#irl railway

[transfem-edward]

de Efteling narrow gauge fleet

aagje [green livery]

moortje[black livery, I got to ride her train when I went :'>]

neefje[blue livery, not in service, sits stationary at one of the stations]

trijntje[red livery, not in service to my knowledge] [not in service due to a boiler rupture as said in reblogs, hasnt been fixed yet]

now I just wanna make them into ttte characters :'>

[hazel-of-sodor]

I'm gonna start going through my folder and posting the up to date versions of all my engines. Tonight’s is the Avonside B3. Specifcally Margaret, a Engine that worked at St. George quarry and the Kinmel Railway with her sister Eleanor.  The right version is her in @denbigh-and-wrexham​ ‘s Au version of her, owned by the Denbigh Quarry Company.  Heres the real Margaret looking worse for wear.

[tornadoyoungiron]

3801 climbing Cowan Bank unassisted, the bank where she had that fatal accident many decades ago.

[brick-boats]

Henry gets cocky and teases James about spinning on the turntable and Gordon rolling into a ditch, only for him not to pay attention and does both!

Whoopsie!

I don’t know when this happened but I know the loco is LMS Jubilee No. 45592.

[edwards-exploit]

The Bournemouth Belle, and The Last Shunter.

More OCs! SteamNav and Missus are rather new so some info might be subject to change, and they were AU versions of certain characters (3 points if you guess who) buuut they spiralled into new characters. SteamNav is tranquil fury incarnate, trying to take control of his life after so long being something humans have tinkered with and throwing herself into making Incredibly Bad Descisions; and Missus can and will judge your (engine) sins, but she keeps losing at poker and that's why Sodor is so damn haunted. If anyone has any more questions or just want to help me brainstorm send me an ask and I'll answer :]

[kidlit-queen-competition]

Train fact: the longest* train ever

like all things to do with railways, you can get pretty granular and pedantic with this one, so this is likely to also be the longest post ever. Sorry, but actual facts (and pretty pictures) under the cut!

The longest passenger train in regular service is Australia's 'Ghan, a luxury tourist train that runs between Adelaide and Darwin, and averages 774 m/2,539ft in length. that's twice as long as the Empire State building is tall.

(id in alt)

The reason I say "in regular service" is because the longest passenger train EVER was run by the Rhaetian Railway in Switzerland, to celebrate 175 years of Swiss railways, and that was more than twice that long at 1,910m/6266.4ft. Almost an entire Kentucky Derby worth of train! It had to go incredibly slowly, maxing out at 35km/h, to avoid overloading the electric systems of the railway and local power grids.

[Video desc: a youtube video from CBS news of the recordbreaking passenger train. The train is made up of several red electric trains coupled together, and moves through alpine landscapes of mountainds and coniferous forest. It is so long that it is visible only in coils, like a snake. Some shots show the train leaving one tunnel while entering another, or driving under a viaduct while the tail end crosses it, and several shots show people watching and taking photographs.]

But, the thing with passenger trains is that they have a lot of rules and regulations applied to them that freight doesn't have to follow. So freight trains get HYUGE.

The average American freight train (I consider the USA to be freight trains' natural habitat because there is a whole bunch of wide open space for for them to crawl around) is 5400 feet long, and the standard in Europe is around 3000ft. That's a 10-20 minute walk at average adult walking speed, just to go from end to end. You know when you stop at a level crossing, and a train goes by, and it seems like it's going by forever? That was probably one of these.

But the average frieght train is peanuts to mining trains. Trains came from the mines, and they still dominate there. The biggest trains in the world are consists of ore and coal, run by tiny crews from extraction point to export. This has always been true.

For example, the Datong–Qinhuangdao railway in China runs coal trains daily that are 2.614 km/8576 ft long. That's more than 1.5 miles, or three times as long as the burj khalifa is tall. And that's the standard for that line.

(id in alt)

But that doesn't break any records.

The longest production train, running regularly, is the Sishen–Saldanha railway line's maganese/iron ore train. These trains are four kilometers long. 4,000 meters, almost half the height of the highest peak on earth, in wagons full of metals. Too long to be seen in a single photograph- the one below was stitched together from four separate pictures, taken from the air:

(id in alt)

and that's still not the record!

The record for longest frieght train is held by BHP, an Australian mining company. It was made for the record, but the capacity is still there. This train ran on june 21st 2011, and was 682 wagons long, over seven kilometers. Almost twice the length of the Sishen–Saldanha's, and a quarter the height of Olympus mons. If you stood this train on its end, it would be taller than Mt Denali. If you started at the front of the lead locomotive, and ran as fast as you physically could, you wouldn't reach the last wagon for an hour.

There are entire branch lines shorter than this train.

Unfortunately, there are no good photos, because nobody in space had time for railfanning that day, but there are plenty of pictures of other BHP trains!

(id in alt)

[brick-boats]

The boys are having fun in Tywyn!

[engineer-gunzelpunk]

"Heavy Harry looks like its about to go postal"

So goes one of the comments under this cartoon by John Draper for the SAR 520 Restoration SteamRanger group.

Going postal would not be too out of character for Heavy Harry, he is very easily angered; '01 for her part looks incredibly outraged, like actually personally offended.

For her part, R761 just looks confused as hell.

As a Victorian gunzel I had a good laugh, just cause seeing my bitter boy in a cartoon, even in a sardonic one is always a hoot. I appreciate the backhanded acknowledgement of both Harry and the Rs being representative of our state's flagship locos alongside '01. It hits just right.

I gotta say, this is one of the strangest comments I have ever seen:

Except that the SAR 520 class has a very strong resemblance to the Pennsylvania Railroad T-1 Class, reflecting SAR Commissioner's William Webb's and CME Fred Hugh Harrison's penchant for American locomotive design and...

...and...

...and...

*reads that last line again*

*blinks*

*Gets visions of a Dalby-esque scene of Heavy Harry derailing*

I MUST DRAW THIS I MUST

Edit: to add link to the SAR Restoration 520 site https://www.steamrangerheritagerailway.org/volunteering-with-steamranger/520-restoration-appeal/

[trainqueen379]

I think this is also worth posting

Made this as a little present after two weeks of work at the R&ER :>

Going back next summer to complete my guard training btw >:D

[klein-sodor-bahn]

Someone got a polish today ✨

Me and two other people polished this old lady today. It’s Madame Eugénie and she was all dusty 😭. But now she looks as gorgeous as ever. I bet the other engines in the shed were jealous lol.

But also something really annoying happened too. We came back from lunch break and in the meantime a pidgeon had shit onto the freshly polished smoke deflector😡🤬 This flying rat can count itself lucky we didn’t find it otherwise we would have cooked it! But hey now she looks amazing.

[whumpster-fire]

Just discovered this TTTE parody that aired on John Oliver's show making fun of the problems with Precision Scheduled Railroading (animation starts at timestamp 23:00)

Obviously this is a satire and not meant to be perfectly technically accurate to rail operations nor accurate to RWS lore, but one thing I do want to point out is that, while railways cutting corners and endangering the public in the name of profits was certainly a thing, it's kind of amusing that Henry, a steam locomotive, is being used to demonstrate a specific type of corporate fuckery (comically long trains that can't be operated without blocking crossings, excessive workload on crews leading to dangerous conditions being missed) that's only possible to the extent that it's being done today because of diesels.

The thing with the obscenely long trains is that railroads get sufficient power to move them by stacking a whole bunch of locomotives on one train, often with some in the back or even the middle of the train, and while this technically can be done with steam power, one of the major motivators for railroads to run longer and longer trains is to save on labor costs... which doesn't really work with steam because every locomotive you add needs to have its own crew, but with diesel or electric locomotives a single crew can operate an arbitrary number of locomotives, and in theory an arbitrarily long train, because they can be controlled remotely from the cab of the lead locomotive. In theory. In practice this causes problems because if you have only two people responsible for a 2+ mile long train with hundreds of cars, anything that requires them to inspect the whole train or do something like setting handbrakes when the train has to be parked on a hill is way more time consuming and causes more crew fatigue.

(which isn't to say there weren't examples of pretty long trains in the steam era, but the main way of increasing the amount of tonnage per person crewing the train, aside from improvements in brake technology which led to not needing several brakemen, was building bigger and bigger locomotives)

(also for maximum pedantry, is obscenely long freight trains running over infrastructure not designed for them even a thing in the UK?)

[hazel-of-sodor]

Hazel Locomotive Shops presents the LNER A2/1 Pacific. In 1944, Edward Thompson ordered the last four ordered Gresley V2 2-6-2s to be built to his own modified 4-6-2 design. Built in 1944-45, The four engines were meant to be the successor to the V2, part of Thompson's  standardization plan. In reality, all four would be scrapped before V2 withdrawls began. In my Au, No.508 Duke of Rothesay would be saved by private buyer Gywneth Amari for an undisclosed sum. In 1966 Amari would purchase the recently closed Great Central line from British Rails, and 508 was overhauled at Doncaster, pulling the reopening train for the new London New Eastern Railway. She has since become the symbol of the railway's heritage operations. She completed her most recent overhaul in 2016, and recently doubled-headed a heritage special with fellow LNER Pacific 60103 Flying Scotsman to celebrate the latter’s 100th birthday.

[issacthebraveandgay]

I want to rate more trains cause it’s fun, send me asks of trains that you like from shows, games, movies or even real life for me to rate and give my opinions of

[sunflowerrboyy]

logged onto minecraft for the first time in a long time and the only world i had was the copy of the realms that me, my former partner, and my old friend spent months building on (in survival)

so nostalgic...

[prowlingthunder]

You're telling me I can nap AND read a book and get from one coast to the other in a DAY? GIVE.

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

[brick-boats]

Dear friends,

The Skarloey engines were invited to Tywyn in Wales for a holiday. The engines at the Talyllyn Railway were very grateful for a rest.

These tales recount the many hijinks over their busy weekend.

Yours truly,

The Author