Dispatches from a Cargo Cultist

[Pachyderm]

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

[Lindorm]

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.

[Pachyderm]

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


Now, about the gaffer tape?

[Aggie]

 


EDIT:

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

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

[Sibling DavidH]

Lovely!

[Darlica]

Ohhh, story time!

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...

[Lindorm]

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.

[Darlica]

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 shunting yard properly.

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

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

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?   

[Lindorm]

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.

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)

[pieces o nine]

BRRRRRR!!!    Lindorm...

Looks like you need one of  these  in your yard!

[Lindorm]

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.

[Darlica]

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!

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.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

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?

[Lindorm]

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.