I don’t see why freight railroads wouldn’t benefit from it.
PTC is an advanced system of technologies designed to automatically stop a train before certain accidents occur. In particular, PTC is designed to prevent:
- Train-to-train collisions
- Derailments caused by excessive train speed
- Train movements through misaligned track switches
- and unauthorized train entry into work zones.
TIL that not being allowed to hook up an old train car to a modern train that requires modern safety equipment is “very grim”
I’m seeing a remake of The Great Train Robbery.
My understanding is the “private varnish” has to undergo annual inspection to ensure that it DOES conform to modern safety equipment…Such things as modern couplers, brakes, and bearings are required. And many of these cars have been modified because they would originally have been heated with steam from the locomotive, which is no longer available.
I think it’s the need to retrofit them to comply with active control systems that causes some concern.
See my comment above. I don’t think that the cars need modification for active train control since the brakes are all controlled directly from the locomotive. Rather the railroads are hoping to use the lack of PTC over their trackage to stop allowing amtrak to run trains and concentrate on freight only .This would make it impossible to operate these cars on long distance routes.
edited to add: Or perhaps they’re hoping to get Amtrak or the US Government to pay for it.
If you’re ever in upstate NY, https://www.revrail.com/ offers rail-bike outings in a lovely section of the Adirondacks. (No association with the company - not even taken one of their trips.)
That’s a rough spin on this, but if this sentiment is at all important to the hobby, then I’m all for it!
He has hosted Pennsylvania transportation-committee representatives aboard his cars to show them the importance of supporting state-funded Amtrak routes.
None of these guys are complaining that they might have to retrofit their railcars. They are worried that Amtrak itself won’t run trains on longer haul lines:
“Private railcar owners also worry many of Amtrak’s longer routes might disappear because of the congressional mandate requiring that Amtrak trains only ride on tracks with a safety technology called Positive Train Control by the end of 2018. Some of the tracks are owned by freight companies that won’t have complied by then.”
The retrofit needed is about the tracks. Amtrak may not want to do what they do for these guys for the fees involved or some of the hassle, but it’s not about these guys being unwilling to drop money to keep their rail cars up to snuff to hitch a ride.
NSFW for some reason.
Shhh! Be vewwy vewwy quiet, we’re hunting capitawists!
Those seem so clunky. Wouldn’t it be easier to have little flip down wheels (imagine horizontal training wheels) on the front and back that kept your bike centered on the rail?
That would certainly be more elegant. I suspect that there would be too much leverage on such a device when the rider leaned a little bit, but I have no actual knowledge to back that up.
Also, it would have to negotiate things like this.
Ideal? Their world looks like that already.
Fun Fact: Hermann Göring had his own private train, not just a measly traincar. Including a car with a bathroom. Regular trains had to wait for it to pass so it wouldn’t have to break, to prevent the water from spilling from the bathtub.
And so it goes.
Certainly fishplates are present on US trackage, but bullhead rail supported on chairs as in that photo is quite rare in North America. Almost all rails are flat bottomed rail sitting on baseplate in the US.
Are we supposed to frown on this? Because if I was a billionaire, this sounds like the kind of thing I might be interested in.
In the article it sounds like the only problem is that they would hold rocking parties (orgies?) in these cars which annoyed the passengers in the adjoining quiet cars.
