Model Railroading > Sperry Car Saturday

So here we are on Saturday, working overtime to try and catch up with the rail detector schedule.  
On duty at 7 AM, a welding gang, a track gang, a Signal Maintainer, and the Roadmaster, plus the 3-man Sperry crew.
Of course the day starts out waiting for another, and another train. (photo 1)Here we are, waiting at Paseo. 
After almost three hours and five trains, and moving the car to open up platform space for Amtrak, we finally get out.
By 1130 we've made it to Marathon, up on the high desert (photo 2).
Whenever the strip charts and/or ocilloscopes show something irregular, the crew gets out with a hand scanner to confirm the bad news. or to find what made the indication (photo 3).
Sometimes an oddly placed bolt hole or some other irregularity will be found, but usually it is a bad rail and the track and signal crews will stage their own negotiations for track time with the dispatcher to fix it.
Meanwhile the dispatcher is muttering that the slow orders at the defective rails just prove that he never should have let them out on the main line anyway......
Everyone is play-acting, the FRA Track Safety Standards tell us all how often to inspect rail and what speeds trains can go over defective rails, nothing personal about it.
At least we won't be doing this on Sunday.  We hope.
Just another day at work in HO scale.

 

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railstiesballast Wrote:
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> Meanwhile the dispatcher is muttering that the
> slow orders at the defective rails just prove that
> he never should have let them out on the main line
> anyway.....

I never looked at it that way. In the big picture, I would much rather find out about bad track that way than the hard way.

Great work and pictures.

TAW

Agree, great modeling, thanks for posting.  I had thought the maintenance folks with the detector car followed in rather than preceded it as shown in #2.  I assume you know better.  

Nick Tharalson,
Marion, IA

Your backdrops are superb at conveying open vistas. Nice background story and fun scenes and I love the Hirailer hirailing.

Brings up a question. I have a walthers sperry car is there a way to make it DCC with sound ?

Great pics BTW

Gary

Posted from iPhone

Thanks for the kind words, I enjoy seeing everyone else's scenery and stories too.
TAW is right of course, everyone would rather find a defective rail this way because if you don't a train will find it the hard way.  But I have heard mumblings about the resulting slow orders from many transportation employees from hoggers to Superintendents.  Just some hot air, it makes them feel good to complain and we don't even believe them when we hear it.
Actually, the Roadmaster is likely to ride the Sperry Car and have someone drive his car along highways.  The hy-rail might be in front, as to  run ahead and line switches or "flag" crossings.
For my 1-1/2 year Roadmaster assignment I drove alongside but I had exceptionally good right of way roads so I was always close to it.
The white hy-rail pickup began when I took a River Point (?) hy rail pickup and put in a simple diode+resistor+LEDs circuit and connected that to two thin brass wires that rest on the rails for the lights.  It is not motorized.  The circuit fits in the bed of the truck, partly concealed by the cross-body tool box.  I added as much weight as would fit to hold it down against those brass wire contacts.
The Walthers Sperry Car was a DC unit that ran very badly.  I would not have wanted it as a DCC unit.  So I disconnected the motor and used the power pickup leads to use DCC to directly feed an always on light circuit like on the pickup.  It is only a photo prop.  If I want the light off for a photo, like when it is in a spur, I just tuck a bit of paper under the far side wheels.  For about 50 cents and 20 minutes of work I should have put in an on-off switch. What it also needs is some black paint on the interior as that translucent yellow body casting is not opaque under even this mild room lighting.
(OT, but I loathe freight cars cast in yellow or orange plastic as for refrigerator cars, I always paint the interior black to try an make it resemble a steel car, same for buildings.  We would have better models if the manufacturers used dark plastic then painted the colors over that opaque base.)
 

railstiesballast Wrote:
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> TAW is right of course, everyone would rather find
> a defective rail this way because if you don't a
> train will find it the hard way.  But I have
> heard mumblings about the resulting slow orders
> from many transportation employees from hoggers to
> Superintendents.

Not hot air. I guarantee what you heard was sincere. I worked with guys who would prevent track inspection in any way they could. They would complain endlessly about a detector or track geometry car. I relieved a guy who called the signal maintainer for a red automatic signal. the signal maintainer found a broken rail. The guy I relieved called the gandys...then wouldn't let them have the railroad to fix te track because he had trains to run. The signal maintainer had almost used up his horus sitting on a motorcar setoff in Bad Rock Canyon and the gandys had been at the shanty for a couple of hours when I sat down. I promptly shut down the railroad set the gandys working, and called another maintainer. He had run six trains over the broken rail and intended ro run several more.

For a big layout that takes several follks to run the schedule for operating sessions, an additional card deck with random failures (broken rail, switch not working, car defect, locomotive defect, etc.) might add some interest and even reality to a session.

TAW

In the situation TAW describes it is a "mercy killing" to take the railroad away from the DS and fix the rail.
Short sighted Transportation employees would run trains forever over a 10 MPH speed restriction until the whole railroad was full of plugged sidings and dead crews rather than yield the track for an hour.  
Simple math is that it takes one 10,000 ft train about 12 minutes at 10 MPH plus more delay in getting past red signals until the rear is past the next proceed indication.  Restricted speed in curved territory is a lot less than 20 MPH..
The rules provide for operation over broken rails under continuous direct observation of a qualified employee who has the ability to stop the train, most Signal Maintainers, Track Foremen, Welders, etc. with a road channel radio can do this.  But if the rail breaks up under a slow moving train and the train gets stopped before derailing, then you have a multi-hour problem to clear the area to get to the rail to fix it. You have to bring another train up behind and pull the rear off of it plus pull the head end past it.  In some situations you need to move the train past where a Hy-Rail gang truck can get on the tracks and bring in the rail and/or the employees.  Or, if the wheels do come off the track you are into a half a day to get Mechanical dept. help there to set the cars back on, then move the train, then fix the rail.
In the end a qualified employee on the site has the authority to stop all movements no matter how foolish the higher-ups are.

I like it! In two and half years with Sperry we had the Roadmaster ride with us on the car, ride in the hyrail behind and ride up ahead and ride on the parallel roads. It seamed to vary from Roadmaster to Roadmaster and railway to railway although many the Roadmaster rode with us all the time. We worked on Sunday on the former Monongahela to Bailey Mine because that was the only day the mine was not in operation. Otherwise I can't remember running to many Sundays other than deadheading sometimes. Saturdays in the states on most railways were as described only if needed. Norfolk Southern ran us on Saturdays for a partial day the two weeks I was on SRS 136 on NS. CP Rail almost always ran us on Saturdays for a full day and ran us much longer most of the weekdays. Sperry charged the railways for time we spent testing and charged a different rate for time we spent waiting on trains. The Norfolk Southern Dispatcher on the Chicago District on the former NKP between Ft Wayne and Chicago had to be the all time best. We were able to test forty miles (average speed of 10-12 mph not including stops) on the extremely busy single track. He would hold EB trains out of the sidings so we could test past the end then we'd back into the siding in front of WB trains while the EB trains went by us on the main, then we'd go out follow those EB trains to the back end of the siding while the WB trains came out of the sidings then we'd test the siding while more trains went by, almost all on signal indication on NS. I don't know how he did it, he just did and had been doing it forever from what the Roadmaster said.

And now for one my favorite Sperry and the Dispatcher story... The Pittsburgh East Dispatcher on First Trick ran the Conrail Pittsburgh Line like it was still the Pennsylvania that he had started on and ran the two Amtrak state trains like they were the Broadway Limited. To put it lightly he didn't really care for us on the Sperry car or us slowing up his railway. One hot dry June morning we were merely deadheading from Pittsburgh to Latrobe. On Conrail we ran as a track car through the Interlockings but could run up to our Sperry limit of 50 outside of the Interlockings. We received permission past the Stop Signal at Restrictive Speed not exceeding 15 mph looking out for misaligned switches at CP Wing where the Port Perry Branch from the Mon Line connected with the Pittsburgh Line on the east side of Pittsburgh near Pitcairn. There was a lot of interesting stuff to look at immediately around that area. There were PaTransit PCC cars being cut up for scrap on the other side of the river and on our side was the turnaround loop for the Pittsburgh Railways Rt 82 (I think?) streetcar still in the cobblestones over twenty years after abandonment. Good thing was I was actually doing what I was supposed to do and paying attention to the switches since we were running on a red. One of the turnouts had lined over right at the points only but the rest of the turnout was stuck and still against the stock rail. Of course the points were over far enough to look like they had lined on the Dispatcher Board so it was not something the Disp could have known. I gave the single buzz to the back and called on the intercom to let them know what I stopped for. We went out poured used oil on the switch and the Roadmaster riding with us got permission and took it off power and used a lining bar to get it to move freely again. Although we had tied up the Pittsburgh East Dispatcher's railway in one of the more important junctions he was grateful over the radio that we had not simply ran through the partially thrown switch. The Pittsburgh East Dispatcher treated us with more respect the next time we came onto his railway.

Jim

TAW Wrote:

> For a big layout that takes several follks to run
> the schedule for operating sessions, an additional
> card deck with random failures (broken rail,
> switch not working, car defect, locomotive defect,
> etc.) might add some interest and even reality to
> a session.

Regular M/W can be incorporated into the op session; it doesn't always have to be random: Assign a crewmember to a ballast train, snow plow, rotary, flanger, track inspection, weed sprayer, etc. 

The photo with the Sperry guy kneeling down captures this work exactly.

We don't use random card draws, but there is a space in the line-up for a special or extra most months, To  large extend, how the job is run largely depends on the indiviual(s) who bid on the job. Variations have included a work job placing riprap, snow plows, summer fire trains, bridge inspectors and so on.