Railroaders' Nostalgia > Do you remember your very worst "meet"

The meet that was the most frustrating you ever experienced. The one you'll never be able to really forget.
Maybe the one you felt was due to dispatching error.
Well I remember mine; Train Order to head in at Narlon when the opposing train was just OSing past
Burbank Jct. And to make matters worse, if possible, the hogger was an extra-board man that thought
the throttle stopped at Run 6! The west bound, according to the DS was a non-clearing train. Well, what about
DT at Santa Barbara? Possible saw-by somewhere? Nope. Stay in the hole and wait it out. Yeah there
could have been extenuating circumstances...........................

ValvePilot Wrote:
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> . And to make matters worse, if
> possible, the hogger was an extra-board man that
> thought
> the throttle stopped at Run 6!

SLO or SJD extra board?


Allen

Two non clearing trains at Merritt, WA on the Scenic sub. Luckily, we were both able to squeeze into the opposing control points and get by each other with a few inches to spare. The alternative would've been having my conductor walk to the rear of our train and backing it down to Winton, WA.

Sounds like the era of 79 to 81 with too long of trains to meet in Coast siding except the Santa Barb DT or SLO DT

Yes Merritt, WA. shortest siding on the Scenic sub. Did a 3 way meet there one time when I was on the work train. 
Other 2 players were an over length westbound stack train and a eastbound boxcar train.

Trusting dispatcher and some experanced crews made things work.

Today they would all be sitting there wondering what the "HELL" they were going to do and waiting for someone to show up
to tell them what to do.  SAD!

DHF

In this day of age, its newer dispatchers and the pressure of running "Z" trains. Went into the only real hole we have. Was told we were waiting for a Z train that just left its crew change point. Proble, was that the crew change point was about 110 miles away and we were 30 away from ours.

A phone call to the boss got us going again...

How about two (2) non-clearing trains meet at Dole Oregon maybe about 1985 or so. You may need a pencil and paper for this one. But we did it! And as you may have already figured out the Branch Dispatcher went totally silent until we dug ourselves out of the mess he created. "Life's a bitch and then you die!"

ValvePilot Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The meet that was the most frustrating you ever
> experienced. The one you'll never be able to
> really forget.
> Maybe the one you felt was due to dispatching
> error.
> Well I remember mine; Train Order to head in at
> Narlon when the opposing train was just OSing
> past
> Burbank Jct. And to make matters worse, if
> possible, the hogger was an extra-board man that
> thought
> the throttle stopped at Run 6! The west bound,
> according to the DS was a non-clearing train.
> Well, what about
> DT at Santa Barbara? Possible saw-by somewhere?
> Nope. Stay in the hole and wait it out. Yeah
> there
> could have been extenuating
> circumstances...........................


And when was this?

V

SLOCONDR

Jeez, there were so many they all just form a blur.

Nobody fit?  Hey, it happened a lot more than people were aware of.  Say you had an east and west train train that didn't fit in a siding. Say east had right over west.

You would head in and just cut the rear end off the west train on the main and pull in the clear. The train going east would shove what was left, over to the next siding, in the clear. They would take a crew member, usually the conductor, on the hack to be the flag. Then back out and go on their way east.  The engines from the west portion, would leave a flag at their west switch and follow the other train east over to where they left the rear portion and pick it up.

Then back to the rest of their train where this all started leaving the rear portion on the main, again. The power would go to the west end, back onto their train, shove back to the portion left on the main. Then pull thru, line up behind and go to the next meet or what ever.

Now if you couldn't do that and had to use the one siding that took a bit more figuring.  As one of the replies above said, it was possible but get out your pencil to figure it out. It took a lot of saw-by's but it could be done. If the cars were out of order when you were done, the conductor could fix that at the next siding or note the change and give it to the yard master where he tied up.

That's what made the job "Interesting".  Of  course, if you didn't have the men to flag, you could put your "Flag" on the other train and he would protect the move. Creative railroading at its best. But it was done safely and that what's mattered in order to keep the trains moving. There were other locations where you could just double over to a tail track or pull thru into a shippers spur to clear.


Nudge



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/16 18:24 by spnudge.

Very worst meet? How about the worst meet(s) that I avoided, that I know of. Out in N. Mex on SP, I got grabbed off of my regular rear man assignment to be a work train conductor. This was train order days. I heard the dispatcher calling my regular conductor's train on the radio to tell the engineer to stop. After the train stopped, the dispatcher ordered the engineeer to back up to the previous siding and "let three go by". The train was headed down hill... through a bunch of curves... with empty pig flats..., so the engineer flat refused. It kinda deteriorated from there. My crew wound up dog-catching them, and we had to use the 'big calculator' to figure out our pay for the day.

- EO

There are distinct benefits to being in C&S. One is not having to untangle such a mess!  Shortly after the CN took over the J, one of our ahem.... Star Dispatchers  ahem....  lined two CN land barges into Normantown. As this star dispatcher could only grasp stupid lingo, and not the intricacies of dispatching and figuring out how things really work, they did it blindly and then was stumped.  They could not figure out why both trains were not fitting. Star dispatcher called both trains telling them to pull up closer to the signal. One kindly told this star dispatcher that if they pull up any farther, they will be out of service.

I was listening to the radio and debating if I wanted to go watch this double saw by in the middle of suburbia, but then someone came up with the sense to pull the power off the rail train in the next siding east and have them pull the ass end off the "Westbound" train.  Of course that stabbed the rail train for the day, but the RR was moving again.


Frank D.

Sort of, got called out of Barstow on Santa Fe Barstow to LA MBALA which sets out almost the entire train at Pico Rivera. Of course made an excellent non stop trip Barstow over Cajon and on down the San Bernardino Sub where we were lined into Porphyry (Corona) when the DS came over the radio with the bad news. "The good news is you can get something to eat, the bad news is your counterpart train MLABA is not on duty until such and such time. Now this crew goes on duty at Hobart yard in Los Angeles, then takes lite power six miles east to Pico Rivera yard to pick up it's train often nearly a hundred cars. Now Pico had no carmen and the time it would take for the crew to get it's power together, get to Pico, clear out, then build the train and make a terminal air test would be at least five or six hours. This short tempered engineer headed for the nearest phone (no cell phone yet) with timetable and phone numbers in hand having a few unfriendly conversations as well as leaving a number of unkind messages on various answering machines. Surprised I never heard back from someone? Unlike many, I ALWAYS carried at least a couple of meals with me so I was not interested in eating or stopping. For thirty one years I looked for that "perfect" trip coming close three or four times as I recall.
JB



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/16 21:43 by 3rdswitch.

> Maybe the one you felt was due to dispatching error.

As a former dispatcher, my "worst meet" list includes a bunch of meets that didn't occur where they were supposed to, where crews ran meets and ended up in sidings beyond the ones specified in their orders.  There were a few too many of those in Iowa in the '70s and '80s...

Take care,

Mark

I remember one night in 1988 on MRL where the DS created a 5-train meet at Frenchtown, MT. 2 west & 3 east. I think he did it only because the math worked... BARELY. All 3 eastbound trains fit -in the siding- by less than 50 feet. It took a shoehorn to get all three trains in the clear while 2 westbound hotshots waited on the main. If there had been just 1 "stranger" car in any of the 3 eastbounds it would have been a total mess. What he should have done was hold the 2 hotshots at DeSmet (end of 2 main tracks just west of Missoula) and let the 1st eastbound, also a hotshot come on into to town. The 2 westbound hotshots were delayed at Frenchtown about the same amount of time they would have had to wait at DeSmet, so the DS gained nothing by setting up such a meet. While all 5 trains were in close proximity one of the eastbound hoggers, who normally had a very abrasive personality, made a pseudo-solemn announcement over the radio:

"Greetings, and welcome to the first annual Darius Gaskins memorial "cluster-hump!" (Gaskins being the current BN president)

It caused much sarcastic laughter & a great raucous barrage of radio-borne retorts...

'Lance/199

I think they called that, "Smoken Them Over" . If you were on another trains time, "Got an air problem but we are moving again." and they would have you lined in when you got there.

Nudge

spnudge Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think they called that, "Smoken Them Over" . If
> you were on another trains time, "Got an air
> problem but we are moving again." and they would
> have you lined in when you got there.

A San Joaquin hoghead told me that as they approached a siding where they had to dive or wait, the fireman would throw a scoop of sand in the firebox and they would watch the horizon for an answer. No answering smoke, here we go.

TAW

BN used to run trains in fleets. Between Pasco's 12 hours each way and intermodal cutoff times they were nose to tail, sometimes as many as a dozen each way. That is just not a happening thing on single track with 15 minutes between sidings. These fleets were all hot trains. None of them were allowed to be delayed by any of the others of them. DOFT's (Dirty Ol' Freight Trains) were then lower than that. Every day, the eastbound and westbound fleets all met between Glasgow and Bainville, including AMTK 7 and 8.

I was assigned off my regular assignment one day for Havre East (Havre MT - Bainville MT) 2d trick. I had never worked Havre East before, which didn't bother them in the least. That still made me more qualified than anyone else. I at least knew a little about the territory because I lived in Zurich and Havre and worked Havre - Whitefish for a year.

I needed to do a lot of planning work from the timetable and track chart. In the old days, we'd write the planning as pencil schedules (pencil OSes) on the trainsheet and work from it, modifying as we went along. Somebody in their Infinite Wisdom decided to run a DOFT right ahead of the eastbound fleet, in the face of the westbound fleet. I penciled the meeting points for the hot trains. That's the way to work. Find a place for hot trains to meet each other (and faster hot trains to pass slower hot trains), then fill in for whatever else is out there.

I came up with just what I expected: the DOFT would sit here and there out in the boondocks where's there's nothing but cows and sagebrush for an hour or more at a time. If I dived them at Wolf Point, where there's a sizable town, they'd be there for four hours but wouldn't bother anybody else. The delay would be about the same, but they'd be a couple of hours longer getting over the road. I called them and told them that I planned to dive them at Wolf Point for about four hours. They could just go to town and disappear, but tell me where they were hanging out in case I needed them. Other than that, call me four hours after they get there.

It worked as planned. They pulled in, tied it down, went to town for four hours and gave me a call. There were no derailments or other things that would have made me change the plan. The happy crew blasted off and went straight shot from Williston to Minot behind the eastbound fleet.

TAW