The New England Central has been running 80 car Ethanol trains behind my house for a while now, including a couple of pretty quick stops with lots of squealing and banging but no sloshing sounds I can recall.
Of course, the sequence of "getting a flat" and then fixing it - do they carry the spare in the trunk? - shows how much prototype research was done on this sound sequence. Many years ago John Allen showed how to build a boxcar which featured a ball bearing rolling on a vertically curved track. If the car was stopped too quickly in switching, the ball bearing rolled off the end of the track and dropped into an opening which completed a circuit and lighted a red light over one truck. The crew would have to summon the layout owner to deal with the "hotbox", and expose their rough handling of the train. A similar setup with the wheel flat sound would be interesting, requiring the crew to run at reduced speed to the next place they could drop the car for a repair crew to attend to, listening to the flat wheel "bang" all the way... Pieter E. Roos --- On Fri, 3/4/11, JGG KahnSr <[email protected]> wrote: > > Do they say "Empty me!"? > I'll have to check some references, such as Kaminski's ACF > book, but my suspicion is that tank cars, like locomotive > tenders, > have baffles in them to prevent sudden movement and > oscillation in transit which could easily derail the > car. I seem to recall > reading that when SR&RL #23 first arrived in Maine > without them the motion did derail the tender, so they cut a > foot out > of the center. > > I assume most list members understand that ethanol is a > major revenue stream for midwestern railroads (lots of them > on > the local DM&E) because it corrodes pipelines and so > far, at least, truck transit is less cost-effective. > > Jace Kahn > > General Manager > Ceres & Canisteo RR Co./Champlain County Traction Co. > ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
