Day 3 - Building the work train
Tomorrow and Sunday are work days, when all the volunteers descend on the Redwood Valley to get projects done. In order for things to be ready for tomorrow morning, we got a work train set up.
Ed picked me up in Berkeley and drove me up to the railroad. We met up with Grant and got to work on switching to build up the work train consist. "Consist" is the railroad term for the mix of railroad vehicles that make up the train. In this case, we made up a mixture of flatcars and hoppers for ballast. There's a spur near the barn that allows us to load ballast in from the top (fortunately, or we'd be shovelling a lot of rock), so we ran the hoppers around to fill them up. We built up the train and moved it up to a siding where the track gang will pick it up tomorrow.
To do all this switching, we used #2, which is a gasoline-powered locomotive. Steam's more romantic, of course, but our steam locos take about 2 hours to steam up, while an engineer just pushes a button on #2 and it roars to life. Or, rather, splutters. She's a bit cantankerous. I'll see if I can get a photo tomorrow.
After lunch, Grant and I took #2 and an empty hopper to recover some ballast. Previous trackwork had left a pile of "used" ballast next to the track in the front loop (near the platform), so we shovelled it into the hopper. Ballast is rock, and is therefore heavy, and shovelling it is tough on the lower back. Anyway, over the course of the day I got lots of practice coupling and decoupling cars in a train. It's a good idea to keep one's fingers out of the way! I watched how #2 is driven, and I learned some basic brakeman's signals for communicating to an engineer that it's ok to proceed, to slow down, and to stop. Very useful when switching.
I'm going up for the work day tomorrow, where I'll try to get some more photos, particularly of #2 and of some trackwork. Incidentally, if you have any questions about railroad terminology, drop me a comment and I'll try to answer it.
Ed picked me up in Berkeley and drove me up to the railroad. We met up with Grant and got to work on switching to build up the work train consist. "Consist" is the railroad term for the mix of railroad vehicles that make up the train. In this case, we made up a mixture of flatcars and hoppers for ballast. There's a spur near the barn that allows us to load ballast in from the top (fortunately, or we'd be shovelling a lot of rock), so we ran the hoppers around to fill them up. We built up the train and moved it up to a siding where the track gang will pick it up tomorrow.
To do all this switching, we used #2, which is a gasoline-powered locomotive. Steam's more romantic, of course, but our steam locos take about 2 hours to steam up, while an engineer just pushes a button on #2 and it roars to life. Or, rather, splutters. She's a bit cantankerous. I'll see if I can get a photo tomorrow.
After lunch, Grant and I took #2 and an empty hopper to recover some ballast. Previous trackwork had left a pile of "used" ballast next to the track in the front loop (near the platform), so we shovelled it into the hopper. Ballast is rock, and is therefore heavy, and shovelling it is tough on the lower back. Anyway, over the course of the day I got lots of practice coupling and decoupling cars in a train. It's a good idea to keep one's fingers out of the way! I watched how #2 is driven, and I learned some basic brakeman's signals for communicating to an engineer that it's ok to proceed, to slow down, and to stop. Very useful when switching.
I'm going up for the work day tomorrow, where I'll try to get some more photos, particularly of #2 and of some trackwork. Incidentally, if you have any questions about railroad terminology, drop me a comment and I'll try to answer it.
posted by CJA | 5:59 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home