#railroad Electrification

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Railway Electrification

[rjzimmerman]

Summary of this Substack post from Bill McKibben:

In the forefront is the most crucial issue facing humanity, the climate crisis. Railroads have a keystone role in addressing it. They are the fastest route to cut climate pollution from one of its major sources, transportation. Rail is already the most efficient mode to haul freight on land. Moving freight from trucks to rail reduces energy use by three to five  times. Electrifying rail and running it on renewable energy is the quickest track to eliminate climate pollution in long-distance freight and passenger transportation. It allows higher speeds that make trains competitive with air travel in many corridors. 

Reducing diesel pollution by shifting freight from trucks to rail, running rail on electricity, and electrifying trucks for the shorter hauls for which truck electrification is most feasible, saves the health and lives of people living along highways and tracks, and near warehouse districts and railyards. As well, this reduces particulate pollution from tire and brake wear, another significant health hazard. Moving from aviation to passenger rail slashes pollution close to airports. Since communities around all these tend to be lower-income, where many people of color live, railroads offer a key environmental justice solution. 

Railroads are also key to unlocking rapid renewable energy growth, reducing power sector climate pollution. The greatest obstacle to swift expansion is a lack of long distance lines to transmit electricity from remote solar and wind resources to population centers where demand is concentrated.  Transmission can be most quickly added along railroad right-of-ways under single ownerships and with traditional industrial uses, as opposed to multiple parcels where lines are often blocked by local opposition.  

[valtionrautatiet-official]

Electric trains to Hanko

I somehow missed this news earlier this week, but the electrification works between Karjaa and Hanko have been completed, and they were tested with one of our Sm4 units yesterday.

Hanko station in 2021, with a Dm12 dmu. Photo Jukka Tölkkö, Suomen rautatiemuseo.

If all goes to plan, from the start of next year we will not only restore passenger services from Karjaa to Hanko, now using Sm4 electric multiple units instead of the Dm12 units used before electrification. Furthermore, with the electrification we will start offering direct trains from Helsinki to Hanko, whereas previously all passengers to/from Hanko had to change trains at Karjaa.

Electrification work continues on the Karjaa–Hyvinkää line; electrification of the entire Hyvinkää–Hanko line should be complete by the end of 2024.

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

🚄🏳️‍⚧️🦊:3 ?

:D

[bookloversofbath]

Railway Adventure :: L. T. C. (Lionel Thomas Caswell) Rolt

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trainposting :3

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trainfuckers

trains do fuck actually

[bookloversofbath]

Layouts and Illustrations :: Peter Smith

[whirligig-girl]

Eaurp Guz's roughly 1:30 scale live-steam model of Slaibsgloth Coal Railroad No.32, a ~1.6 meter gauge 2-8-8-2 garratt steam locomotive built on planet Mellanus in (earth-)year 2346 and retired in 2379 (two years ago) for service bringing coal carriages from the coal pits up to the interchange at the Glooiw & North Eastern. It is unusual for a coal burning steam engine to remain in revenue service--the majority that remained in use after the development of Diesel-Hydraulics were decommissioned with nuclear-powered railway electrification in the 2360s, and the ones that remained were mostly converted to oil burning. The Slaibsgloth steam engines meanwhile persisted right up until the closure of the coal mine. Glooiw & North Eastern has acquired the 40 locomotives. Their fates are uncertain but railway preservation groups remain optimistic.

When Guz first came aboard the Cerritos she was overworking herself constantly, which lead to her being so tired that she was leaving residues on the consoles and generally doing sloppier work. It turned out that Guz had been working double shifts, and when Billups found out he put a stop to that. That's when Guz turned to a hobby she'd done a lot of before joining starfleet--model rocketry. Armed with far more advanced tools than she'd had on Mellanus, she made accurate working model replicas of real historical prewarp spacecraft from a variety of planets and would fly them in real space whenever possible.

Eventually, she also found a new appreciation for her childhood love of trains, and her model-making skills and tools translated well to model railroading as well. She has a little shelf layout in storage that she occasionally tinkers with, and she runs large scale model trains on the holodeck. She could run full-scale holographic trains on the holodeck too of course, but it wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. And then there's the 1:5600 scale BM-gauge railroad she's building on a microscope slide! (Bµ gauge is "Byte micrometer" gauge or a track spacing of 256 µm)

Guz eventually wants to build a roughly 1:80 scale modular layout of the Slaibsgloth Coal Mine, with smaller scale electric-powered models of the Slaibsgloth coal-burning steam engines and enough track to wrap around a room and give them a good run, but unless she can rally support for a Cerritos chapter of the Starfleet Rail Transport Modelling Club or she can get her own crew quarters, it's a pipe dream--or maybe something for her retirement.

Replicators and advanced computer aided design tools reduce the amount of time it takes to get modelling projects done by whatever factor is desired. Technically Guz could probably replicate fully assembled working models as long as they fit in the replicator bed, but where's the fun in that? But she's still only got so much time in an off-shift, and doing it 'properly,' scratch-built using machine tools like 'real' modellers on Mellanus, or manually defining all of the geometry in a CAD program like modellers on Earth, would take too much time.

see also: alt versions of the locomotive.

[buff-electra-truther]

When you actually Americanize Starlight Express, Electra suddenly becomes a Reaganite boogeyman of Amtrak as a “welfare queen”- A “Dark Side of the (T)Rainbow” esque fascinating synchronicity

(Yes, that term is racially loaded and I am using it very deliberately for reasons to be explained later.)

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: I was way too wishy washy on this in the original version of the post (which got picked up by some bigger names and spread around) so I want to make this very clear. This is all a giant “Immer Pünktlich!” situation where the original creators could have never foreseen how it comes off wildly different in another country. Most of the traits discussed here were not present in the workshop version of the character. They just arose later on mainly through pure coincidence. I am VERY aware of Electra’s original intent and origins. I would be astounded if Brits in the 80s knew this much about the long-suffering US passenger rail network, even most Americans today don’t know if they don’t actually ride these trains or live in the northeast.  Starlight’s central themes of bootstrapping and “being under your own control” are associated with conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan, but that’s basically it in terms of actually intended elements. This is a wild reinterpretation of things by someone with a wildly different viewpoint than the original creatives.

People often make fun of how Electra makes such a big deal of being electric and futuristic when electric trains are just kind of the norm in most countries with substantial rail networks.  But when you take into account that toothpaste-era Electra is considerably Amtrak-coded and look into the politics and railroad history of what they’d be like irl…. Their framing goes from kind of stupid to pointedly malicious in oddly specific ways.

You know what else WAS the norm in the US (and still is in much of Europe) until Reagan started treating it as a radical freak? The big bad “liberal agenda” of the government actually funding things like social programs and infrastructure, including railroads.  And you know what kind of trains are almost completely dependent on that kind of government support?  Electric ones.  EVERY SINGLE REPLICA NATIONAL represents a country that (at least circa the 80s) had a nationalized rail network that actually invested in electrification. It’s not impossible for private companies to fully fund themselves but very hard, especially now.  

Who are “electric train politics” heavily associated with in the US?  Black people, LGBT people, damn near every minority, which coincidentally, Electra regularly was early on.

You may not realize this if you’re from elsewhere, but the US has very, very little rail electrification vs other rich countries.  You have some commuter rail and local transit systems in a number of cities, the Northeast Corridor and Keystone Corridor, and that’s…. about it.  Intercity service between a line of the big northeastern cities and that’s it.  The rest is all diesel domain irl.  Behold the wikipedia page for electrified lines in the US and see just how many are GONE. (Passenger service is also absolutely threadbare if not nonexistant in most of the non-electric network and often offensively slow, not even local road speed.  But that’s a whole separate can of worms) 

Why is this?  Heavy simplification, but the government subsidized highways and airports instead after WWII and that along with antiquated laws and losing mail service made passenger rail a massive money pit for most the railroads forced to continue it.  Instead of passenger rail service and infrastructure improving like basically all the other Nationals’ countries,  routes dropped like flies and many railroads sank into financial ruin until Penn Central’s collapse in the late 60s.  That’s when the government finally stepped in and took over passenger services as Amtrak.  Electrification infrastructure and equipment was dated then due to years of desperate finances, and while there was active rail investment in the 70s to improve, Reagan’s administration was hostile to it and it’s been an on and off uphill battle since to get enough funding to keep things going, let alone improve or expand.  Literally left decades behind by the system.  The 2013 tour is the most accurate version of Electra as a realistic reflection of electric passenger rail in the US- a guy who’s been at it since the 80s that still looks like a decades-old vision of the future in a notably cheap, torn up, worn out costume.  Actually the AEM-7 locomotives used then date to 1978, even older than that.

“Electra must be rich” sounds like something a stingy conservative politician would say about Amtrak needing billions of dollars (to just be barely functional due to years of neglect).  Yes, they were intended to be a celebrity for separate reasons early on, but the massive contrast between being shown as “rich” but representing an infamously NOT rich rail system really feels like something a nasty conservative politician would try as a smear campaign in another timeline. Oooo handouts bad.  Oooo you must be so extravagant if you need that much.  You “welfare queen” sucking government funds to blow on exotic pets and glitter and other frivolities. You “strapping young buck buying T-bone steaks with food stamps”. Those are Reagan’s quotes, not mine, I hate even typing them out but god, can it be more obvious?  Painting those who need government assistance (usually coded as black) as extravagant has been weaponized to destroy social programs and further inequality.  The gap between Electra and reality always felt kind of jarring for me, but the longer I thought about it, the more I realized how much uglier the implications were.

“Or unreliable”- electric trains have so few moving parts they tend to be notably reliable in terms of the physical locomotive/multi unit*.  A lot of their issues are actually due to structural failures with powerlines, and this is ESPECIALLY true with the NEC and other ooold electric commuter lines in the US.  This has also limited the maximum speed of trains at times.  See video below for more on this, also explains a lot of the stuff I’ve mentioned earlier.  Huh.  Gee whiz.  Someone held back and suffering due to structural problems being blamed as personal failing.  What DOES that sound like? 

*technically CC 40104 used as Electra’s helmet actually was an unreliable model because it was a weird complicated niche thing with four voltages for a uniquely European situation but that’s downright cherry picking.  The other Nez Casse engines with that styling actually were reasonably reliable and realistic Amtrak Electra from the 80s to 2018 would be an AEM-7 (common fanon choice too) that was also fine.

When you think about it, the likes of “only you have the power within you” and “needn’t beg the world to turn around and help you” might be the most offensive things you could say specifically to an electric train in the US besides“lol they shoulda replaced your line with even moar I-95 lanes”

Anyways, isn’t it funny how people conveniently ignore how steam preservation was actually very popular (compared to almost any other obsolete tech) in the 80s and had been since at least the 60s?  You had steam engines pulling the 1976 Freedom Train.  A small, relatively “young”, mechanically functional steam engine would have tourist railroads FIGHTING over them back then.  That was the era when the majority of the steam engines left in Barry Scrapyard were scooped up and preserved, Crown Metal Company was making new build ones for amusement parks, and some tourist railroads even bought new builds from the last company in China building steam engines for regular service.

But you know what did go out of favor in the late 30s and was treated as downright laughable to go back to after the 50s, just like the regular revenue use of steam locos in the US?  

The kind of small-government conservatism Reagan preached.  And the steam engines in the show promote.  Barry Goldwater was openly mocked for it in the mid-60s.  It was thought genuinely unthinkable to go back to.  

So, those laughably historically inaccurate depictions of electric and steam engines.  Isn’t it uncanny how near-perfectly those unrealistic traits of them align with other things?  

Also a funny aside: probably 90% of those new build Crown Metal steam engines were dressed up in western themes.  Literally cowboy actors, just like Reagan was.  

(I’ve got an extended unhinged analysis of Starlight accidentally resembling the rise of Reaganism and it unexpectedly spreading world over and destroying everyone else’s railroads too.  That’s still in progress though. But these two aspects are so freakishly dead-on I really needed to get them out.)

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Catenary?

canary : )

[valtionrautatiet-official]

An introduction to VR multiple units, part 5: Sm6

The Sm6 Allegro. When I started this series about our multiple units, I first thought I would cover the Sm6 in the "operated for others" -series, then thought I would leave it out altogether... but events overtook my plans and now I'm introducing them as VR's own multiple units, although they are not yet in operation as VR trains.

An Sm6 unit on the Kerava-Lahti line, currently the only bit of high-speed rail in Finland, 2011. Teemu Peltonen, Vaunut.org.

Since the 1990s, two daily return trains had been operated between Helsinki and Saint Petersburg, Russia: the Sibelius, which used VR carriages, and the Repin, which used RŽD carriages. In 2006, the two rail operators decided to replace the locomotive-hauled trains, which took five hours to make the trip, with jointly-owned high-speed trains. For this purpose, a new jointly-owned subsidiary Karelian Trains was established.

Two Sm6's during pre-service entry test runs at Vainikkala, the border station between Finland and Russia, with the locomotive-hauled St. Petersburg train Sibelius on the right. Lari Nylund, Vaunut.org.

After a round of tenders, Karelian Trains opted for the Pendolino design (already used by VR in the form of the Sm3) from Alstom in 2007, with four units to be delivered in 2010 (there was also an option for two additional units, which was never taken up). Although the exterior design of the new Sm6 units was almost identical to the Sm3, in terms of technology they feature numerous improvements compared to the older class, and were outfitted to operate both on the Russian and Finnish electric systems. Due to the small difference in gauge between the two countries (Russia uses 1520 mm but Finland 1524 mm) the trains were given near-unique gauge of 1522 mm.

Interior of the Sm6's first-class carriage as delivered. Otto Karikoski, Wikimedia Commons.

Branded Allegro, the new Sm6 units begun operations in December 2010, cutting the travel time between Helsinki and St. Petersburg to 3½ hours. In addition to services offered on Sm3 units, the Sm6 has (or perhaps more accurately had) a space for the border patrol to use, as passport control was done en-route on the train, and a kid's playroom. The original grey-dominated interiors were replaced by new, more colourful blue designs in 2018-2019.

The new interiors were not in use for long before the Covid-19 pandemic caused for passenger train services between Finland and Russia to be suspended in March 2020. The Allegro services were restored in December 2021 (the Helsinki-Moscow sleeper train Tolstoy, however, was not), and ran for less than four months until closed again in March 2022 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (VR subsequently stopped freight traffic to Russia too - other Finnish rail operators continue to serve freight to and from Russia, however).

Second-class carriage in the post-2019 look. VR.

After March 2022, the four Sm6 units languished at VR's Ilmala depot in Helsinki, without maintenance as RŽD refused to make any payments for their share in Karelian Trains (which, although jointly Finnish-Russian owned, was registered in Finland). In March 2023, when Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin visited Kiev, Ukrainian Railroads requested the Sm6 units be handed over to them, but nothing ever came of this. Instead, in December 2023, when Karelian Trains was on the brink of bankruptcy due to RŽD not paying their share of the company's bills, VR bought out Karelian Trains and took over the Sm6 units.

The trains will be given a thorough technical refit, which will include removal of the systems to operate with Russian electrification, and will enter services on routes within Finland in 2025. How they will be branded is unknown, though a VR representative said in an interview they will not be called Allegro. Presumably this will make the Sm6 the first VR rolling stock class to be fully painted in the new livery.

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trains? >:3

TRAINS :D

[sinsinewave]

still annoyed that there's a bunch of cool train stuff that basically never gets used in games like, shunting usually just doesn't really exist in games because rail logistics are simplified so much which means limited uses for slugs which are useful for switching and even B units are often just not useful because actual locomotives are so cheap in games like Transport Fever or Factorio or whatever let alone actual shunting engines also video game trains are often just like depressingly short and with electrification in games where it exists being cheap as all hell, there's no real reason to use diesels after unlocking electrics; there's no climate constraints like in Finland, there's no cost constraints, it just makes most sense to switch your entire fleet over to electric just, bweh --- also applies to single track railroads, rails are so cheap to build that it just makes more sense to double or even quadruple track everything even in places where it wouldn't be irl the only game i can think of which at least gets that right is Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic; because you have to actually build the railroads with certain difficulty settings instead of just plopping them down

[network-rail]

Brand new electrification system

One issue with electrification is that it tends to require a lot of expensive new infrastructure. However, we have taken inspiration from model railroading to develop a new two-rail electrification system, where the running rails are also the live rails.

To make the electrification process easier we are going to just clip some jumper cables (the kind with alligator clips) to the rails and the nearest transmission line. We will need some new trains for this system, but we can probably retrofit some older trains as well. Anyways the trains themselves aren't Network Rail's problem so we don't need to worry about them.

If you're worrying about crossing the tracks, don't! You shouldn't be tresspassing anyways, get off the tracks! We'll turn the power off for maintenance, and we'll try to get rid of level crossings, but just don't touch the rails. It's not that hard.

[1863-project]

NJ Transit 40th Anniversary Weekend Extravaganza!

Pay your engineers and give them a contract.

Okay, now that that's out of the way...

This weekend I got to spend some time with my dad aboard NJT's 40th Anniversary Express, a special train they put together in conjunction with the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey to commemorate 40 years of NJT's rail service. Normally I'd have just been content to watch, but they hooked me with a GG1 reference so naturally I had to go because I will do anything for a GG1.

The URHS of NJ loaned the Hickory Creek out for the event, along with a few other passenger cars they own. It was weird to see it at Penn Station instead of in Grand Central Terminal, but they still rolled out the red carpet for it as if it was attached to the 20th Century Limited. (This is where we get the phrase "red carpet treatment" from, by the way. It has nothing to do with Hollywood and everything to do with one crack passenger express train.)

I did not ride in the Hickory Creek itself because I do not have that sort of money, but Dad and I were in the Tavern Lounge No. 43, another New York Central car. It was a lovely ride.

The highlight of the trip was in South Amboy. Historically, electrification of the North Jersey Coast Line ended here. Today, it ends in Long Branch. Here's where the GG1s come in. There would be an engine change at South Amboy. The GG1s, electric locomotives, would be switched out for other locomotives to go further south. It was steam at first, and sadly became diesel later. Yesterday, they recreated this engine switch for us, complete with an NJT heritage unit painted to look like a GG1. This is the closest I'll likely get to seeing one running within my lifetime, so I'll cherish it.

The engine change. NJT 4636 stood in for my beloved GG1s, and two of the first locomotives built for NJ Transit, a pair of F40-PH2s (4119 and 4120), took over. You rarely see the latter in passenger service these days because they usually pull work trains, but they're the last two members of their class in NJT service.

Much to everyone's delight, we got to watch some brakeman work in action, because they manually flipped the switches. Note the heavy-duty gloves the conductor is wearing for this purpose.

It takes quite a bit of setup...

All clear!

Once the locomotives were swapped, we all boarded again and went on down to Bay Head. Since it was cold and rainy out, a few of us had some hot chocolate, which hit the spot and was incredibly wonderful.

Eventually, we made it to Bay Head. This is how I found out the president of NJ Transit was on the train with us, because the NJT engineers are ready to strike because there's no contract right now, and a group of them were protesting down at Bay Head because they knew he'd have to see them. Excellent move.

At Bay Head, we got to go around the loop in Bay Head Yard, something passengers don't normally get to do.

So we had views that most people don't get to have, and that was really cool.

At Bay Head, they fed us and gave us NJT swag. There were also some vintage buses from Public Service there, which was great because nobody stopped me from getting into the driver's seat of them.

My right hand is on the gearshift in this photo - it was huge and came out of the floor. Neither bus had power steering - that's a relatively new feature in motor vehicles.

I can and will attempt to drive anything.

Back to trains - after lunch, everyone got back aboard and the 40th Anniversary Express made its way back up north to Newark Penn Station. Whilst we were at Newark, we were allowed to get out and take some photos, so I investigated the staff car and was delighted to see that it had a conference table with a PRR K4 pictured above it.

You know me, I love my 4-6-2 Pacifics.

Eventually, the train came into Hoboken Terminal, and that was the end of day one.

Today, the entire heritage fleet was on display at Hoboken Terminal, so I made my way back for more photos.

I love GG1s and wanted to thank my new friend for giving me the opportunity to come so close to that experience yesterday.

4101 and 4109 are the surviving sisters of NJT 4100, a locomotive I'm rather attached to. It was nice to get good photos of them instead of the ones I usually have to snap through the window when I'm actually out on the rails!

Erie-Lackawanna 3372 is a labor of love for the URHS of NJ. They've done a beautiful job restoring her so far, but there's still a lot of work left to do.

The thing that really did me in was this old Pennsy diesel here, an E8A numbered 5711. She's in incredible condition for something built in 1952, and they had a cast of an old Penn Station eagle next to her, too, just to break my heart into a million pieces because I'll never be over what happened to Penn Station.

In all, I had an amazing weekend, and NJT and the URHS of NJ knocked it out of the park with this. It was just wonderful to be surrounded by other railfans for a couple of days.

Some other highlights:

Talked about trains the entire ride with the folks in our car. At one point we all got to sharing cat photos. An older couple had a cat named Lake, short for Lake Shore Limited. I cannot tell you how much that delighted me.

I love being around other railfans. It's one of the rare places I can be myself, since there's inevitably going to be a lot of other autistic people there besides me so I don't have to mask. I cannot even begin to articulate what it means to me to be in a place where I don't have to mask.

The hobby has actually changed a lot since I was a little kid - and in a good way. I wasn't the only woman there, for one. I was still greatly outnumbered gender-wise, but there are a lot more women in the hobby now, and it's also a lot more racially diverse than it was back then. Additionally, I saw a LOT of young people - it's going strong! It doesn't feel like it's being gatekept by the old white men anymore. It's really wonderful. Trains are for everyone. They always were, but now you can visibly see it.

When we were on the platform at South Amboy getting set up to take photos, someone yelled "Everybody smile!" behind me and I nearly died. Because, you know:

Whoever you are, give me your phone number.

As a final addendum, of course I brought them with me, as per usual when I go out to do railroading stuff. Here they are seated in Tavern Lounge 43!

This was just an absolute banger of a weekend and I hope more events like this happen because it's so fun to engage with history hands-on and see other people who care about it as much as you do. It's the best! Perfect!