Search results

That may be the Transcontinental Railroad, completed 1869. Central Pacific (the half that started from the west) made a record that has never been matched, 10 miles of roadbed and rail completed in one day.

Donner Pass, over the Sierras from California to Nevada, still is a marvel of engineering. Seemingly impassible rough terrain was surveyed about 1860 to make the Transcontinental Railroad. Up many canyons, across ridges and through tunnels, then up more canyons. Riding that route today its...

Not 4014 related. That long steady grade - 40 miles? - from sea level to 7,000 ft Donner Summit, has a lot of curves at minimum radius because the terrain is so rough. We walked from a back road to the Transcontinental tracks near a crossing a few miles short of the summit, and saw lots of...

I should note we were on foot, Clipper Gap / Cape Horn region. Steep grades, tight curves. Added: Cape Horn, see picture below.

I've seen that on the way up Donner Pass. Greasy mess.

Beautiful photos! If that's all it has for brakes, I can see why it needs an accompanying Diesel with regenerative (?) braking to meet modern safety standards. Can the steam pistons provide braking?

"employees must not ride on platforms or walkways and must not ride on steps when coupling" What does that leave as acceptable locations?

The amount of monkey-motion and hence maintenance in that shovel is impressive. I expect a modern excavator could outwork it, considering how much down time that shovel might need. Great photo!

Are you taking these with a drone, or off an overpass or ??? Great photos!

That was my thought before seeing your post. A work train, some sort of cleanup in the right-of-way.

That sounds better! I had been told near $60 round trip to SF now, but that must have included BART across the bay too. SIL has two kids at Davis now while their home is near SFO. Considering commute hour traffic through SF, AMTRAK/BART is the only practical way for those kids to go home weekends.

Our daughters did similar from UC-Berkeley via BART to Richmond, then transferred to Amtrak to Sacramento Depot (next to the train museum), where I picked them up. They enjoyed it but expensive! That was 15 years ago. Now its near $60 round trip. Another alternative they used occasionally was...

An adaptation for tunnels in the steam era was the cab-forward design run by SP between about 1905 and 1955, on the steep grades over the Sierras. One concern was heat and fumes for the engineer, but the folklore was that they were up front to see collapsed portions of the long snow sheds in the...

What triggers the doors on those?

No dropping crossing arm? how fast is that going?

There was a post above saying if you show up at a scrap dealer with RR stuff they call the cops.

Likely intended as a surveyed property corner, too.

2' 6" gauge on that Patagonia railroad sounds like it may have ben originally built for ore, never passenger service. I've read the reason for such a narrow gauge is it allows much shorter radius curves, so there's less earthmoving to build a route in rough terrain. And on this Patagonia route...

Yeah but the forest fires are often on federal land, over 50% of California forest land is federal. Get Congress to budget more money for fire-alleviation efforts! I think nearly all the major fires here started, and grew, on Federal land.

Or just pure Free Enterprise!

I went down the rabbithole, followed each link in the railfan articles. Only 2 ft 6 inch gauge! Looks like the cause was resuming occasional tourist service on trackage that was essentially abandoned long ago with no maintenance since. There are more photos on Facebook, no subscription...

A lightweight article, then followed by many insightful comments: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/12/2205297/-America-has-too-few-rail-track-route-miles-That-must-change?utm_campaign=trending

I've read that a major limitation to passenger traffic here is that Amtrak rents access on freight rails that aren't designed or maintained for high speed, and also the scheduled unit trains can have priority at choke points - bridges etc. Also US spec passenger cars are heavy, intentionally...

What happened? Soft ground? Rail folded over? Ran off the end of the track? 2607 pushed it too hard against an immovable line of cars? ???

I've read the diesels that accompany these exhibition trains aren't needed for horsepower. The helper diesels are needed for modern requirements re signalling, electricity generation that matches passenger cars behind, (there are several 'standards') and most important, engine braking and...

Maybe they'll just push it, cold?

This isn't new. 60 years ago I watched an oil pipeline being built over Donner Pass (7k ft) from California into Nevada and beyond. Owner? Southern Pacific Railroad, at the time the primary carrier of petroleum products from the Richmond refineries over that same corridor. It was more...

What's the difference if you substitute 'bailout for General Motors', for 'railroads'? What do you propose, to save the status quo? What I've read supports what Moss said, coal is no longer the most economical fuel for generating energy so it's losing market share. Look at this article on...

Why should we care? Nostalgia? There will still be things to haul. 40 ft cans, automobiles, UPS trailers, general freight.

Found on Reddit: ____________ "I once went camping in North Wales with my father. We found a campsite and asked the owner for a spot. He said sure and pointed us to an empty treeline area, far from all of the other vans and tents. It seemed ideal, so we set up next to the trees. Early the next...

That loco's modern replacement is for commuter service within Los Angeles where everything possible is being done to reduce air pollution. Retiring and destroying the 30 year old non-conforming diesels was probably a condition to qualify for federal and state participation in the cost of a...

Did you notice the Terms&Conditions? "... disabled in 2020 as part of a government grant covenant, by cutting holes in the block of the main drive engine and the HEP engine." Minor parts missing. "If this locomotive is brought back into service, it must be repowered to a Tier 4 or cleaner...

They do things different in VN.

:LOL:

WTH???

Likely we need another term for the opposite of DARVO but I haven't thought of one. Maybe something along the line of WWJD? Really, the intentional divisiveness I saw when I followed that link is killing us all. "Can't we all get along?" - said it all.

Similar? A plank road crossed the desert in southern California for a couple dozen years, overlaid on unstable sand dunes. Very little trace of it remains today. https://www.desertusa.com/sandhills/plankrd.html

Agree. I went to look at what provoked that post and discovered that thread is now a cesspool. Let's leave them alone to swim in their own s***. We can do better than that by looking toward the positive.

I found the explanation in the comments: No catenary. So apparently it's being delivered.

The Andes are incredible terrain. Nariz del Diablo (Devil's Nose) railroad in Ecuador was built to connect Guayaquil (seaport) to Quito (the capital) high in the Andes. Everything is so steep that footpaths had been the only routes for millennia. Around 1890 the government started a plan for...

Some great photos on that site. And beautiful country.

Somebody has an expensive hobby!

Good find!

I went looking at Google maps to see if there is rail at those addresses. No. But way down the rabbithole I found this: https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2014/07/t-sections-and-emd-plant-tour.html

The Japanese bullet trains somehow aren't crashed by the frequent earthquakes there. There's something in the project design to bring then to a safe stop.

Wow. Sounds like they ran out of safe high speed track to test on, rather than any limit within to the train.

Wow! From hitting the record, only 4 minutes more to pick up another 20 mph. (numbers approximate!). Overpowered?! I wonder how fast it could go ultimately with even better track and power input.

Graffiti - A local legend. It's at a high-traffic regional intersection. It was simple for many years. Then: (All - 2019) It started getting continually updated...

The overnight train from New Delhi down to Varanasi was clean and comfortable. We had a compartment (bunks, overnight separated from the aisle by a curtain). A couple of times in daylight hours, both directions, other families were seated with us between local cities. Decent people and...

Then there's MASS transit. Big trains, lots of them, even the rail gauge (and I think the cars) are wider. I can't see how to embed this short video so click on the article headline: Sheer Train density on tracks of Mumbai Suburban Railway Which carries 7.5 Million People Daily

That's a great series of photos!

Maybe the steam models belong in a different thread. For me, what I admire most is the work the builders have put into them. The modelers seem to be mostly retired machinists etc who have thousands of hours invested before their baby runs. I spoke to one owner who told me he has about 2,000...

I don't mind complying if that seems to be the view of the audience.

Anybody interested in this? Golden Gate Live Steamers in Tilden Park, on the ridge above Berkeley, is a nearly century-old club of enthusiasts who build and operate live scale models. My cousin who is an engineer and also designs and maintains the electronics/signals, hosts an annual family...

A detail that made the India rail disaster so severe: That was an iron ore train standing on the siding where the express got shunted into. Each US ore hopper might be 100 tons or more while India uses 5'6" rail gauge which is 10 inches, almost 20%, wider than US Standard Gauge. So each iron...

Thanks everybody. Never heard of a Slug before this. That makes sense. Horsepower is needed top-end for speed, but added torque and traction are what's needed to get a heavy train started moving, ie this switchyard application.

What's a RR slug?

That statistic reflects the large population still in subsistence rural ag. But don't ignore the part of the economy in China that is developing, fast. It's a different world. See a Google search on 'high speed rail in China'. More high speed miles of routes now compared to all other countries...

Yeah but - they're starting from 100 year newer technology than some of those American photos. So they may have lower costs from more efficient production, in addition to their lower wages. (which probably aren't a major cost element anyhow).

When daughter did her semester abroad in New Delhi we visited, and took a first-class sleeper train from New Delhi down to Varanasi. It was a little unnerving to board in the crowded main station where dozens had died a couple of weeks earlier, crushed in a stampede as crowds left the city for...

3-train catastrophe in India today. 80 mph passenger express mistakenly got shunted into the back of a stopped freight train. Its cars accordioned and hit an oncoming passenger express...

Here's a railroad mystery just now unfolding. Thirty tons of ammonium nitrate vanished between manufacture at the Dyno plant in Cheyenne ("a global manufacturer of explosives", mostly for mining) and the destination, a remote rail siding in the Mohave Desert. Latest update claims the seals on...

'Cause they're so hard to steer. :)

Is there an old Stop Look Listen sign there? I wonder if shutting down the tractor and just listening for a minute might avoid a surprise.

There are a lot of videos that show this history accurately! This video looks like they gave a primitive AI app an assignment where it collected photos that seemed relevant, colorized them, then wrote nonsense narrative that was collected from those photos' captions. The narrative then repeats...

Some railroad stories that are family legends: About 1930 Mom was a starving college student. She worked summers as a helper to wealthy families at their summer homes, where they hosted endless social events. At Lake Tahoe one summer. Then one summer at Keddie, high in the Sierra Nevada range...

What's that third locomotive? Nickel Plate Road? I thought that was just history.

Here, and probably everywhere in the US, the state or local highway department can't do anything if a RR crossing is rough. Nothing will be done before the RR gets around to it with their own forces.

Both? The rail unions are complaining to the press that running longer trains with reduced staff is causing this. They may be right.

WAY different on the San Francisco cable cars! Foot pedals to force steel brake shoes against the wheels. Wooden blocks that press down on the track. And the :)

I expect railcars picked up along the way are easier to attach by uncoupling and sending the locomotive into a siding, rather than backing the 3 mile train into the siding to fetch them. Picking up unladen cars this way was cited as a cause in one of the accident reports, with the local...

That's the problem. The beancounters ordering the speedup to be more profitable (successfully) are resisting acknowledging the physical limits that train unions say are the cause. In the cases mentioned, heavy cars in the back half of a huge train can push light empty cars up front right off...

Interesting article. They say one problem with trains 1~2.5 miles long is when braking, light empty cars up front get shoved off of curves if most of the weight is in the final third of the train. The final part of the article has several examples...

Whoever designed that HAD to have had Lionel trains as a kid!

What happens to the air hoses?

UP ore train on the mainline between Las Vegas - Los Angeles got off in the bushes yesterday ... No injuries. I can't find any intelligent details but in summary the crew jumped without injury. Roadside sensor reported the maximum it can measure, 118 mph, speculation is 150 mph...

Tell us what you know.

That North Coast region will never see rail again. There are no longer the lumber mills up north, that needed transport from there down to civilization. The route is 200+ miles of steep rough country, famous for earthquakes, and landslides due to the nature of the soil and heavy rainfall. So...

We did. Nuff said. Subsequently ... the RW will likely become part of the State Parks system. Wikipedia:

Here's what drew my attention to SMART recently. A news article said a couple of cars of feed grain flopped over while being moved slowly in their switching yard at Schelleville. (miles from their nearest passenger service). I found a railroader's discussion group saying lack of maintenance -...

I haven't been following this thread. But I was just reading something local, that someone here might find interesting: It's a business case study for planning the resumption of freight traffic north of San Francisco. Railroad infrastructure still exists, but with near-zero freight. Passenger...