Ok. It's not an OLD story. In fact, it's pretty recent. I sent this to Mark Blum some time ago, and figured that it'd be great to relate to the rest.Little background: Bout six years ago, before getting stuck in the textile industry, I worked for a company known as "Fieldale." Fieldale was a pretty big reciever of grain by way of railcars. In fact, they had a rather huge yard when they built the second plant.I worked at the second one, driving something known as a TM or trackmobile. Funny looking thing, four big rubber tires and track wheels.Well, this story comes from there and is as best I can remember it:As originally built, the yard fieldale used had a bit of a rise to it. I think, the company's idea was to let single cars drift down the rise, through a spring switch and then up a slight grade and retarder to stop on a staging siding.Ideally, it was to be computer controlled. Well, I worked there a short while, having a bit of fun driving the trackmobile around (which is really fun, but a pain to use for switching) but, I'll tell you this, the operations were far from ideal.While the computer was supposed to work like that, in the end it never did what it was programmed to do. Either the retarder would grab, stopping the car dead (meaning someone would have to take the TM out and fetch it, pushing it where it should have gone; the retarder wouldn't retard and there'd be a really sickening BOOM as the cars hit each other. Then, we'd all pile out, see if we derailed them, and if not just wipe our brows and make a note to tell the railroad they needed to pound out any dents. If it was derailed, it meant for a long night, though normally they only dropped an axle or two on the weeds. The funniest thing that would happen, is the computer often mistook the TM for a car, and when it came across the retarder, it'd grab HARD and stop you in your tracks. I had this happen twice, once it spilled me from my control seat. That's all it ever did to me, Mostly I just yanked a string up to the winch, and the loading crew would pull the cars through before dropping them as need be.However, there's one story I heard after I quit, that I found a bit hard to believe. Supposedly, the little incident caused fieldale to rebuild the yard so the problems would never occur again. Basically, The winch had messed up, and the crew was under orders to manually switch the cars into the staging yard. The problem retarder had long since been taken offline, and I think, they were prepping to remove it. The TM had been converted to remote control, which was another factor to figure in. As the tm pushed a string of six cars into the loading bay (or unloading since they were the same) something caused the remote to fail to send a stop signal. So, thinking it was doing its job, the TM continued merrily on, pushing the cars through the loading bay, then spring switch, and out onto the main. The TM itself did stop, once it ran out of the reach of the radio, but the cars didn't. They rolled about a nice half mile down the track, and just sat there. It took over an hour for someone to get permission to take the other switcher (from the number 1 plant) onto the main to go fetch the cars. Made for one heck of a delay for the trains.
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RE: Old story., CRSD40, May-30-03, 08:51 PM, (1) RE: Old story., ATF1224, May-30-03, 09:57 PM, (2) RE: Old story., John 136 6000 GO, May-30-03, 10:16 PM, (3) RE: Old story., Magick_maker, May-31-03, 00:30 AM, (4) RE: Old story., FireDragonLightning, May-31-03, 08:14 AM, (5) RE: Old story., ATF1224, May-31-03, 07:29 PM, (6)
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