Toadfish Monastery

Elseforum, I posted a little account of a duty turn I had a few days ago that turned out ot be a bit more adventurous than I had bargained for. Since it might perhaps amuse you, too, O Toadfish, I thought it best to also repost it here.

To recapitulate from my introductory thread, I work as a train driver (US: Locomotive engineer) for a Swedish freight operating company. I am based in Stockholm, and work trains over most of southern and middle Sweden -mail to Malmö, Sundsvall and Göteborg, Intermodal trains with containers and trailers to Norrköping, Nässjö, Gävle and Hallsberg, wagonload freight to Hallsberg, Västerås and Gävle, lots of local services and shunting in the greater Stockholm area and so on.


Here it goes:

===================
This was indeed an adventoruos night and day...

I started out on monday afternoon by going to Hallsberg. There, I readied a loco and picked up my train in the marshalling yard. (By the way, the new batch of shunters in the marshalling yard are all young, cute, blonde females. I predict that some trains with pining drivers will be late departing the yard... And traditionalists will of course lament that the traditional shunter's greeting of "grmblgrf" is now replaced by a cheery "Hi!" :D )

Aaaaanyhow, I got underway and started driving towards Gävle. The route I took from Hallsberg to Gävle was a somewhat circuitious route through southern Bergslagen, a area formerly full of heavy industry and mining, now a rustbelt with a few huuuuge hi-tech industrial megacomplexes here and there, such as Sandviken that manufactures tools, dies and special steels. The route goes through the deep woods, is often single-track only and is actually very fun to drive.

Once I had left the area of Hallsberg Line Control and entered the outskirts of the Stockholm Control area, things started to go badly. My train was delayed for a few meets here and there, and I was then held in Sala for almost 30 minutes to let a delayed passenger train pass me. Whatever happened to the golden rule of on-time trains always having priority? Grrr... As I left Stockholm Control and entered the Gävle Control Area in Avesta-Krylbo (The Avesta in Avesta Polarit Steel, btw), things started looking better again: I called up the line controller to talk to him about an entirely different matter, and then the controller asked me if I had a heavy train tonight. My reply was "nah, only about 300 metres and 600 tons, so it's a sports model. "

-"And the loco is running fine?"
-"Oh, sure, purring like a cat"
-"Well, then, I cannae be arsed with having ye go intae the passing loop at Dalgränsen and wait for 7538 (a passenger train) to pass ye by. I'll let ye run as far as it goes."

In other words, he let me run on clear signals all the way towards Gävle, and I soon was over an hour early. Things looked better and better, I was heading for an early relief and then to bed, and it was a joy to drive a train.

Until I came to Hagaström, all of two minutes running time from Gävle, my terminal station. The exit signal was at stop. I did have the time to think "huh?" before the cab phone started rining. It was Gävle control, telling me that the catenary in the Gävle central area had failed, and they had to switch off the power to the whole area while the electrical repair crew did damage asessment. Meanwhile, no trains could pass through Gävle at the moment. But the electrical repair crew was on their way, promise.

So I waited.

And waited.

And called Darlica on the phone to while away my boredom.

And waited.

So, then I called up the line controllers to hear if they had any prognosis for when things could get moving again. As it turned out, they had actually managed to sectionalise the catenary and clear two tracks for service, but then the first train through ( A SJ AB-operated passenger train BTW) had managed to pass a signal at danger and then end up in de-energized territory, completely blocking the two newly opened tracks in the station. Yippie-Kay-Yay, etc. The mood of the controller for the Gävle  local area could best be summed up as "We are NOT amused"

About 45 minutes later, they managed to clear a path for me into the freight yard, where I could finally uncouple my wagons and hand over the loco to a waiting driver, who was supposed to use that loco for a train back towards Hallsberg.

I was by then about two hours late, and had been waiting for three hours to go a few kilometres. Ironically enough, the last hour was spent literally looking at the window of the lodging room I was to sleep overnight in. I called up our company control and informed them that my rest period would be too short for me to pick up the train I was supposed to pick up next morning, so we agreed on a time where I would be officially awake again and call in to them

As it turned out, when I called them up the next day, my ordinary train (a intermodal train from the very far north of Sweden) was so late, that it had actually just arrived in the freight yard and was more or less parked outside my window. I relieved the preceeding driver, and got on my merry way, if "a bit" late.

Still, it was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining, and the weather was really warm. I had to wait for a while and let a few other trains pass on the single-track sections at Furuvik and Skutskär, but that was only to be expected, since I was so late.

And then, the phone went off. It was Gävle Line Control, who told me that there seemed to be something wrong with my train. In fact, a trackside detector device had reported sticking brakes on eight axles of my train, including two high-level alerts (where the brakes have been sticking enough for the temperature of the wheelset to go above 450 degrees celsius)!

So, according to our procedures, I brought the train to a careful stop at a convenient place -in this case, just outside Marma, a interlocking and passenger halt in the middle of nowhere. And then I had to check on the sticking brakes. Of course, this was one of the 620-metre trains. Of course, the axles that set off the detector where around axle 84, 91 and so on -almost all the way back. Arrrgh! Of course, most of the sticking brakes were false alarms, but two were actually serious enough for me to cut out the brakes on those two wagons. I then had to re-do some essential paperwork, calculating the new brake force available for my train, and new top speed etc, as well as call in a damage report to my company operations centre. Eventually, I could move on again, about two hours late.

Aaaaaand on my way in to the godforsaken municipiality of Tierp ( a place so depressing they actually have to pay a hardship bonus to the few passenger drivers who are stationed there), Line Control called me up again, and told me that my train had set off a detector again.

ARRRRGHHHH!!!!

So, same procedure again. This time, there was only a false alert, thankfully. When I talked to line control and my company control again, we did exchange a few "robust" jokes as to how far I was going to make it this time, and if the floor of a cab was equivalent to a hotel room when it came to claiming back lodging expenses from the company.

I eventually ended up back home in Tomteboda goods depot outside Stockholm, where the depot driver greeted me with a "Where on earth did you come from?", about three hours late.

Oh well, There will be some nice overtime compensation for all this, so I suppose it wasn't all that bad. And the drive up to Gävle was very nice! I even saw some buzzards hunt mice in the fields outside Tillberga in the evening dusk. And I did see a bunch of dancing herons on my way down from Gävle today, which was also fun.

But I was glad when I could finally climb down from the loco this afternoon!
================


I should perhaps mention that there are also those days when everything runs so smoooothly that you are home and have poured the weekend's first whisky before your scheduled booking-off time in the depot.  But mishaps tend to be more amusing! ;)

Quote from: Lindorm
-"Well, then, I cannae be arsed with having ye go intae the passing loop at Dalgränsen and wait for 7538 (a passenger train) to pass ye by. I'll let ye run as far as it goes."

You have Glaswegians in Sweden?  ;)

The overheating axle reminds me of a cartoon with the captain and first officer of an oil tanker looking out of the bridge down the huge length of the ship to the bow and one's saying to the other "I heard a tanker ran aground, I wonder if it's us".

I didn't realise the complexity of train driving. I thought they were just like extra long cars :mrgeen:

Quote from: beagle on April 04, 2008, 12:06:28 PM

Quote from: Lindorm
-"Well, then, I cannae be arsed with having ye go intae the passing loop at Dalgränsen and wait for 7538 (a passenger train) to pass ye by. I'll let ye run as far as it goes."

You have Glaswegians in Sweden?  ;)

Not really but I'd say they are the Swedish equivalence of Glaswegians. ;D

Hard to visualize...

Sort of blonde, blue-eyed, well-scrubbed, polite, sober Glaswegians?

Well hopefully sober since the kind of work a line controller do is quite demanding. But that's about it.  ;D

What an absolutely facinating story-- and the job sounds fantastic (oh all jobs have their bad moments) but this one just sounds great.

Quote from: beagle on April 04, 2008, 11:27:17 PM
Hard to visualize...

Sort of blonde, blue-eyed, well-scrubbed, polite, sober Glaswegians?

Sure! Just like all britons wear bowler hats, have pictures of the queen on their living room wall and say "Gor blimey, Guv´nor" a lot! :D

Actually, the dialect of the province of Gästrikland is rather special, and I have no idea of how to translate it into english, so I just used a dialect marker. As for politeness in their manner of speech, I suppose that depends on whether you consider "fucking arse" a term of endearment or not. Apparently, the locals do so at least.

Quote from: anthrobabe on April 05, 2008, 07:06:48 PM
What an absolutely facinating story-- and the job sounds fantastic (oh all jobs have their bad moments) but this one just sounds great.

Glad you liked it! The job does have it's points, both good and bad. Fortunately, the good points outweigh the bad ones by far, at least for me. And the job does provide me with some incredible story material from time to time -not least when I was a metro train driver and had to interact with the great unwashed public. Remind me sometime to tell you the true story of how I pleased three teenage girls in one night with a roll of gaffer tape! Or the tale about the bag of dynamite. Or how a dead shark ended up in the booking hall of a station.

Come to think of it, how did I survive all those years anyway?  ;)

My vote is for the gaffer tape story.

Quote from: beagle on April 06, 2008, 07:21:31 PM
My vote is for the gaffer tape story.

Me too.

Excellent tale, by the way!

Gaffer Tape! Gaffer Tape!  Lindorn, Do :yar: :yar: :yar: :ROFL: :yar: :yar: :pinkelephant: Gaffer Tape!

And another for the gaffer tape ! ;D

tsk,tsk tsk.

You smutty minds!


Nobody wants to hear about the Shark (you do realise that sharks does not belong in the natural fauna around here? right?) But teenage girls and gaffer tape... I say!


:halo:

Sharks are so 1990s. Ever since Damien Hirst you can't move in the cities here without tripping over a decaying shark in a tank of formaldehyde (Probably why Mr Hirst lives in a big old house in the country now).

Now about that gaffer tape.

You don't happen to have any anecdotes about teenaged sharks and gaffer tape, do you?

Gaffer and then the shark! I want to know how one ended up in the metro. ???

What have I set in motion now... ;)

I'll start with the shark story, since it is short and easy to write. I'll post the gaffer tape story later this evening or early tomorrow.


...Aaaaanyhow, one thing I learned quickly whilst working as a Metro train driver is that the impossible usually happens on a regular basis, miracles about once a week, and unbelievable coincidences are 26½ to a dozen. A Tim Powers story is generally a good description of a slow day in the Stockholm Metro.

A friend of mine who works in the rail industry within Britain once forwarded an internal delay report to me, stating that a train was delayed due to a Portakabin mobile toilet having been blown on to the line one stormy, and landed in front of the train. I had a good laugh, and forwarded the mail to a few colleagues in the metro. One of them, H, then a line controller and mobile supervisor, now a line manager, responed by asking me if I had heard the story of the shark at Station X? I hadn't, so I called him up and asked him to tell me the story. Here goes:

H and I have always agreed on one thing: Sundays are deceptive, fickle and untrustworthy days. Especially afternoons and evenings. Sundays are usually slow, with low passenger loadings, few trains out and about, nothing much happening, dragging you into a long, boring and dull shift, that never seems to end. And all too often (but not so often as to make it a regular occurence), just as you are about to enter a blissful state of coma, Something happens. What Something is, varies from time to time, but it is generally a case of mayhem, chaos or utter and complete weirdness.

H was the mobile operations manager for the northwest sector that night, out and about in his response car. He had been checking up on a false alarm from a water pump at a station, when his mobile phone went off. It was the duty shift leader for the line control centre for the metro line we both worked on. The shift leader was a bit agitated, and concerned about the mental state of one of the emplyees, specifically the station attendant at station X.

The station attendant had been calling the line control centre several times, being very upset about something. Unfortunately, the station attendant's first language wasn't Swedish, and since he was a bit agitated, he had apparently forgotten most of what swedish he knew, but he was trying to say something about big teeth in the booking hall. Was there someone trying to bite the concrete wall or eat a litter bin? Had there been a fight, and there was now blood, teeth and sundry body parts all over the floor? Had someone tried to bite the station attendendant? Apparently not, but they could not understand what the problem was, with the only clarification beiung something on the lines of "teeth swimming".

Now, station X is a bit of a dull backwater, but it has not been known to promote insanity among the station staff posted there, at least not more prone to do so than any other station on the network. Was the attendant drunk? Possibly, but it was a sunday, and all the state liquor monopoly stores are closed on sundays. Line control being in a quandry, they did what confused controllers usually do, and dispatched H to the station to check up on the station attendant.

H arrived at the station, and entered teh staff rooms through the back door. He was somewhat nervous, isnce he didn't know what was waiting for him. A drunk psycho station attendant, wielding a ticket stamp as a weapon? He was met by a charming, elderly, small man of north african extraction, wearing immaculate uniform, who offered him a cup of mint tea, and then threw out an arm towards the booking hall with a "Regardez!"

There, in the booking hall, was a shopping cart.

In the shopping cart was a small shark, about a metre and a half long, of a variety that is native to the west coast of Sweden. It was not stuffed, but it was quite dead, and somewhat smelly, too. The shark was not in possession of a valid ticket or permit to travel.

H contacted line control, who asked him to repeat what he just had said, and then asked him to please remove said piscine from the public view, and perhaps he ought to call the police and inquire as to if anyone had reported a lost shark. H did call the police, whose reply was on the lines of "What? followed by Don't ask us, ask the National Musuem of Biology, they ought ot open on monday.

H finally took matters in his own hands, and threw the shark into a skip standing next to a building site a short way from the station. He then went back to the station and had another cup of tea. Since the station attendant had been on his meal break when the shark was placed in the booking hall, it has never been revealed who placed it there, and why.

The shopping cart was appropriated by the station cleaner, who needed something to cart around his anti-graffitti materials in.

QuoteThe shark was not in possession of a valid ticket or permit to travel.

BTW: ye tell a good yarn, lad.
Ye could 'ave posted this in thee "Long Winded Tales of the Ocean" fer the pyrates.   :pirate:

Deeply curious.  :mrgreen:

An excellent tale, well told. Are you sure you aren't a skald?

Now, about the gaffer tape...

You do tell stories well.

sound like Sundays around here--just when the coma sets in--WHAM it his the fan.....

Thanks for the nice words, everyone.  :)

I thought I had the gaffer tape girls story saved on my computer, but apparently I had not. I've been really busy lately, so I haven't had the time to re-write it from scratch, but hopefully, I'll be able to do something about it tomorrow.

You have Sweden's justifiably high (so I've heard) reputation for material in this area to live up to.

You could always supply the stories in serialized form, like the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, and if you ever run out we will make you eat Bart's famous fish head stew for breakfast next day.

Aaaaa-choooo!
This was a dusty thread, but I'll risk resurrecting it.

I really ought ot write up the story of the gaffer tape girls someday, oughtn't I?

Meanwhile, things have been somewhat grim on the railways -the economic slump hit us hard, and quite a few people were made redundant at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately, most of those redundancies were operational staff (driver, shunters, etc), so when summer and the vacation periods came on, we suddenly had no staff left to operate the trains. Whoops. The managing director got the sack this autumn, and the new MD started out by launching a reorganisation of our bloated headquarters, who were sacrosanct in the first round of redundancies, but now seems to face quite a few axings, while we have actually been recruiting some new operations staff in certain places. So it goes.

Otherwise, things have mostly been puttering along in their normal pace -which, since we are talking of the railway here, includes quite a bit of insanity and oddness.

There was the day when  all the diesel shunting locos in the yard I am based at broke down. First, the guys doing the shunting in Södertälje Harbour collided with a lorry that ran a red light at a railway crossing, so they needed a new loco. Then, one loco refused to move in any direction, unless you cut out half the traction motors, followed by the third loco that had an interesting little fault with the load regulator: every time you notched the throttle up over step 3, the motor went to idle and the fuel pump shut off. Great. Fortunately, we had a last diesel shunter available, that just had come out of maintenace in the workshops, and I was sent to pick it up. When I got to the loco, I was greeted by a charming little fountain of greenish water from the long hood of the loco. Yup, coolant leak. At first, the guys in the workshop tried to fob it off with the explanation that they had probably just overfilled it a little, or perhaps there were some air pockets in the coolant loop. When I explained to them that I cxould actually see the coolant level decreasing in the sight glass as I talked to them over the phone, they fell silent.

Not much was done that day -we did manage do to some shunting of the unelectrified tracks in the goods yard with a electric loco and a loong rake of wagons to reach the wagons parked on the unelectrified tracks, but the outlying industries and sidings had to wait.

And then, we had the afternoon when a newish and rather unexperienced driver didn't read his wagon lists and duty sheets properly, and so sent a train on it's merry way to Malmö in the south of Sweden. Problem was, those wagons were supposed to go on the ferry to Finland next morning.

The funniest part of the whole story is that the woman handling the bookings of wagons to Finland has her office next to the main goods yard in Malmö, and sent us a fax on the lines of "I see some wagons I can recognize outside my office window. Please explain why I can see these wagons, and why they aren't in Moominland. "

Then, there was the time when I was out shunting a local industry south of Stockholm -a factory making pasta, cake mixes and industrial flour mixes e t c. Their loading tracks are situated on a very steep incline, and the tankers loaded with bulk flour are quite heavy -around 90 tons per wagon, so you have to stay on your toes, especially when it is wet and slippery. One early autumn day, with a fine drizzle, I almost ran over a bunch of suits who were standing in one of the loading bays, busily taking photos of the bay, and the train, and just about anything, and didn't really understand why I was braking so heavily, blowing the whistle on the loco and waving to them to get out of the way. Must have been because I was such a cheerful chap, mustn't it?  I did manage to stop in time, so no harm done, and they eventually slunk away after I made my foul mood known.

The catch? The suits  were a bunch of Six Sigma Production Process Quality Improvment "experts". I am not sure how production processes get improved by being run over by a train, but then I am not a consultant, either.

All in a days work...

Quote from: Lindorm on November 20, 2009, 11:53:24 AM...

The catch? The suits  were a bunch of Six Sigma Production Process Quality Improvment "experts". I am not sure how production processes get improved by being run over by a train, but then I am not a consultant, either.

...

I believe you've hit upon a solution that would significantly help *many* industries under the assistance of 6Σ...    ;)

I had the title of 'consultant' attached to my job description for a while, although in reality I was a developer and occasional project manager. True consultants walk in suits with an air of superiority (or perhaps their heads are buoyant?) and incapable of being run over by a train... until they are!

Quote from: pieces o nine on November 20, 2009, 06:04:29 PM

Quote from: Lindorm on November 20, 2009, 11:53:24 AM...

The catch? The suits  were a bunch of Six Sigma Production Process Quality Improvment "experts". I am not sure how production processes get improved by being run over by a train, but then I am not a consultant, either.

...

I believe you've hit upon a solution that would significantly help *many* industries under the assistance of 6Σ...    ;)

So, when we reach 3.4 flattened consultants per million corp-speak catchphrases, we will achieve enlightment and the rapture will be nigh? Or perhaps Cthulhu?

Quote from: Sibling Zono (anon1mat0) on November 20, 2009, 06:24:46 PM
I had the title of 'consultant' attached to my job description for a while, although in reality I was a developer and occasional project manager. True consultants walk in suits with an air of superiority (or perhaps their heads are buoyant?) and incapable of being run over by a train... until they are!

Dunno about suits, environmental consultants walk around in fireproof coveralls and try not to get run over by heavy equipment. ;)

Ecological consultants tend to wander round idly wondering when the bleeding will stop...

Quite a number of years ago I used to know a consultant who had a very simple - and effective - modus operandi.  What he would do when called in to a job, after having all the discussions with management etc, was to put on a pair of overall and go out onto the factory floor and get to know the workers.  After a period of suspicion (what's he up to?) the workers would usually tell him what was wrong and - more importantly - how it could be fixed.  He would then take the info back to his office, write it up in a nice shiny report and send it in with an invoice for big fat fee.  He had a reputation for getting excellent results and made a lot of money.  He said it spoke volumes about the management of many companies that this approach never occurred to themselves.

Do unto others before they figure it out themselves.... 8)

The railways being what they are, and with the legacy they have, are filled with some rather colourful and eccentric characters, often with quite a few quirks and somewhat odd perspectives on life and reality. God knows I often suspect that I might be one of them myself. There is the signaller who in his spare time runs a webpage where he disproves not only Einsteinian physics, but also Newtonian mechanics. There's the driver who is an accomplished musician with several recordings and live performances to his credit, always bringing his favourite instrument with him to practice during breaks. His favourite instrument is the bagpipe, by the way, which can lead to some very unusual sounds floating across the goods yard an early summer evening. There's the obsessive DIY-guy, who has built a very ingenious heating and electricity supply system for his house using a home-built Heath Robinson-esque setup with a wood gas generator, a heat exchanger, a generator set converted from an old diesel motor and the old farmhouse well, approaching perpetual motion efficiencies -but has never owned a washing machine until well after his 45th birthday.

But tonight, my story isn't about them. And it's not about my possible and probable descent to quirky eccentricity, either.

This story is about two drivers -let's call them Runar and Björn.

In southern Sweden, there is a certain important railway junction and associated small town and goods yard, located on the outskirts of the Swedish Bible Belt. Since the company I work for is in the business of moving freight, we have a sizable crewing depot there, and run most of the goods yard, too.

In this depot, there is a  driver named Runar.
Runar is a small, thin guy, very neat and tidy, immaculate in his appearance and indeed the only driver in the company that I know of who wears a tie to work. He is soft-spoken, mild-mannered and very careful in his driving -indeed, he is also a minder driver for trainees doing their practice runs. He lives in a small country village some distance away from the railway town. He is also very active in a local baptist church, whose number are legion in these parts of the country.

In the very same depot, there is also a driver named Björn.
Björn is a big, burly fellow, with a most imposant belly, a huge beard and a huge mop of hair. His voice is on the level of a foghorn, and his personal grooming and wardrobe is handled by the Salon de Dumpster et Cie. His appetite is prodigious, with one favourite being the "Kebab-roll-pizza" speciality of a local greasy spoon -take a ham/cheese/mushroom pizza, roll it up to a wrap, fill with kebab meat and chips/fries, splash of red and white sauce, stick a fork in it, and you are ready to go! He also happens to like good stories and, above all, practical jokes, preferrably involving whopee cushions, toilets, boobs or all three. One of his perennial favourites is to roll up a porn magazine in the sun blinds of a loco, giving a "nice little surprise" to the next driver who pulls them down. He is, by the way, not considered suitable for the position of minder driver.

Anyhow, one day, Björn was sitting as a spare driver in the crewing depot, waiting for something to happen, or for him to be released and get to go home. He was also bored and looking for something to liven things up. In this state of mind, he espied a driver's bag that had been left standing next to the notice boards. It was, in fact, Runar's bag, as could be evidenced by the name tag and the little enamel pin of the Christian Railway-Worker's Association. From observation to thought to action was but a mere instant, and a few porn magazines were surreptiously snuck into Runar's bag. Very satisfied with himself, Björn busied himself with the coffee machine and then went into the TV room to wait for the inevitable explosion.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited some more. In fact, after four or five days, he was actually getting somewhat nervous. Had he given poor Runar a heart attack  (Björn is not malicious by any means, and actually a rather kind person, in his own slightly annoying way)? Or had Runar blown a fuse, and was now plotting revenge? Or had management gotten wind of it, and he was about to be pulled on the carpet?

So, when Björn finally spotted Runar in the corridor a few days later, he simply had to ask if Runar hadn't noticed a "little extra something" in his bag the other week?

To which Runar replied that he had indeed, and while the magazines were not of the kind that he usually read, he did appreciate the thought that was behind them, since he understood that Björn not meant any harm, but only wanted to give him some light amusement to read in case he got stuck out in the woods due to some disturbance or other. In fact, he appreciated it so much that he and his wife would be very happy to have Björn over for dinner on friday evening, and he had noticed on Björn's roster that he was on rest days by then.

Björn was a bit flabbergasted at this, and wondered if there might be some ulterior motive behind it all, but since he was cornered, he more or less had to accept.

Friday evening came, and Björn went to dinner in Runar's home. Unfortunately, Björn found it a bit difficult to fully appreciate the delicious meal prepared by Runar's lovely wife. You see, Runar had also invited a few friends over.

In fact, it was his local church group that had come over for one of their prayer meetings.

Also present was a journalist for a newspaper affiliated with the baptist church, writing a nice little story about the evangelical work done in the deep woods, and taking lots of photos.

And a week later, a newpaper cutting appeared on the noticeboard of the crewing depot. The centrepiece was a photograph of Björn, dainty cup of coffee in one hand, hymn book thrust into his other hand, all 125 kilos of him stiff as a board and a absolutely terrified Bambi-in-the-headlights look on his face.

Björn has never visited Runar for dinner again.

And Runar has never found a porn magazine in his bag again.

And they all lived happily ever after, driving their trains on their merry way through the dark woods and desolate heaths.

It's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for..


Now, about the gaffer tape?

 :ROFL:


EDIT:

Quote from: Lindorm on January 29, 2010, 05:51:57 PMThere's the obsessive DIY-guy, who has built a very ingenious heating and electricity supply system for his house using a home-built Heath Robinson-esque setup with a wood gas generator, a heat exchanger, a generator set converted from an old diesel motor and the old farmhouse well, approaching perpetual motion efficiencies

I resemble that remark, or more accurately, I aspire to resemble that remark. Would love to hear more at some point.

Lovely! :ROFL:

Ohhh, story time! ;D

Both the railway and the underground is the home of (well workplace mostly, but there are exceptions to that too) to a lot of eccentric characters. And some eccentric machines too for that matter.
For what else could one call an really old tram that now has it's home on the underground system and has had it's electric motor removed and instead is equipped with an equally old diesel bus engine, although not to propel it, it has to be towed as the diesel runs a big fan that work as a gigantic leaf-blower and is used to clear the third rail of ice and snow...

Winter on the railways

This year, the winter has been quite severe here in Sweden -in some parts, it has been the coldest and most snow-rich winter for more than twenty years. This has had quite an effect on the railways, with lots of delays, cancellations and other problems. Some of these problems are due to cost-cutting measures implemented by Banverket, the national rail infrastructure administration with woefully inadequate staff and machine resources available for snow-clearance and fault-finding jobs. These cost-cutting exercises are mostly due to the government wanting to cut public spending, at least on low-publicity areas such as infrastructure maintenance. Other problems are due to the various operating companies not having adequate resources, running to tight schedules and deferring maintenance -again due to cost-cutting measures in order to be more effective and show a profit.

Other problems, however, are simply due to the fact that when it gets cold and you have deep drifts of snow, everything takes more time, becomes more difficult and things simply break down. I, and my fellow railway workers have had a couple of gruelling months now, trying to keep the trains running.

Consider, for example, that one of our typical freight trains is essentially a 630-metre long pressurized air hose, with a joint every fifteen to twenty metres. This hose has to be tight and leak-proof, in order to get the brakes of the wagons working and the train running. But when it gets cold outside, rubber gaskets and hoses stiffen and crack, and start to leak, metal pipes contract and jump out of their sockets, and moisture in the air supply from the compressor on the locomotive condensates and freezes to ice in the train brake pipe, creating blockages. Whirling snow collects on the underframe of the wagons, starts to melt from the heat when the brakes apply, and then instantly freezes solid again, forming great blocks of ice around the brake rigging, which has to move freely in order for it to work. An intermodal wagon for carrying containers and lorry trailers can easily carry an extra 5-8 tons of ice around its underframe and in the container well. Multiply that y 32 wagons, and you are suddenly carrying a lot of extra weight. Not to mention that the ice formed on the upper part of the wagons might cause the containers to not latch on properly to their carrying spigots, which means an unsecured load.

Even the simple act of coupling two wagons to each other -throwing a eye over a hook, tightening with a screw connection and joining up two air hoses- can become a challenge when the coupler and the air hoses are frozen in a solid block of ice.

Here are a few pictures taken the last few weeks that might perhaps be of interest:

The first one shows the front of a loco, with the coupler and air hoses frozen in a solid block of ice. The second one shows part of a bogie on the same loco. In there, somewhere in the block of ice, is a brake block that has to move freely in order for it to work properly.

The third one shows the loading bed of a container-carrying wagon. The wagon was probably covered in snow at the time of loading, which then compacted and solidified during the journey south. This is the sight that met me and the operator of the reach stacker when we started unloading: The loaded containers sat in solid blocks of ice, and it was impossible to load the wagons with empty containers, since the ice and packed snow was enough to lift them clear of the attachment spigots.

The last one shows a few of the tracks in a goods yard south of Stockholm. The maintenance contractor has helpfully enough cleared the tracks with a broom mounted on a road-rail JCB, but the snow thus cleared has been thrown on the walkways between the tracks, where we are supposed to walk while shunting, perform brake tests on the wagons and so on.

This has been a trying few months since christmas, and there is still quite a bit of winter left.

Brrr.
I've seen these pictures before, still I always get upset about the conditions you have to work under...
At least they should clean up the :censored: shunting yard properly.

I feel an itch to take the high monkeys at banverket for a little walk on that yard, between the trains. :whip:

Quote from: Lindorm on February 13, 2010, 11:42:41 AM
This has been a trying few months since christmas, and there is still quite a bit of winter left.

I'd say something about "winter hardiness" but I imagine you're weary of such cliches.

Wow, man, that's rough.

Wanna borrow a blowtorch?   

Quote from: Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith on February 14, 2010, 01:39:55 PM

Quote from: Lindorm on February 13, 2010, 11:42:41 AM
This has been a trying few months since christmas, and there is still quite a bit of winter left.

I'd say something about "winter hardiness" but I imagine you're weary of such cliches.

Wow, man, that's rough.

What gets me is not so much that the work has become harder and colder, but that you constantly have so much needless and useless aggrevation over things that others really ought to have taken care of. If a industry owns their own siding, they are responsible for keeping it in a serviceable state. It shouldn't come as a surprise to them that they need to clear off snow if record snowfalls are predicted, and they shouldn't be surprised and make a big stink about it if we then refuse to service said siding, since we cannot run there without risk of derailment.

Here in the greater Stockholm area, the commuter rail operator is the political and economic heavyweight, and lobbying and pressure from their side has meant that the infrastructure maintainers have prioritized their plant (commuter train depots, station platforms and so on), whereas we on the freight side are at best the poor country bumpkin. That we had to have three derailments in our local goods yard before the infrastructure owner finally listened and started clearing snow in our yards is simply disgraceful.

The shortage of infrastructure resources has also meant that those who actually exist -both staff and machines- are worked very, very hard, which of course is an enormous strain on both people and machines. Stress, long working hours and difficult situations combined with contracting staff new to working on the railways have already led to several accidents where snow-clearing staff and plant have been hit by trains, unfortunately with lethal results in a few cases.

Let's just say that there will probably be quite a lot of rethinking within the industry after this, the first really hard post-privatization winter. Unfortunatley, the incumbent coalition minister responsible for infrastructure is busy looking the other way and would much rather talk about the positive new values created by the lates passenger franchise reform they are trying to ram through parliment.

Quote from: Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith on February 14, 2010, 01:39:55 PM
Wanna borrow a blowtorch?   

We actually do use blowtorches from time to time, to thaw frozen screw couplers on wagons and magnet valves on the locos. The problem is that when using a blowtorch, you burn any lubricants and seals that might be present, so if you are unfortunate, you end up in even bigger problems. If you use a blowtorch to thaw a frozen screw coupler, you usually burn away most of the lubricant and the seeping water will enter the threads on the screw, freezing them solid once you stop torching. Still, sometimes it is the only way out. The germans are enamoured with covering their couplers in a thick grease which is absolutely useless in ordinary weather, and freezes to solid ice in this weather, so that is probably better burned off. Wagons from the north of Sweden and from Norway, though, have their coupler lubricated by thin mineral oil. It wil stain your clothes and seep through your gloves, but is does keep the snow and ice away, and the couplers run easy even in -25 degrees.



(Edited fur spellink)

BRRRRRR!!!    Lindorm...

Looks like you need one of  these (http://www.cs4fn.org/society/images/dragonfire.jpg)  in your yard!

Tonight, I celebrated spring by getting stuck, and almost turned a very expensive piece of equipment to a nice little bonfire. 

I was rostered to work a intermodal train from Stockholm to Norrköping tonight, getting relieved there. The intermodal trains we run on behalf of CargoNet (we provide traction and drivers) are invariably quite long and heavy, more so since their latest cost-cutting exercise during the economic slump, where several trains that used to run separately were combined into one. A big one.

I picked up and prepped my locomotive for the night's working in the goods yeard where I am based. A colleague had driven the loco on an earlier working and made a note in the fault report book about "Traction currrent ammeter for no. 2 traction motor inoperative-reads zero amps all the time". OK, nothing unusual, and the loco was otherwise working fine, so I departed and made my way to the intermodal terminal on the other side of Stockholm. I was recieved by a shunter, we coupled up my loco to the rake of wagons, charged the brakes and then made a brake test of the whole train.

By the time the brake test was finished, a light rain had started to drizzle down, making the rails quite slippery. The shunter called up line control and gave me the departure signal.

Just about immediately after I started to move off, I realized that This Will Be A Close Shave. The train did start to move, but very slowly, and with quite a bit of wheelslip from the loco. The southbound departure tracks from this intermodal terminal are all situated on a quite steep incline, and getting the train up and across the incline was looking more and more improbable.

I applied the "anti-skid brake" to stop wheelslip, laid down sand to improve adhesion and drove with one eye glued to the airflow indicator, one eye on the road ahead and one eye on the traction current meters to see any early indications wheelslip. As more and more of the train came up to the incline, the train got slower and slower and slower, and soon was moving slow enough for the old electromechanical Hasler speedo to just register an occassional -tick-. I started using the overload feature which gives you even more power to the traction motors, but also overheats them and shouldn't be used for more than about twenty seconds or so. The ammeters are only graded to 2000 amperes per traction motor, but the indicator needles all went a bit further, and stopped on the arrestor bars where the gauges ended. All, except for the one for motor 2. Hmmmm...

I knew that if I stopped on the incline of the outlet track, I would never be able to start the train again. So, I continued, and probably woke up anyone sleeping in the neighbourhood with the howl from the traction motor venitlators and the transformer oil coolers. The smell of burnt silica from the sand, ozone and very hot cable insulation was getting rather heavy even in the cab by now.

Eventually, I managed to climb the crest of the incline, and roll down the slope towards the tracks of a busy commuter train station on the line southwards. I called up the line controller for the section and told her I had technical problems with my loco, and had to stop at the next signal to check up on things.

This, I duly did. There was actually a haze in the engine room of the loco from the very hot traction motor groups and the coolant pump for the transformer was working like crazy. I didn't actually dare to shut of the ventilator fans, but instead put on my ear defenders and let the ventilators run whilst I rummaged around trying to find what the fault was.

I had no fault indications in the cab, nothing was obviously wrong in the engine room, and the heat had now subsided, so I shrugged and thought that the whole thing might have been due to slippery conditions ( the first spring rain dissolving the winter's accumulated railhead contamination) and probably overloading in some of the containers and lorry trailers that were loaded on the wagons, a not unknown phenomena. The traction motor ammeter had to be faulty, since I had no indication of a fautl with the motor itself, right?  I notified the line controller that I was ready to depart, and promptly got a clear signal.

Now, the line ahead comes to  a short but rather steep incline, followed by a long slope southwards. Unfortunately, I never got that far. About 150 metres short of the crest of the hill, the loco simply couldn't pull the train anymore. I was well and truly stuck. I reported this to the controller, and to my company operations control, and then went back to the engine room and started doing some more thorough checks, ones where I had to switch off the main line breaker and take the pantograph down, since I was about to poke around in high-voltage cabinets.

After a while, I made an interesting discovery. The main contactor ( a big electro-pneumatic  switch for heavy electrical loads)  for motor two was broken, but in such an ingenious way that while the contactor did indicate that it was opening and closing properly, the actual contact surfaces never came into contact with each other and closed the circuit. The small flicker of traction current I had seen register in the ammeter was actually the 2000-odd amperes of full power arcing across the air gap, and by the way more or less vaporizing the contact surfaces. No wonder I thought I smelled something burning...

So, this loco was definitely hors de combat. And my train was blocking several of the tracks in the busy southern approaches to Stockholm, leading to no little aggrevation of the evening services. Eventually, a colleague arrived with a new loco  -even though the loco could run perfectly well with the faulty motor cut out, the loss of traction power would mean that the wagons would be waaay to heavy for it to pull. After doing some bizarre shunting and blocking even more of the southern mainline, I could eventually start making my way to Norrköping again -about three hours late.

I actually made it back home, too.  But not on schedule. Oh well, perhaps next time?


... and when I see my colleague next time, I'll have some words with him about what he writes in the fault report books. And, more to the point, what he doesn't write.

Oh dear, you had a exiting night! :-\

I'm very happy you got out of the ordeal with just some overtime and a bit of odd smell on your clothes!

Quote
I applied the "anti-skid brake" to stop wheelslip, laid down sand to improve adhesion and drove with one eye glued to the airflow indicator, one eye on the road ahead and one eye on the traction current meters to see any early indications wheelslip.

It's true, driving a train you need at least three eyes...
Well you might not have three eyes but you sure need 'em, the ability to multi-task is crucial.
:)

Nothing like a bit'o excitement to get the heart valves slamming, yes?

You said 2000 amps to the motor-- at what voltage, I have to ask?  (yes, I'm a geek and I love machinery of any sort...)

If it jumped an air-gap, I'd guess in the range of 440 or more?  Then again, that depends on the air-gap, does it not?  :)

Glad the only thing ruined was something already broken--- well aside from your broken schedule-- could'da been worse, yes?

:)

Catenary voltage on the national rail network in Sweden is nominally 16 kV, 16 2/3 Hz AC. Voltage can vary quite a bit, depending on load in the section, distance to feeder substation e t c. Amperage can also vary considerably, but the high tension surge protector on the class Rc 2 locomotive I drove the night in question trips at about 600A.

The Rc2 class locomotives are a late sixties construction, and the first locomotives in the world in full scal production with thyristor control and separetely excited traction motors -the rotor and the field are controlled separately, giving (for the time) an unprecedented degree of fine control over the loco. A lot of water has passed under the bridges since then, and the Rc class in it's various incarnations is now getting a bit old and, with new locos vastly surpassing them in performance -at least on paper. Still, it is an excellent and very dependable piece of engineering, with a very elegant simplicity to them, and very easy and friendly to operate.

Being of the age they are, the traction control system is probably a bit odd compared to modern standards. It is also much less precise, with "nominal" sometimes being more of a sincere hope than anything else. The values below should be taken with a grain of salt, and in certain parts reflect operational philosophies as much as anything else.

The incoming AC from the catenary is transformed in the main transformer to various voltages -among them 800 V for the traction converters. In these, the incoming AC is converted to a pulsing DC current, switched through a series of converter bridges. Each bridge has two diode branches with four thyristors and five diodes each, and there are four bridges for each traction motor, for the rotor. The field excitation/magnetisation bridge is simpler -four thyristors coupled in a one-way arrangement per motor. The field excitation converter basically only  provides a rotary direction (and thus the direction of movement) as well as field weakning when the motors get up to speed and counter-EMF rears it's ugly face. All the bridges are oil-cooled, on a separate cooling circuit from the main transformer, but sharing the same cooler groups (air-vent fans in a central cooling shaft). Each thyristor is also coupled in series with a 400A 800V circuit breaker, to protect the transformer windings.

Each motor is rated for a maximum starting current of 2080A, a max tension of 870V, max speed 1920 RPM and a maximal field current of 260A. Each motor is a little cutie of about 3000 kg, exclusive of mountings and connecting cables. The continous rating of these is 900 kW, but they can and are overloaded above these values. The power rating is as much a function of the insulation class in the motor as anything else -the El 16 locos exported to Norway have the same traction motors, but with better insulation and heat resistance, so they have been upgraded to 1000 kW nominally each.

The total power availabel of 3600 kW is nothing much when compared to modern electric locos -the Bombarider Traxx family and the Siemens Eurosprinter variants all have about 6400 kW available. But on the other hand, a significant factor in determining what you can pull is the adhesion available -otherwise, your wheels just start to spin and you end up literally digging ditches in the railhead and heat-damaging your wheels, so total power available is not the whole story.

Aaannnyhow, I am off to bed now. If there is anything more you want to know, feel free to ask and I'll try to answer when I can.  :)

That's so very technical that I just love it... thank you for the expanded info.

I'm experiencing a brief moment of geek nirvana....

:)

I don't know at those amps and voltages but I wouldn't be surprised if the ozone produced by the arcs reached a fair amount of toxicity. Do you have a mask, and if so how frequently do you use it?

From my own experience ozone levels become intolerable before they become really harmful (short time exposure only). Even rather small amounts are so unpleasant that noone will stay long enough (unless trapped) to get a lethal dose.
Longtime exposure to low levels is something different of course.
Not sure, if there are ozone masks. They would have to decompose the ozone in the filter (it's oxygen after all and keeping that out altogether would defy the purpose ;)) but the formed radicals would be extremly aggressive.

Quote from: Sibling Zono (anon1mat0) on April 10, 2010, 04:22:24 AM
I don't know at those amps and voltages but I wouldn't be surprised if the ozone produced by the arcs reached a fair amount of toxicity. Do you have a mask, and if so how frequently do you use it?

Considering that the engine room is about 12 by 3 by 2 metres, and ventilated by 12 high-power fans for the air cooling of transformer, converters and traction motors (the waste heat from the main transformer alone is on the order of 400 kW), I'd say that dangerous concentrations of anything would be very unlikely.

We do have an  escape hood]=http://www.srsafety.com/product.aspx?p_id=10320] escape hood (http://=http://www.srsafety.com/product.aspx?p_id=10320) in each cab to use in case of fire, though -all that cabling and fire-retardant insulation can get quite nasty when it finally burns, and while the transformer oil isn't PCB-laced anymore, it's still a far cry from a vegan acai berrry and soymilk smoothie.  ;)

So, what have I been up to lately?
As mentioned elsepost, I have been involved in a fair bit of training of drivers-to-be at a training centre in Stockholm. Recently, I was there as a sort of guest lecturer to give a talk on goods wagons, how they work, how to perform functional and safety checks and so on. While the lecture was quite long, and sometimes a bit heavy, I got the impression they liked it a lot. I did give them some colourful examples of what can go wrong, and what happens then, which did get their attention. I think I have been having a certain influence on the trainee group, too -literally all the girls in the group want to go to a freight operator for their practice period, whilst most of the guys are thinking about either high-speed passenger trains or raking in the cash at the airport express company. Wimps!  ;)

I'll have them over for some practical sessions next week, doing a bit of practical instruction on brake testing, coupling and similar stuff. I intend to let them get very, very dirty!  :mrgreen:  And the week after that, they will be heading out for their first four-week practice period, which two of them will be having at my home depot. I will have one of them as a student driver, and I will also handle the practical stuff surrounding their practice period -booking lodging rooms, tickets, next-of-kin details and all the other minutiae. This is their first period of practical training, so it will mainly focus on them getting to see a lot of the theory they have been studying fall in place, get a taste of driving and teach them some basic survival skills when it comes to shunting.

I'll be very busy for the upcoming six weeks or so, but I am also looking forward to doing some training again and having a student driver. Then again, since we basically will be living together for a month, I hope I will get one that I get along with outside of driving, too -otherwise, it might be a bit boring or loooong awkwards silences. Nah, I'm sure it'll work out OK -most of the students in that group seem to be quite keen and alert. I'm not sure how I'll be able to handle a foaming trainspotter, though, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Yesterday afternoon, we had a very nasty reminder that working on the railway can be a quite dangerous occupation. Two workers doing work related to the new Citytunnel connector in the north end of the goods yard where I am based were struck by a passing commuter train. One died on the scene, the other got his legs cut off. While not exactly colleagues or friends, the guys from that contractor have their temporary shacks next to our crewing base, and often pop in to our break rooms for a coffee and a chat, so they are hardly unknown strangers either. I don't know the exact chain of events leading up to this accident, but the persons involved were all trained in PTS and procedures for working on-track, and experienced in doing that kind of work. Still, yesterday something went very wrong, and now someone has lost their son, their father, their husband or their fellow worker.

I'm very sorry to hear that, one thing is to hear about occupational hazards and a very different thing is to deal with an incident. My thoughts to the families and the survivor.

Nasty.  I can imagine it makes you feel pretty down for a bit.

Ever vigilant we must remain, with regards to safety-- and gentle reminders are not only a good idea, but a must--
...sometimes, I find myself growing complacent around high voltage electricity, mainly because I've not been shocked in a long while.

So I have to force myself to remember that it is not only painful, but deadly.

I think it is in the nature of humans to forget that they are literally one tiny misjudgment away from maiming and death-- and no, I am not blaming the victims, here-- it could've been someone else's signaling error as easily as complacency.

<I> Feel sorrow for the families of the one bloke, and sympathy for the other one--who while alive, his life has unexpectedly made a 90 degree left turn...

... and right now, I can appreciate sudden, unexpected sharp turns in life, having just experienced one myself (although mine was not injury-related, it is an upheaval).

I have the deepest sympathy for these men and their families.

Still, I'm very happy because L was not involved in anyway. My heart stopped for a beat when I heard about the accident on the news. Thankfully L called just minutes afterwards so I didn't had the time to get really worried.

This has been a really black year for railway maintenance contractors so far, as late as in April three workers also working on the "Citytunneln" project got hit by a underground train in the tunnel between two stations, one person died immediately one was seriously wounded and the third person was physically unharmed but in shock after witnessing his colleagues accident. The driver of the train was also shocked and brought to hospital.

(((((((((♥)))))))))

There are grim statistics that the average train driver will run over people several times during his/her career, in most cases suiciders that do not care about the effect on the driver (and despite abundant info have not checked that it very often is neither a secure nor quick way out, especially not close to stations where the train is not at full speed). But even without these cases I am actually surprised that rail workers are not run over on a daily basis esp. on the metro (underground). Not a job I would want to have.

Suicides are indeed a problem for train drivers, but there are also those who take short-cuts across the tracks, ride on skateboards right on the platform edge, try to ride on goods wagons or on the couplers of trains as a dare, people who use the tracks as a toilet and countless other examples. There are also those who try to beat the train through a level crossing, or who can't get themselves to leave their car if they get stuck on a level crossing, or try to use the railway as a bike/car/skiing/snowmobile path. Or a convenient place to walk their dog. Or another of the countless of excuses I have seen and heard.

Nevertheless, it is indeed a traumatic experience for all those involved. For example, someone has to clean things up and sanitize the train, and someone has to talk a walk along the track in the darkness, looking for the pieces that once was a teenage boy but now are strewn across a kilometre or two. 

At least here in Sweden, the caretaking process of those involved in such an accident has improved a lot the last 15-20 years or so. Most companies only require the driver to make an emergency call, stating the nature of the accident and the position, and that's it. You are not really supposed to do anything else, apart from securing your train, since you are definitely under high stress, and stressed-out people tend to make stupid mistakes.

When help arrives at the site, a "kamratstödjare", "support buddy", an experienced fellow colleague with some basic training in emergency psychology and caretaking takes care of the driver, and gets him or her off the site as soon as possible. They make their way to some suitable place -nearby company offices, the home crewing base, whatever, and sit down and try to relax and unwind a bit. Depending a bit on how the afflicted driver feels, they might meet up with a company representative and start writing up a report on what happened. Likewise, the police sometimes want to interview the driver as well. Due to some unfortunate incidents with very insensitive actions by the police, most companies have a policy of instructing staff to not agree to any interviews etc with the police unless they have a "stödkamrat" and/or company representative present. 

Eventually, the driver is taken home, and care is taken to ensure that the driver is not alone at home, or at least has an easy means of contacting someone if need should arise. Manly men sitting at home, turning things over and over and over again in their heads whilst staring into the wall with a bottle of booze at their side is thankfully not considered a desirable solution anymore.

Most companies also operate on a policy of not granting sick leave to persons who have had such an incident (unless they are physically harmed, of course). Instead, they are relieved of their normal duties, but expected to pop into work and meet fellow colleagues and a manager, in order for them to get back to their job slowly but surely. After a few days, they might tag along with a colleague for a ride on a train, and then start driving on their own, often with a stödkamrat accompanying them for the first few tours.

This is of course the ideal situation, and unfortunately not always the outcome. Likewise, while most companies are good at taking care off the immediate emergency and aftermath, the long-term follow-up is often sorely lacking. Medical research (actually performed on train drivers from my former place of work) showed significantly increased stress hormone levels even a year after a person under train incident. Various incarnations of PTSD are not unheard of, either. The system of care is far from perfect, and it is unfortunatley a case of mostly being something for drivers with other staff getting very varying levels of post-incident care. Some companies are very good at dealing with the whole train crew and others affected, other operators are less than stellar.

Still, it is a vast improvment "Take three days off, and get a bottle of vodka" and Real Men Don't Cry, which was the norm not so very long ago. However, anyway you look at it, it is still one of the major occupational health problems we face as train drivers, and one that has the potential to affect any and all of us. While you can certainly learn to live with your experiences, they do affect you and change you, and they are impossible to forget.

We had a shocking incident in our village, just about the time I joined this forum. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243758/Woman-driver-dies-train-ploughs-car-level-crossing.html (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243758/Woman-driver-dies-train-ploughs-car-level-crossing.html)

Both cars were waiting at the crossing.  Buildings prevent drivers from seeing a southbound train until the last second, but people trust the barriers, so when they went up the cars moved onto the crossing, just as a fast train came through.  The westbound car was hit square-on and thrown maybe 150 metres.  The eastbound car had to cross the empty line first and was almost able to stop in time; it seems the car hit the moving train and was thrown clear without much damage.

The only possibility is that the signalman opened the barriers too soon.

I hear from a credible source that at the critical moment a farmer phoned the signal box to ask for a private crossing further north to be opened so he could move some sheep across, as the train had just cleared that crossing.  The signalman leaned over to do this and hit the wrong switch.  He instantly realised his mistake, but too late.

All kinds of nonsense is still being talked in the village but my feeling is sorrow for the poor bloody signalman.

Is why such things ought not to be left to fallible humans.

:'(

Working on the railways, you get to pass through large parts of the Swedish countryside. It's interesting to see the differences in landscape and climate when you travel to a remote part of the country, or for that matter to do a bit of reading-up on the history of some of the places you pass through. Often, the economical and social history of a place can be quite interesting and something to ponder  as you pass through a closed-down rustbelt small town or realize that traisn have been running to this harbour for more than 150 years.

And sometimes, the modern socio-historical conditions of a place can be quite colourful, even exotic or, dare I say it, burlesque.

As I have mentioned in several posts, there is a town in Sweden called Hallsberg.
Hallsberg has in itself more or less no redeeming values whatsoever, but as it happened, it became a junction between several of the major trunk lines when the Swedish railways were built during the 1800's. Thus, Hallsberg became a very important railway town, with a huge goods yard and marshalling yard to go with it. As a driver working for a freight operating company, a fair bit of my time is spent on trains either towards or from Hallsberg.

Now, from Hallsberg there is a branch line going south-east towards Motala and eventually Mjölby, passing through such interesting places as Åsbro, Mariedamm and Rönneshytta. You have never heard of those places, you say? Most Swedes haven't either -they are small villages, once having had an industry of some sort, now relegated to a interlocking and a passing loop in the middle of nowhere, and the few remaining inhabitants are either small-scale farmers or commute to Mjölby or Örebro to work.

Although Åsbro gained a bit of infamy recently -the one surviving industry there is by the way a large wood treatment plant, where wooden construction objects, including railway sleepers, are treated to make them impervious to rot, insects and weather. it has actually been deemed cheaper to keep the plant in operation than to pay the costs for the environmental clean-up after over a hundred years of continous use. That was not the source of the infamy, though.

The old manor of Åsbro was put up for sale some years ago, after the farmer who owned it went bankrupt. Part of the old manor buildings were purchased by a sort of new-age group doing healing therapy sessions with indian yoga, sun-dancing and odd diets. They also offered courses in how to stop eatign and only subsisting on sunlight and pure water. Considering the presence of the wood treatment plant, one did not have to be overly cynic to wonder where they would find pure water in Åsbro, but each to their own I suppose. The creosote treatment is proven to be effective against psoriasis at least, though it might lead to cancer in the long term.

Another part of the manor was purchased by a norwegian businesswoman, who had plans to open a "conference and event facility", specialising in providing clients with unique team-building experiences and events. As it turned out, the clients were members of a certain association in which the businesswoman also had a prominent position.  In fact, the association was a BDSM association, who finally had found an object to rebuild into the castle of their dreams on the lines of many a lurid bodice-ripper, complete with dungeons, stocks, suitably drafty attic chambers and other implements necessary for the discerning sadist with bad literary taste.

Now, imagine what happens when the BDSM association one merry day decides to have a little "slave hunt" on their grounds, with the poor slaves allowed a (small) running start, escaping into the forest, with collars and piercings and shackles and what not all merrily jangling, followed by their cruel masters and mistresses, brandishing riding crops, whips, snares, large butterfly nets and unbelievable amounts of black leather.

Consider also the nice little yoga clan, deciding to go on a small pilgrimage to a secluded clearing in the woods, there to do some naked yoga exercises, meditating on leaves of grass or little droplets of morning dew and generally subsisiting only on sunlight and mumbling some mantra or other in peaceful and quite harmony.

Now consider what happened when the twain met, perhaps not with a physically loud clash, but certainly a monumental clash of Weltanschaung. Who was trespassing upon the land of whom? Who had most severly jangled the delicate sensibilites of whom? Tempers ran high, some of the peaceful meditators turned out to be lawyers with suprisingly shark-like attitudes, and eventually, fists started flying.

Imagine what the local population thought of seeing the fight spill over into the village itself. Including the remnants of the old station, by the way -though none of the combatants tried to chain another to the track. Perhaps they have a specially equipped room for such purposes at the manor, complete with suitably modified Märklin model trains?

Imagine the field day the more lurid tabloids had. "Secret club for violent sex engage in public displays of deviancy", to quote a headline.

Oh, and won't someone think of the children?


(Links to Swedish tabloids filled with righteous moral indignation furnished upon request. Link to webiste of said kinky manor, complete with pictures of memmbers engaging in, well, activities also supplied upon request. Chlorine bleach for eyeball-washing you have to supply yourself.)

LOL!

Most amusing bit of irony, there, L.

Thanks for the laugh.

I ask for forgiveness about my comment but it seems that the incident fits certain Swedish stereotypes...  ;) :P :mrgreen:

Material for a movie if you ask me.
:mrgreen: :mrgreen:

By Jove! I think there's Lifetime Movie (http://www.mylifetime.com/movies/flick) in there, somewhere... 

I was relieved to read that the the sunshine-subsistence nekkid yoga peeps weren't accidentally rounded up and herded back to the dungeons!   :D

Glad you liked my little tale.  :)

Here's a link to one of the articles filled with Righteous Indignation and Moral Outrage in a local paper. It's a rather staid one, so it's all completely worksafe, too. And in Swedish, which might perhaps be a bit of a problem. Some of the "reader's comments" are absolutely hysterical, I promise!  ;)

http://na.se/nyheter/hallsberg/1.517645-klubb-for-valdssex-mitt-i-villasamhallet (http://na.se/nyheter/hallsberg/1.517645-klubb-for-valdssex-mitt-i-villasamhallet)

My next tale is already in the writing, and will actually take place not far away from Åsbro, a bit further down the line. It is a dark tale full of sound and fury and with a not insignificant amount of blasphemy and violence, too.

It is the tale of the subversive beaver of Jakobsdamm.


Coming sooooooon-ish!

Gaffer tape! ::)

No gaffer tape, no subversive beavers -I have simply been waaay too busy. Sorry!  :-[

One of the things that has kept me busy are trainee drivers, which as always is a mix of ups and downs. One is a natural talent, another one might be  ... well, perhaps a natural talent for something, but not driving goods trains. My current trainee is one of those that makes me smile when I go to work, though - a young lady with tattoos and piercings here and there, a great sense of humour and a very nice taste in music, mainly EBM and early heavy metal of the Iron Maiden / AC/DC / Joan Jett variety. Slogans of the day have varied from "Hey, I'm driving a heavy diesel -where's the company issue wifebeater and beercan" to "Yes, but have you tried looking at the traction control system from a queer gender analysis perspective?". In other words, we are having a lot of fun, she is making very good progress, and I feel like I have really accomplished something. It's a nice feeling!  :)

Quote from: Lindorm on March 18, 2011, 11:14:34 AM
"Yes, but have you tried looking at the traction control system from a queer gender analysis perspective?".

Can I see an interesting "guest teacher" appearance in the new KY3 class in the making?
:smartass: :ROFL:

I'll pay to be a fly on the wall! Or I can buy the booze for you two as you sketch up the lecture.

What? me? instigating? ;D

My current trainee, the young lady mentioned above, has almost talked me into getting a tatto on my upper arm of one of our locomotives. Well, I suppose that if I have to have a fortysomething-crisis, I at least ought to do something fun out of it, and the whole thing with underage mistresses, ponytail hairdo and getting a Harley-Davidson seems a bit tired.

One of these, perhaps?
http://www.jarnvag.net/images/bild/lokguide/Rc41191Malmo2009.jpg (http://www.jarnvag.net/images/bild/lokguide/Rc41191Malmo2009.jpg)

Or a diesel?
http://www.jarnvag.net/images/bild/lokguide/T44385Malmo2006stor.jpg (http://www.jarnvag.net/images/bild/lokguide/T44385Malmo2006stor.jpg)

Hmmmm....

I seem to recall an image of a train carrying glowing steel through the night. That would be cool.

Yes, dear customer BigCorp, we can of course provide training to your sub-contractor´s staff in a variety of subjects. Though it would be nice of you to actually tell us what those subjects are, how many staff you want to have trained and when. And we do understand that you yourself have a shortage of trained staff, and therefore would like us to take as much respnsibility for the training as possible. But when we say that the only way we will be able to find staff qualified to train others in Subject X is by poaching your own existing staff, we really mean it. And if you require our instructors to whiffle off to Italy in order to be trained on the technical aspexts of System Ka-Wow by the manufacturer, it would be nice to have a long-term planning horizon. And by long-term, I do not mean a text message on my company mobile telling me that the course is postponed -arriving whilst I am practically on the way to the airport. We did agree that training group sizes could vary by a reasonable amount due to various unforseen circumstances, but sending 37 people on a course designed for a maximum of 10 trainees is taking the piss a bit, especially since the conference room you booked only holds a maximum of eight people to start with.


... by the way, I have now changed employers -one of the reasons for my long absence on these forums. I now work for a small-ish company providing training, consultancy and similar services to customers within the rail industry. We also operate several basic training courses for train drivers and do various other interesting stuff. I still drive some trains on the side, too, to keep my licence active and myself from going completely insane. It's fun, but sometimes also very hectic. A large customer has more or less driven another instructor within the company to a heart condition and long-term medical leave, and now the MD of the company I work for and myself have formed a sort of special task force to kick that customer into shape. It's an experience...

Nice to see you back; sounds like things are/have been bumpy.

Good to see you, Lindorm.

Hope you and the doc can whip get the Evil Customer into shape...

Thanks for the welcome-backs!  :)

Yes, things have been quite bumpy, but also quite fun. I threw in the towel at my old job early this spring, finishing with being a sort of operating staff representative in a big project for a new customer. The last day I had at my old place of work was a sort of local staff meeting which turned into a surprise leaving do for me. The company gave me a big artisanal crystal glass bowl as a thank you, and my ex-manager, aided by a few colleagues gave me a huge hangover the next day.

Then, it was off and away on a training course for my new employer -pedagogy, didactics, seminars on the philosophy behind the rules and regulations governing the swedish railways, some advanced courses on technical subjects etc. We were just eight "advanced trainees" on the course, which was held at a breakneck pace due to various circumstances -we only had about half the time normally used to cover the subjects, so it was a case of putting in a lot of twelve-to-sixteen-hour days. In a way, it was a very stimulating environement, too -we were all there for the same reason, no one was a slouch, and it was very much of a total immersion experience, at bit like a sect of fanatical railway professionals. The courses, the instructors and the fellow trainees were all at a very high level, and I learned a lot.

Anyhow, having graduated from the course, I am now a instructor and examinator approved by the Swedish Transport Agency to instruct, train, evaluate, examin and license operating railway staff of all categories in Sweden, both on theoretical as well as practical subjects. In essence, if you ever come to Sweden and go by train, it might very well be my signature on the piece of paper that says that the driver of your train meets all the standards and requirements and is fit to be a train driver.

I still have a bit of a problem getting my head around that concept. ;)

Since then, I have worked for my new employer, a small company that does quite a bit of training and consultancy in the Swedish and Norwegian railway industry. Most of the staff at this company are old grizzled veterans -I, with my 18 years of experince is something of the new blood, and I have learned a lot from my new colleagues. During the summer, we were unfortunatley hit by quite a few of the staff falling ill and going on long-term sick leave, so I ended up having to assume responsibility for the train driver training courses in Stockholm, all in all about 55 trainees in various stages of the course. Gulp, and then some. So much for the gentle introduction.

And then, another guy fell ill, and he happened to handle one of our biggest corporate customers, for whom we are doing a few project that I was somewhat involved with. Since I was the only one who had any idea of what was going on with those clients, I ended up as the person in charge of those projects, standing in for the guy who fell ill. I did manage to exercise som managerial talent and fob off the driver training courses to someone else, and since then I have been handling training for a few corporate customers.

A bit of a wild ride, to be sure -but on the other hand, the boss is good at showing his appreciation when you have done something beyond the ordinary, and he does give you the backup you need, if you ask for it. He also has the sense to realize that his talents lies in the adminstrative field, and leaves the technical decisions to the instructors. He's also good at thrusting people waaaay out of their comfort zone, in a good way. Thus i ended up as a sort of head honcho for our biggest corporate customer, with about six months working for the company under my belt.

Double gulp time, but it is also a lot of fun.

And the wild ride sometimes takes you to exciting places like Ånge, a railway junction town in the north, pop. 2872, and a goods yard bigger than the rest of the town and not much else. Oh, there's a sporting goods store that sells their own brand of camouflage hunter's clothing, and a combined pizza/thai/kebab joint. And a hotel that lies next to the marshalling yard and is full of railway staff lodging away from home. The town closes when the moose hunting season officially begins.

But that's about it. There are no tumbleweeds in Sweden, but they would certainly not be out of place together with a few twangs on a steel guitar on Ånge Main Street a late and windy evening.

And in a few weeks, I will be going up to Kiruna in the far north, where the sun has set, and won't rise until early april next year. Unless it's off to Italy on that blighted training course. Or somewhere else? The driving turns I still do from time to time for my old employer have taken on a distinctly therapeutic tint...

Pieces of Nine: I think I used a certain amount of british english in my previous post. I meant MD, as in managing director, not the medical specialist.

That's okay, we yanks have to get our heads out of our beehives every once in a while. It's very good to hear from you, L. Sounds like you've been awfully busy.

All seems very intense, in a good way. Co-incidentally I heard from a friend today who said his brother had just completed training as a train driver (on the south coast here).

Good to hear from you again, Lindorm. :)

Quote from: Lindorm on September 19, 2012, 10:41:31 PM
And the wild ride sometimes takes you to exciting places like Ånge, a railway junction town in the north, pop. 2872, and a goods yard bigger than the rest of the town and not much else. Oh, there's a sporting goods store that sells their own brand of camouflage hunter's clothing, and a combined pizza/thai/kebab joint. And a hotel that lies next to the marshalling yard and is full of railway staff lodging away from home. The town closes when the moose hunting season officially begins.

But that's about it. There are no tumbleweeds in Sweden, but they would certainly not be out of place together with a few twangs on a steel guitar on Ånge Main Street a late and windy evening.

In most prairie towns that meet that sort of description (pop. 2872 is quite large, actually), the main street is generally named as Railway Ave. and has a grain elevator alongside the tracks.  Trains are a big deal for grain-farming towns.

Hoorah, Lindorm's back.  A lot of interesting news there, Lindorm.  Congratulations on the new qualification.

:)

So, I made it back from Ånge in one piece.

That was a strange, yet comforting, little town. The railway yard and facilities are literally bigger than the rest of the town -look it up for yourselves on a map service! While Ånge is small, it does have a bit of everything. Actually, in more than one sense, One of everything.

One hotel, where the staff actually asked if you really, really, needed to have your room cleaned every day -but on the other hand were happy to let you in to their offices on your own to use the printer and phhotocopier. Oh, and the lunch buffet went out on the steam tables at 09:30, sharp. Dinner buffet was the lunch buffet, but 10 kronor more expensive.

One small bookshop that actually hade a quite nice selection of books, and not just DIY, cookbooks and crime stories, but also a lot of poetry and drama from regional authors, quite a bit of it self-published, a nice selection of Swedish literary classics -better than I have sen in quite a few Stockholm bookshops, and above all, a pair of owners who really loved books and their work.

One terrible, terrible Thai restaurant, where the thai fare consisted of such delicacies as tinned pineapple chunks and grated cabbage in some sort of pierogi dough, all with a dusting of common supermarket curry powder.

One very nice and old-fashioned clothes store, with staff that were genuinely nice, and managed to get a certain coat ordered for me and delivered to the store before I had to go back home. I did end up spending quite a bit of money there, but I did get some very nice autumn clothes there, too.

And, above all, the silence. Not a lot was moving in Ånge, and peopel are genereally rather quiet up there, anyway, so the week was one of autumn stillness and tranquility, with some sounds from the railway yard carrying over to the hotel in the cold and crisp autumn air.

It's also very much a railway town -at the hotel lunch buffet, you could see staff from a cross-section of the Swedish railway industry happily munching away. Certainly makes for some very good lines of communication and a generally relaxed attitude.

The trainees were a mixed bunch of people working for a track maintenance company. They were all about to be trained as drivers of on-track plant, and my task was to teach them a bit of technical stuff about goods wagons, techniques for loading and securing loads as well as an introduction to dangerous goods ("if the leaking tanker carries orange warning plates, RUN"). Some where more motivated than others, some were perhaps a tad young, but on the whole a nice bunch. Of course, they weren't glued to every word I said all the time, but sometimes you got one of those comments or questions that showed that someone had really been Thinking Things Over -a little victory in a way, I suppose.  :)

Now I am back in Stockholm, working on the driver training course and then heading off to Kiruna, north of the arctic circle, to do more trackworker training for the same company as in Ånge. And who knows what comes next?

...Oh, and that big corporate customer I mentioned in my previous post? They actually called me up today and said that they had realized that it was a bit awkward having to operate a project withour anything resembling a timetable. So they promised they would hash out a few things, and get back to me with a confirmed timetable by the end of the week.

a) I'll believe it when I see it, and then I'll expect the adjustments and revisions to start.
b) Jeez, you only promised a start of the project in march this year. A half-hearted promise of a timetable over half a year later? Surely, Sir is too generous and lenient!

Sounds like you'll need to follow up on that, if they don't contact you again by week's end.

Ånge sounds lovely. I adore old department stores. I might want to move there, but I have no Swedish!

I really enjoy reading updates in this thread, Lindorm; I've had friends in railroad towns here, so some things sound familiar. But quite a bit is foreign (in the interests sense, not the geographical sense, although I guess there is that, too) and provides an interesting window into another 'world'.

Quote from: Griffin NoName on October 08, 2012, 08:48:32 PM
Ånge sounds lovely. I adore old department stores. I might want to move there, but I have no Swedish!

I agree, Ånge sounds like a delight.

On the old department store front, back in April when Mrs Blue and I went to Kangaroo Island, on our way home we stopped off for a few hours (and lunch) in the South Australian town of Tanunda.  There was an old fashioned department store in town that was fair dinkum fabulous.  Lots of good quality merchandise of every possible description and very reasonably priced, even more so as it is a country town, not one of our major cities.   Gotta love that!  ;D

It sounds like Leominster only with more excitements.  :mrgreen:

Gaffer tape!  :D

Hello, Pachy!  Good to see you.  :)

Elephant hug!

I like reading these, too. I like trains. I'm going on a train trip this weekend and can hardly wait. It's been a while.

Well, now I am probably the northernmost poster on the Monastery -way north of the polar circle, in the sub-arctic town of the arctic grouse, right next to the biggest subterranean iron ore mine in the world. Actually, some of the mine shafts are probably literally a kilometre underneath the bed I am lying upon at this moment.

This is a town that does have a strange feel to it -I´ll try to write something about it later in the week. Oh, and on wednesday, the forecast is of temperatures of -16 degrees and gusts of wind up to 33 m/s. Bracing.

T is tolerable, v is not ;)
My deepest mine crawling was only abot 800 m below ground (tourists were not allowed deeper).

Brrrr! You can be our northernmost poster child!

Yes, Brrrrr! Me too. I bet it's fabulous apart from the temperature.

Let me see.  -16° C and 33 m/s wind.  33 m/s = ~64 knots.  For every 5 knots of wind you experience a wind chill of 3° C.  So wind chill = 3x64/5 = ~38°, so your apparent temperature would be -54° C.  I reckon that's pretty chilly - I start to complain when it gets down to +5°!  :P

Cold nights and mornings, hot afternoons, some rain.

Quote from: Lindorm on October 22, 2012, 10:13:21 PM
Well, now I am probably the northernmost poster on the Monastery -way north of the polar circle, in the sub-arctic town of the arctic grouse, right next to the biggest subterranean iron ore mine in the world. Actually, some of the mine shafts are probably literally a kilometre underneath the bed I am lying upon at this moment.

This is a town that does have a strange feel to it -I´ll try to write something about it later in the week. Oh, and on wednesday, the forecast is of temperatures of -16 degrees and gusts of wind up to 33 m/s. Bracing.

Thank TGW, I'm not a competitor for worst climate anymore. ;) We've had snow, but I suspect my winter garden may yet bounce back.

The weather came and went, and so did I in Kiruna -I have been up there for a total of about a month, doing training for a infrastructure maintenance company. Kiruna is a very special place, and a town full of contrasts -I'll try writing something about it in the tide pool later.

Work has been very busy at my new employer -we literally have to turn customers away, because we can't handle all the requests.

At my former employer, things have not been so rosy, though. The economic slump has hit parts of the Swedish industry hard -especially those parts that run a lot of freight on rail, such as steel industry, forestry, paper. pulp and chemicals. Freight volumes have plummeted and Green Cargo gave the employees a special chirstmas gift: A layoff of about 15% of the workforce. Negotiations between the company and the trade unions are still in progress with plans for a crisis agreement that would see most of the employees step down in hours worked and salaries paid, but would save the jobs of quite a few people. There are still a few snags to iron out before any agreement is in place, and there would still be layoffs, so things are far from certain. I have been visiting my former depot a few times for various reasons, and the mood can only be described as grim.

Ironically, the slump may actually lead to something of a boom for my present employer, since a lot of railway companies will now push mandatory training and retraining periods forward as a way of taking up slack from lost traffic, and they will probably want to outsource as much as they can of training and other services. It's nice to have a lot of work coming in, but it does have a bitter aftertaste.

It is very sad for your previous company and hope they can save some jobs with adjusting hours, but I am glad you are with the new company and not at risk.

It's good to be with a company that is able to pick and choose it's customers.

In the summer, I get to do that myself, and it is gratifying to politely turn down a job we'd rather not be involved with.   Alas, winter's not so busy as all that.

I am looking forward to the tales of Kiruna though. :D

GAFFER TAPE!!!! >:(      ;D ;D ;D

So, the time has come for us to start another round of recruiting to our basic driver training courses. We have had some very favourable coverage in mainstream media, including making the cover of Sweden's biggest respected daily as an example of a decent education with excellent prospects of a job afterwards.

The result is that, at the moment, we have some 700 applicants to the 30 places offered in Stockholm. This with about a month of the application period to go, and these are the ones that actually scraped through the preliminary web-based tests. Guess who has been drafted in to help handling the selection process and administering the serious selection tests? Yup, me.

As a side benefit, I have also handled quite a bit of all the questions that people have e-mailed in to us. "Oi, Lindorm. You're one of those academic types. That has to mean that you can speed-type, Here, be a darling and answer these 386-odd lunatics for me, will you?"

This has been something of a trial.

Dear prospective applicant, it is bad enough that you write in your letter that you do know that the answers to your questions can probably be had by reading our information webpage, but you really feel that you have to have questions answered your way. But when you, on top of that, write a looong, rambling and confused personal letter stating how independant you are, how much you like working on your own initiative and how resourceful you are in finding solutions to problems, you simply have to be taking the piss, no?

Dear prospective applicant, when we ask you, in your personal letter, to provide an example of a situation you have been in when you had to perform some safety-related task, why do you answer by bragging about how you were the sales champion at the advertisment sales company you previously worked for? Did someone get a papercut while trying to sell a few page 27 ads?

Dear prospective applicant, per Swedish and EU legislation, we do require a recent and valid test for drugs and alchohol from all applicants. No, there is no exemption. And yes, while we do not require a compy of your criminal record, some companies do so as a condition of employment. No,. there is nothing we can do about that. And no, there is still no excemtion from the drug testing. Are you nervous about something?

Dear prospective applicant, if you want to project a serious, responsible and employable image, perhaps you should spare a thought for what message an email adress such as "stinkypiss@whatever.com" or "HungLikeAHorse@spammail.com", or "legalizeitnow@wannaberastafari.com",or even "whitepower"godhatesfags.com" might send. Hint: It does tend to give a sharp (or, perhaps: intensely narrow) focus to your employability prospects.

Dear prospective applicant, if you happen to be a complete foam-at-the-mouth-trainspotter who knows the exact number and dimensions of every rivet used in the manufacturing of the boliers of the K4-class steam locos, do not expect us to be impressed. Sweden actually managed to move up to electrical traction about a hundred years ago.

Dear prospective applicant, if you are so dyslectic that you can't read the application form, then train driving might perhaps not be the job for you. While we do our best to help people with learning difficulties (and we really do -that's one of the things I am actually proud of when it comes to my employer), we can't translate all the 3000-odd pages of manuals that form the course literature, and we are not even legally allowed to do so. Likewise, yes, it is a legal requirement for you to be proficient in the swedish language in order to drive trains in Sweden, and no, we can't provide a polish translation of the rule books for you.

Dear prospective applicant, the course does rquire quite a bit of classroom activities, as well as quite a bit of hands-on training. Therefore, it is not possible to take a driver training course as a distance course while you are in Prague getting a MBA from some diploma mill, even if you say that you are really intelligent and have had a Märklin toy railway since you was a small kid.

...and so on, ad nauseum....   

We all know The Crazy^TM exist, but being actively reminded of their existence doesn't sound like a fun job...  :-\

If they have a sense of humour at least they will get a laugh, even though no job.

LOL!

I love the one with the quirky e-mail addresses... that one is worth sharing.  :D

Good luck on weeding through the applications to find the right candidates, Lindorm!

With so many applicants, we can afford to be quite rash and despotic in our decisions.

Hello Kitty letterhead? Bin.

The short, introductory, personal letter stretching out for eight pages? Bin.

Can't be arsed with responding in time? Bin

Not including any of the required supplementary documentation? Bin.

Writing in text-speak? Binzzorz

Haven't actually read the instructions on how to make your application? Bin with extreme prejudice.

Writing in, stating that you do not meet a certain formal criteria for prior education, but having a passed exam in virtually the same subject from another school, wondering if you can convert those grades to the required grades?

A answer of yes, you certainly can, here's how you do it, and welcome to stage three of the application process. Would thursday next week be suitable for your aptitude tests?

... bin

:ROFL:

That wouldn't happen to have a shredder attached, would it?  It can be so satisfying to shred such things.  Good for the inner tranquility as it were. 

I liked binzzorz.

Even more fun to say than binznizzle.    :)

While the selection process is far from over, I have also been doing some other stuff lately -including teaching, of all things.

Most recently, I have thaught a bit about "Tågfärd i system M" -"Train operations, system M". This is basically how to run trains using old-fashioned methods. Instead of the relay interlockings, automatic signalling and computer-controlled route setting that is the norm on most of the Swedish railways today, you go back to basics.

Essentially, Signaller A calls up Signaller B (or, earlier, telegraphed), asking if the line is clear between A and B, and B can accept a train. If B answers affirmatively, A then dispatches the train and then notifies B that "Train 01 departed A right time". Both A and B then make a note in their logbooks that the line is blocked due to a train being on the line. When train 01 then arrives in it's entirety in B, the signaller in B calls up signaller A and reports that "01 has arrived in B". Signaller B might then ask signaller A if she is ready to accept train 02, and so on.

The safeworking of the trains thus depends on the signallers exchanging correct information with each other before dispatching any trains, as well as a few other extra checks. For example, the driver of a train might have a safety order stating that "Train 01 to meet train 02 at B", and thus, the driver of train 01 must not depart from B before train 02 has arrived, or train 01 has recieved a safety order stating that the meet is cancelled or moved to another station.

Most of our trainees have only seen modern automatic signalling (and will only work in those areas, too), so this is something of a cultural shock for them. With modern signalling, you cant go too wrong with the basic assupmtion of "if the signal is green, go, if the signal is red, stop".  However, in System M, the signals are essentially controlled by the signaller with a light switch, and there are several scenarios where it is perfectly possible to have a green light into an occupied track, or out from a station on to a stretch of line which is occupied by another train. Indeed, in some cases you as a driver must not, under any circumstance, move your train, even if a signal is green, until you have recieved a manual dispatch hand signal from the signaller. In other cases, the rules state that you are perfectly allright to pass a certain signal at danger on your own authority, without even contacting a signaller. You should, however, report the fact to the signaller "at a convenient time". Oh, and there are stations and interlockings that are completely without signals, too -which is complete and utter bizarro land to the trainees,

Confusing at times, but it's quite fun, and you get a course in the underlying principles of railway signalling as it developed in Sweden over the years.

Here's a picture of some of my whiteboard drawings when I held a few lessons covering the basic principles.

From left to right, we have "Knotträsk", Gnatmarsh, a fairly large station with some interlocking and signalling, and permanently staffed by a signaller (bevakad), the guy with the red cap. Train 01 is supposed to meet train 02 here, and the signaller is to dispatch trains by hand signal ("TKL ger körtillstånd).

We then come to Svältböle ("Starvecroft"), a station that has fallen on hard times. It is only staffed at certain times (tidvis bevakad) and, at the moment, unstaffed (obevakad driftplats). The signals are set to clear in both direction of the single track -the station is essentially not there for most purposes. Since it is unsupervised, trains can not meet there. However, the siding to the Starvecroft peat bog is of a special type, where a train can gain access to the siding by using a special key to unlock a set of points, enter the siding and then lock the set of points behind them, thus clearing the line for other trains.

After Starvecroft, we come to Wrångsjöö gruva, the old Lake Morose mines. This is a Linjeplats, essentially a set of points located on the line between two stations. These points are uncontrolled by any signaller, and operated by the train crew themselves, again with a special ("K16") key. Again, a train can enter the Lake Morose spur, throw the points back after them and lock them again. They then report to the signaller at the station where they picked up the control key stating that they are clear of the running line and they have the K16 key with them. The signaller then removes the notification in her logbook about a train on the line between Gnatmarsh and Midgewater and can then resume running trains on the line. The words used for this report are "jag har k16 i handen" -literally "I have the K16 key in my hand". Jokes about rules-bending work train crews getting tattoos of K16 keys in the palms of their hands are mandatory at this point.

We finally arrive in "Myggvattnet", Midgewater, yet another continously staffed station with a signaller on duty at all times.

Midgewater is, by the way, the site of a hugely popular annual country fair, with dumpling-eating contests, fierce rivalry between Ladie's Associations as to who makes the most scrumptious rutabaga mousse as well as a cattle exhibition. The throngs of people swarming Midgewater are enough for the railway to lay on a series of extra trains, necessiating the manning of Starvecroft with a extra signaller in order to provide a meeting place for extra trains and enabling the running of several trains in a convoy after each other. The traditional farmhand fight after the country fair of course always makes the last train from Midgewater late, so trains will have to recieve special orders about cancelled and moved meets, as well as new meets with extra trains.

On the other end of Gnatmarsh, there's the coastal town of Herrington and a branchline to Herrington Docks. Herrington station is a very confused place, displaying examples of just about any oddity you can imagine signalling-wise. This sorry state of affairs has fortunately not discouraged the local signaller, TKL Hume, who considers it a learning experience -but that is for another day!

Apparently, it's not all natural leadership ability and waving from the engine...   :D

An old system is the token on the one track line. It requires that the number of trains going into one direction is the same as in the other. In Britain the token was a ring hanging from a hook on a pole at the height of the driver's side window. A driver coming to one end of that single-track line would take the ring and drive through. Then he would put the ring onto the hook at that end. If there was no ring on the hook, the driver would have to stop and wait for the next train from the other direction bringing it back.
I don't know what happened when some never-do-good country boy stole the ring ;)

Quote from: Swatopluk on May 25, 2013, 10:18:32 PM
An old system is the token on the one track line. It requires that the number of trains going into one direction is the same as in the other. In Britain the token was a ring hanging from a hook on a pole at the height of the driver's side window. A driver coming to one end of that single-track line would take the ring and drive through. Then he would put the ring onto the hook at that end. If there was no ring on the hook, the driver would have to stop and wait for the next train from the other direction bringing it back.
I don't know what happened when some never-do-good country boy stole the ring ;)

Is that the source of the name "token ring" which describes a communication protocol in electronics? 

:)

No idea. I just collect the British Transport Film Collection of the BFI and that was in a short on the first disc.

Quote from: Swatopluk on May 25, 2013, 10:18:32 PM
An old system is the token on the one track line. It requires that the number of trains going into one direction is the same as in the other. In Britain the token was a ring hanging from a hook on a pole at the height of the driver's side window. A driver coming to one end of that single-track line would take the ring and drive through. Then he would put the ring onto the hook at that end. If there was no ring on the hook, the driver would have to stop and wait for the next train from the other direction bringing it back.

They could make that an Olympic relay sport !!

Quote from: pieces o nine on May 25, 2013, 08:24:13 PM
Apparently, it's not all natural leadership ability and waving from the engine...   :D

Oh no, you have to be passionate about customer service, make a perfect milkshake every time and the only fault in your character is that you are too humble and modest, too.

Actually, the milkshake part could be something useful -at least it would show an ability to read and follow written instructions.  ;D

Quote from: Swatopluk on May 25, 2013, 10:18:32 PM
An old system is the token on the one track line. It requires that the number of trains going into one direction is the same as in the other. In Britain the token was a ring hanging from a hook on a pole at the height of the driver's side window. A driver coming to one end of that single-track line would take the ring and drive through. Then he would put the ring onto the hook at that end. If there was no ring on the hook, the driver would have to stop and wait for the next train from the other direction bringing it back.
I don't know what happened when some never-do-good country boy stole the ring ;)

The Token Block system is still alive and well in quite a few parts of the world -it was widely used wherever the railways were built with a british operational philosophy. The british, being awfully clever chaps and all, soon came up with several ingenious solutions to the problem of all tokens being in on place, and all the trains somewhere else. The pinnacle of token block systems uses two or more interconnected token block machines, one at each station. The signallers at both end have to operate electrical instruments to enable the release of one token from one end only, after which the staff instruments locked up. They could then only be opened and issue a new token when the first token had been inserted in the staff instrument at the other end of the section of track. The staff instruments had magazines of token staves, so they could cope with imbalances in the service patterns.

German railway signalling developed along slightly different lines, instead opting for the use of block field instruments with indicator discs showing the signaller if the line was occupied or clear.

Theft or loss of tokens as well as other mishaps were handled by an extensive and very thorough system of rules and working procedures. In a way, British railway operations philosophy has put a great emphasis on always ensuring a clear run for the driver and eliminating any possibilities of signalliing faults or even degraded working. The drivers were more or less ensured that if they got a clear signal, they could depend on that signal aspect and then left to run their train as skillfully as possible. Those trains, on the other hand, were and are a bit special. No headlights on the locos, no speeds signposted -the driver was expected to know his lines and their permissable speeds, and, of course, the "unfitted freight". Unfitted, as in not fitted with any brakes on the wagons -they only had brakes on the loco and a hand brake on a brake van in the rear, staffed by a guard.

In Germany, on the other hand, they seemed to delight in inventing new and unusual ways of permissive working, special working, degraded working, exceptional working and so on, making a clear aspect on a german signal something to be regarded with a healthy pinch of salt, or perhaps through rose-coloured glasses. The germans were the one who invented as special supplementary signal attached to a main signal to show that the main signal was not working properly, and then attached further supplementary signals to show the driver how this faulty signal might be passed -all with their own fail-safe and discrete circuits. They also installed propane-fuelled signal lights up until quite recently, all fitted with complete electrical circuitry to monitor the propane flame and sound an alarm if the flame was extinguished. But making the signal itself electric? Undenkbar! 

Quote from: Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith on May 26, 2013, 04:00:27 AMIs that the source of the name "token ring" which describes a communication protocol in electronics? 

:)

The way a token ring network operates is certainly very similar to how one of the above mentioned networks of electric staff instruments work, as well as a old-fashioned open railway telegraph or telephone network.

Do not forget, the railways were very much into secure and reliable communications protocols from a very early time. Some of the earliest modern communications research was carried out on behalf of the railways. Quite a few railways, for example the no-defunct Southern in the US, were also pioneers in the use and construction of computer mainframe networks and computer communications.

The favorite way of a certain kind of 'Chaots'* around here is to cut the signal cables (electric and mechanic) at crucial points of the railway network. These guys have become experts in bringing the system to a standstill with minimum effort. Much more effective than the usual cable thieves (copper prices are high).

*people declaring themselves to be leftist revolutionaries but actually being in it primarily for the joy of creating chaos.

On the proper and not-so-proper methods of lubricating your trainees
===========================================


First of all, I must say that the current bunch of trainees that I have are really an excellent lot. There's a general sense of comradeship, enthusiasm and all-around good will in the class, and I do enjoy working with them tremendously.

At the moment, half of the class is away on practice secondments, and the other half is having a theory block with me back in school. We are going through a basic vehicle technology course, having looked a bit at the fundamentals of electric traction (series motors, separately excited motors, asynchronous AC motors, what is the point of a traction converter, how do modern computerized trains really work...)

Part of this course is having a look at reality, in the form of going to a nearby goods yard and borrowing a locomotive from my former employer Green Cargo and letting the trainees loose on it under my supervision. The locomotive class, Rd, is actually a very good teaching aid, since it is a late seventies construction that has been extensively refurbished and modernized just a few years ago, so get a lot of rail vehicle development in a single convenient package. Also, you can make pop corn in the microwave in the B end cab.

Now, I had had the trainees in small groups all day -it was a marathon day for me, since I wanted to get all the groups done in a single day due to scheduling issues. Time had come for the last group, and we had crawled round on the loco, looking at this and that, opening the high-tension cubicles and looking really closely at the transformer and main circuit breaker and all that, and were wrapping it up for the day.

Then, one of the trainees, M, opens her mouth and says those fateful words: "Would it perhaps be possible to have a teeny-tiny look at one of the diesels, too, since I am about to drive that very class on my practice secondment." I like M. She is a good student, not only keen and intelligent, but also someone who has a lot of common sense and is very down-to-earth. She is also not afraid to pull up her sleeves and dig in when that has to be done. The other trainees are also a good bunch -K is a quiet guy with a very nice attitude and a keen sense of humour, N is the kind of girl who doesn't say that much and mostly keeps quiet, and when you are not looking, it's her who puts the matchsticks in the tire valves of that illegally parked SUV.

So I said, OK, if everyone is up for it, we can take a little look.

Of course they are up for it, so off we go to have look at the T44-class diesel loco. Licence-built by NOHAB here in Sweden back in the early seventies, a big hunk of Detroit Iron with a GM 12-645E diesel engine, antediluvian technology, but also some very interesting and extremely robust technical solutions. We open some of the hood doors to have a look at the engine, we pop the cylinder top covers to have a look at the cylinder tops with the rockers, camshafts, injectors and all that, and then we fire the diesel up and look at all those parts moving.

Then, I get an idea.

Ideas that you get after having worked for 12 hours straight are seldom that well-thought out.

I decide to show them how you can manually operate the motor governor, opening up the fuel rack and increasing the speed of the diesel engine.

The cyilnder heads are cooled by lube oil being sprayed on them and circulated in a oil circuit. The lube oil is pumped around by a plunge pump that is directly driven by the engine. If you increase the engine RPM, you also increase the pressure in the oil circuit and the frequency of the spraying.

You can see where this is heading?

I couldn't.

Lindorm leans on rocker shaft to motor governor, engine revs up, slowly and with the characteristic GM/EMD lag, and accompanied by a very nice bass throbbing. And literally a shower of lube oil, out of the ejector nozzles and straight on top of my trainees. N managed to duck behind a hood door, but K and M where looking like dalmatians.

I wanted to die of shame there and then. I felt really, really terrible. Good lord, what had I done?

And then M said "Cool, they would never have taken me seriously if I had shown up in clean hi-vis at my practice secondment. Anyone got a tissue?"

Anyhow, we all helped in getting each other mopped up, and then took the loco out for a little spin -but this time, with all doors, covers and hatches properly closed. And lots of bad jokes about "Hey, teach, thanks for giving us a few splashes of reality" and "Is this how train drivers are baptized?".

I don't think I will do that particular blunder again.... :o


But the kids are a really, really nice bunch!  ;D

An unfortunate but hilarious episode! Your students will never forget you, and I mean that in a good way. And they really learned a valuable lesson, too!

I doubt L will ever forget it either... there's apparently even a video file of the event...  :o

It could have been worse, these three seems to have both their hearts and brains in the right places. And M has a point, no one in completely clean hi-vis is taken seriously...  :)

_{(I guess it's because "Management" wears clean hi-vis clothing, it's the same in the Metro where I work)}

Yep, some stains on your coveralls are good for job cred.  I did ask to buy a new set once, for going door-to-door in a 1 km radius around the worksite after we accidentally discovered an old mercaptan pod in the ground...  one wants to look one's best when telling the public that the giant stink cloud was one's fault. 

_{eh, it didn't go further than 15 km downwind, from the reports called into the gas company.  ::)}

Thanks, L...

... that was hilarious... your description gave me an excellent visual picture of the whole process...  movie-quality hilarious, even.

It's even funnier because you didn't do it on purpose.

:D

If we ask really nicely, could we get more Dispatches? I really, really enjoy these, and the man has a distinct talent for the telling of a tale.....

Lindorm is up to his ears in work at the momen but I will forward the request. ☺