When I was working we had an unfortunate incident during our rail construction when a young engineer ordered $3M worth of continuous rail that arrived about a week before it was ready to be laid. It was dumped on the right of way, where it was in the way of a roadbed contractor; he shoved it aside with a front loader (working from one end of the heap of rail to the other). The stuff is flexible enough to be shipped on flatcars and bend around curves; unfortunately the front loader operator bent it beyond its limit. We ended up getting $0.10 on the dollar for it as scrap metal, and the engineer lost his job.

I also have a very minor hazmat involvement; you wouldn’t think there’s anything hazardous about continuous rail. However, when it breaks it’s field welded with thermite. In the view of the Denver Fire Department, thermite is an explosive; thus we paid $125 a year for an explosives permit for our Maintenance of Way department.

Which brings us to Track Defects. Apparently there’s a fleet of specialized track inspection cars that travel around the country with magnetic induction and ultrasound testing equipment. I’ve never seen one; I’m not sure if we’ve ever used any. At least I know what they do now.

Ballast and roadbed for us was classical gravel ballast and concrete ties. We used wooden ties on switches, crossovers, and other multiple track assemblies; I was surprised to discover that these are assembled in advance and hauled to their installation site. I guess that’s easier to do with wooden ties. Ties out here in Colorado are never hazwaste, but you always have to prove that to the landfill when you dispose of old ones (test for cresols). In more humid climes, ties were often treated with more exotic stuff like pentachlorophenol and arsenic compounds and can end up as hazwaste. (Tie treatment plants are another story; that much creosote is bad news in soil). Ballast can also be interesting; it usually accumulates enough drips from passing trains to acquire a significant hydrocarbon content. When we redid the ballast when replacing a old freight line with new light rail, about a quarter of it exceeded guidance levels for total hydrocarbons. We also have an interesting situation in Denver; much of the gold ore from the Colorado Mineral Belt was processed down here. Most of this ore had a high lead content - in fact, both in terms of total weight (which is not surprising) and total monetary value (which is) lead, not silver or gold, was the most mined metal during the Colorado mining days. The smelters produced a slag which was heavy, hard, and quite high in total lead; railroads snapped this stuff up to use as ballast (the smelters were perforce already well served by rail). A lot of it has since be replaced by normal maintenance but you can still pick big chunks of the stuff along tracks, especially old ones. Your results go through the roof if you happen to get a piece in your test sample for heavy metals. Fortunately, the lead is slag is always well oxidized and thus not very soluble; the more expensive and time consuming leachable metal test (TCLP) always (so far) drops the lead levels below hazwaste standards.

I’ve seen surfacing equipment in action on our lines but I couldn’t follow what was going on until I read this book. Automatic ballast tamping machines line up on a distant laser, jack the track to the correct grade and force it horizontally to the correct alignment. There’s generally nothing dramatic to watch but there’s a lot of hydraulic power involved.

Rail grinding I’ve never seen. It looks dramatic in pictures, though.

We have a number of Hyrail vehicles; at least one is a car tow (if the power fails with a light rail vehicle in the middle of an intersection, it’s bad news for auto traffic until you can pull or push the thing out of the way. The tow truck is a little Mercedes that looks a bit like a Unimog, with gearing designed to pull a 40-ton train. We also have a bunch of Hyrail boom trucks for catenary line maintenance.

It takes an amazing amount of snow to stop a railroad. Sometime in the late 90's we had a 30-inch snowfall in Denver in late October. Road traffic was paralyzed; even though our trains have no specialized plowing equipment and are lightweights compared to mainline Diesels they just pushed the stuff out of the way and not one was late. (Switches are another problem; ice can get jammed in a switch and prevent it from closing. Ours all have kerosene heaters that can be started by remote control. This requires another Denver Fire Department permit - for work involving an open flame. $350 a year for that one.) I was interested to read that some East Coast transit systems solve this problem with flatcar mounted and downward pointing surplus jet engines. I want one.

The snow equipment that brings rail fans out in force, of course, is the Leslie Rotary Plow. I’ve never seen one in action; it’s hard to accomplish because the only get called out one year in five or so (a big conventional “wedge” plow mounted on the front of a plow train can move 60 tons of snow out of the way, you only need a Leslie when things are even worse than that) and they usually work in areas remote from highways (and what highways there are up where the Leslies are working are usually impassable too). The really amazing thing is how old these are. The last “official” Leslie plow was built in 1950; various railroads built 5 more “home-built” copies, the last in 1970. There are still 44 Leslie plows in action; the newest is thus 35 years old. A Leslie plow is therefore probably the oldest piece of equipment most railroads own. Interestingly, one Leslie Plow does get used every year, to plow out the Cumbres and Toltec scenic railway for the tourist season. Sometimes the railroad will follow the plow with a special excursion train, where hordes of rail fans pay large fares to be coated with coal smoke and pelted by stray lumps of snow. (By the way, if you do take a ride on the C&T, see if you can pick up Geological Road Log, Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railway. It’s one of an excellent series published by the New Mexico Bureau of Mines, now unfortunately out of print.)

The book is recommended; the one complaint I have is that the author sometimes uses pictures where a diagram or drawing would explain things a lot better. I guess publishers figure that rail book buyers want pictures, so pictures is what they get.… (meer)

I find myself playing with railroads a lot (I am originally from Chicago, so it’s appropriate). I have to deal with people who actually know what they are doing, while I have been getting by on bluff and bluster and the general knowledge that the important thing is to keep the train centered on the tracks. Thus, I’ve been reading railroad books on the side - so I can bluff better.

I thought this would be dull but important, but it turned out to be interesting and important. It’s something of a compromise between a technical manual on the history of signaling and a coffee-table book with attractive train pictures; the author manages to pull this off.

I am attracted to books with lots of “trivia”: facts that are esoteric, unexpected, and slightly amusing. Thus:

Early trains were routed solely by timetable. There wasn’t even telegraph available yet. Needless to say, there were some spectacular accidents. But since brakes didn’t work all that well it wouldn’t have mattered much if a signal indicated another train - you probably couldn’t stop in time anyway.

The expression “to highball” comes from one of the early American signaling methods: hoist a red ball on a signal pole if the track ahead was clear.

The early railroads in North America and Europe all had their own signaling methods, once it became obvious that signaling was a good idea. A spectacular accident on one of the British railways (The Great Western?) resulted in The Government getting involved and dictating signaling uniformity. As in many other cases when The Government tells people to do stuff, this was initially successful but had the long-term effect of inhibiting progress on new signaling methods. Thus most of the improved signaling technologies (automatic blocks, for example) came from North America, where railroads were free to have spectacular accidents without Government interference. It was instructive that all the examples of historic signaling methods (manual interlocks, the “staff” method”) shown in this book came from British and Irish railways where they are still in daily use.

Manual interlocks are what you see in historic photographs of rail yard operations. These are large levers set into the floor of a control tower that a signalman has to grab and pull to throw a switch and/or set a signal. In the early days, these were entirely mechanical - there was a control linkage connecting the lever in the tower to the switch or signal, often several hundred feet away. It took muscles to be a signalman back then. Eventually the linkages were replaced by pneumatic, hydraulic or electric assists. There are some nice pictures of a still-operating manual tower on Irish Rail. In yards with complicated switch setups, the manual interlock levers often had to be thrown in a particular order, to prevent switches from being set up in dangerous alignments. There were also timers connected to the switch levers, to reduce the possibility of switches being thrown while a train was passing over them. Thus if you were a signalman at a yard and you needed to let a through train go through, you would have to throw the switches in the right order to let the train bypass occupied track, and once you threw those switches the timers would prevent you from setting them back. Therefore, making a mistake was a very bad thing - the train would have to stop and wait until the timers released and the switches could be reset. This was another reason for requiring the switches to go in a specific order; the last switch to be set is the one controlling the signal for entering that track block; thus the oncoming train can’t enter the block until all the switches are set properly.

I had no idea what the “staff” system was, but not only is it still in use on Irish Rail, there are also couple of branch lines in the US that still use it. The train stops at a control tower and gets a “staff”, which is a physical hunk of wood or metal inscribed with the name of a track section and with a series of grooves or bars that act as a “key”. Possession of the “staff” allows the train to use that track. When the train reaches the end of that track block, it returns the “staff” to the control tower or station there and picks up another “staff” for the next section. The obvious problem is that the system depends on two-way traffic flow; there has to be a way to get the “staff” back to the original station. There was an ingenious mechanical solution to this in Europe - the invention of interlocked staff-dispensing machines. A dispensing machine has a number of staffs but only releases one at a time. A train crew picks up a staff from the machine, does its run through that track block, then stops and inserts the staff in the machine at the far end of the block. (The “keyed” nature of individual staffs prevents using a staff for the wrong track block). This sends a signal to an interlocked machine up the line that allow that machine to again dispense exactly one staff. Thus you could have several trains going in the same direction, each secure that it had “the” staff for that track block. As long as the overall number of trains using the track block balances out by direction, the dispensing machine won’t run out. Obviously automatic blocks would have been much simpler, but they were Not Invented Here.

The automatic block system depends on the train completing a circuit between the rails. Because steel rails and steel axles aren’t the best electrical conductors, there are sometimes problems with very short trains on days with bad weather that requires sanding the tracks. Hyrail and track maintenance vehicles also sometimes fail to trip automatic blocks; this has resulted in some ugly wrecks. The setting of a train signal is called the “aspect”; railroaders thus talk about the “proceed aspect” rather than the “green light”. A trackside signal mast will often have two sets of signals - one has the aspect for this block; the other has the aspect for the next block. This allows a train crew to start slowing down for the next block if necessary. If signals are arranged vertically, they are the opposite of highway traffic lights - the green signal will be on top and the red on the bottom. This is considered to contribute to “fail-safe” operation; the upper signal will act to partially shield the lower signal from snow and ice accumulation.

I had no idea that most European railroads have positive interlocks with grade crossing signals. In the US, it is up to a motorist or pedestrian at a grade crossing to avoid trains (although the train crew must sound a horn or bell when approaching a grade crossing). There may be a gate or barrier, but that is not connected in any way to track signals. I expect the system evolved that way here because the track usually came before the road. In European practice, grade crossing signals are fail-safe connected to track signals. If a grade crossing light or barrier isn’t working, the corresponding signal for that track block will revert to “STOP”. There are a horrendous number of grade crossing accidents in the US every year even with American drivers; I pity European visitors who blithely cruise through a grade crossing with nonfunctional signals only to find themselves decorating the front end of a locomotive.

The future of rail signaling will probably be something already under test - Precision Train Control. Paradoxically, this does away with trackside signaling altogether. Each train has a GPS and a radio connection to dispatch and follows instructions. Although it seems scary to eliminate signaling, this is essentially the same way air traffic control works. The railroads feel that PTC will allow them to scrap a lot of maintenance-intensive signals and move more freight on less track. We’ll see.

The only minor flaw I find with the book is that I would like to see more technical diagrams of how signals work and fewer pretty color pictures of signal towers at sunset. Some illustration of accidents caused by signal failure would also be instructive. However, my overall impression was quite favorable.… (meer)