Western Railroad Discussion > Ore is Heavy… Triple Knuckle

Union pacific’s Caliente subdivision in eastern central Nevada stretches from Milford, Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada and is part of the LA&SL that stretches from Salt Lake City Utah to East Los Angeles.
Along the way it picks up Utah Iron’s 20,000 ton 140 car iron ore train from the Cedar City branch at Lund, Utah and is destined for Long Beach California.
The 8708 west is a PSR resistant 2+1+2 mega-monster that has had more of it’s share of drama as it ply’s it’s 600 desolate desert miles. Today was no exception as it was first tripped up by a open hopper door that triggered a detector somewhere near Uvada and then performed a full triple knuckle near Kyle, Nevada ending the crew’s good time at about 100 miles in.

Almost sounds like EMS was running in synch when it should have shut up and let the engineer run fence up
with the remotes shoving hard. More ah progress, wonder where the nearest Responder was at the time. 
Actually that's not fair because we all know that EMS is perfect, must have been some of those Chinese
couplers we keep hearing about. 

Out 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/22 17:09 by callum_out.

Tough luck iron ore train underway once again near Leith, Nv.

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Thanks for the report Bill.  The Caliente Sub has to be tough for big heavy trains such as that.  There are sections with sharp curves and grades and unfortunately a bad day for the crew with a triple knuckle!

That POS train ruined a trip for me a few months ago when it got a knuckle going through the crossovers at Summit on Cajon Pass. We were stuck behind it for hours. Will they ever learn? (rhetorical question, of course)

Over 20 years ago Conrail (remember Conrail?) was running iron ore trains past my house with 3 GEs pulling and 2 GEs, in what we are now familiar with as distributed power, about 2/3rds back in the 100-120 hoppers. There never seemed to be a problem although this was an entirely new procedure. When the empties returned they had all 5 GEs on the headend of the empties. In all fairness this route is only about 0.01% upgrade but quite curvy.
 I'm sure UP can't justify running dedicated iron ore trains despite the difficulties they are experiencing with throwing the extremely heavy iron ore into a regular freight. Dumb is as dumb does!
Gonut

The ore runs in a dedicated unit train O UTS1 as I remember and it should run reasonably well but the couplers
and drawbars don't like quick inertia changes. As I said, normal practice is to run these trains tight with the remotes
taking the slack out but who knows who or what was running the train. It's not fair to the crews to have to put up
with this crap, as remote as that train runs it can take hours just to change out one knuickle.

Out 

callum_out Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Almost sounds like EMS was running in synch when
> it should have shut up and let the engineer run
> fence up
> with the remotes shoving hard. More ah progress,
> wonder where the nearest Responder was at the
> time. 
> Actually that's not fair because we all know that
> EMS is perfect, must have been some of those
> Chinese
> couplers we keep hearing about. 
>
> Out 
I've never seen either Trip Optimizer or LEADER run a train without the fence up.  If you give them control ehile in sync mode, it will put up the fence.  I have noticed thsr if you hsve s midtrsin snd resr DP, if the fence is placed between the lead and mid-train DP. T-O won't offer Auto Throttle.

That's interesting, learn something new every day especially the TO comment on fence placement.
Great to have some people on here with experience in these less than normal situations.

Out