Have you noticed anything strange in Railroads (add post here)

cascaderailroad

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Have you noticed anything strange going on in Railroads (add post here)

I'm have noticed that the CSX has been adding a secondary trailing lone DPU unit on the tail end of a train ... I suppose this is because they have "wised up" and have now thought that "it can be done" in order to aid in facilitating in reverse train movements, and switching moves
 
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I have seen many CSX trains with 3 loco's on the head end ... sometimes another 1 or 2 more loco's mid train ... and one more loco on the hind end running backwards

I have not counted the number of railcars ... But long ago CSX ran many short fast trains, several times per hour, with one or two loco's only on the head end

This DPU is a new practice here
 
I've noticed that on the EJ&E (now owned by CN but, no.) that for its mixed frights CN likes to have 1 engine up front, 1 mid-ish, and 1 on the rear. the trains are not terribly long but I guess it would spread out the couple stress and slack (for a smoother ride)

Still must be hell for the yard crews though :hehe:
 
CSX, a former HH Harrison road, runs their trains exactly as Harrison did on his former CN and CPR. They run what are called jumbo trains that are upwards of 15,000-plus feet long. These trains will sometimes split at various destinations, but not always. This may work out in the flatlands of the Midwest and Canadian prairie country, but this doesn't always work well on the curvy and hilly eastcoast. There have been cases with trains needing to be split apart because they stall on hills and getting stuck. CPRail also ran into this issue on their former Sunbury division, which was once the Delaware and Hudson mainline.
 
Saw a rather long CSX train, with many Tropicana cars, with lots of empty, and single stack loaded intermodals ... it had one loco head end, and one loco trailing backwards on the tail end
 
Saw a rather long CSX train, with many Tropicana cars, with lots of empty, and single stack loaded intermodals ... it had one loco head end, and one loco trailing backwards on the tail end

This seems to be becoming more common "up our way" than it used to be. I saw a CSX run through freight heading to Maine with a DPU - distributed power unit (loco) in the middle of the freight as well as one on the end. The freight was a good length moreso than normal for us as well. This freight was mostly mixed freight, lots of hoppers, and some scrap gondolas.
 
~5-6 years ago I went to explore the derelict EJ&E yard in Waukegan, IL (a little Rust Belt city that's seen better days). Some of the more interesting finds included an ancient rusty sanding tower and the remains of the old stone roundhouse which was demolished in the 1980s but never hauled off. On a giant slab of said ruins, somebody had seen fit to leave not just several empty bottles of "Mississippi Mud", but a large quantity of carefully arranged raw meat (IIRC they were sausages) which was cooking in the sun. Probably not what you intended this thread to be about, but that sort of thing sticks with you.
 

I'm on the Ashland, Virginia webcam on a daily basis. One thing everyone does when that happens is if the driver was drunk, talking on the cellphone, or following the directions on the GPS and turned a little too early. One thing we also do is guess the consist of the Amtrak's southbound Auto Train, which comes thru in the late afternoon, between 4:00 and 6:00. Instead of saying X locomotives, Y Superliner cars, and Z auto cars, we simply use X/Y/Z. So, if there's two locos (which is common), 15 Superliner cars, and 21 auto cars, then it's 2/15/21. Also, 2/15/21 was the consist today.
 
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