#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.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"GALT, PORT DOVER ROAD WILL BE ELECTRIFIED," Berlin News Record (Kitchener, Ont.) July 12, 1913. Page 1. ---- (From Simcoe Reformer.) Engineer Kellatt, of the Lake Erie & Northern, was talking to The Reformer on Monday. He said that the story about the line being exclusively a steam one had no foundation in fact. The line from Galt to Port Dover would be electrified. Of that there was no possible doubt. The board of directors had never considered making it a steam road.

Of course, the roadbed would be of steam standard and the steel heavy. It would be quite possible to run an ordinary steam locomotive, hauling a full complement of loaded cars, over the line any time it was found desirable. But this fact did not clash with the statement that it would be an electrified line.

The T. H. &. B. brakes will not be used. The delay north of Waterford is caused by a difference of opinion as to the merits of two alternative routes. Two complete surveys have been made: one runs through Boston, the other takes a more westerly course and misses Boston by a major more. The final decision will be made in a few days, and it was good betting that construction will be under way in a month.

Mr. Kellatt expects to have the line open from Brantford to Galt by October 1st in time for this fall's business. He places the completion of the whole line and its opening for business, from Port Dover through to Galt, not later than June 1, 1914.

One of the difficulties now con fronting him in Simcoe is to accommodate his plans to the recent purchases of land by the Board of Education. Of this, probably more will be heard in the near future.

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

🚄🏳️‍⚧️🦊:3 ?

:D

[bookloversofbath]

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

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trainfuckers

trains do fuck actually

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trainposting :3

[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.

[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.

[buff-electra-truther]

Greaseball vs Electra- how I view the dynamic

-I view Stex with a HEAVY dose of irl train politics for these two specifically because it fits the characters well. I see them more as two sides of the same coin than opposites. They’re the two main present-day approaches to rail transport, electrification vs diesel power. There’s also a rural vs urban divide with them, since population density is a MAJOR driver in which is more practical (they also have small vs big government undertones but I don’t like to get too into the weeds with non-train politics in Stex LOL)

-I tend to default to them being similar size/ability-wise because it checks out with their implied basis engines. Electra has a bit of an edge statistically but requires so much more fragile infrastructure and has a relatively fussy design by electric loco standards (they’re usually less likely to go wrong than combustion engines due to having fewer moving parts, Electra is just an outlier! I’m sick of electrics being played up as fragile in general. It’s the infrastructure that’s fragile.)

-Greaseball symbolizes reality and pragmatism. It is how it is, for better and worse. He’s not as book smart as Electra but much more practical and rugged. He may not know the intricacies of controls and scheduling on the Northeast Corridor but he’d fare much better on a desert island. He’s good at strategizing on the ground with his Gang, for all his ~toxic masculinity~ he is NOT isolationist and very much works as a pack like irl diesel locos typically do on longer trains.

-I lean HARD into Electra being more idealistic and theoretical. He’s like Jack Kirby made a propaganda poster for Amtrak, like a cartoon superhero come to life vs an actual (US) football player type like Greaseball. In ideal conditions Greaseball can’t touch him, but boy it’s hard to line that up. And with his Gang? Electra alone does not stand a chance, he’d work maybe with one other engine and that’s it because of Amtrak’s perpetual shortage of motive power.

-Electra overestimates how stupid Greaseball is, Greaseball overestimates how fragile or weak Electra is.

-Electra can have a weird conspiratorial streak about thinking the government is out to get him (he’s onto something, honestly) and is overly obsessed with proving himself, especially in being worthy vs diesel power due to what a hassle electrification is to implement

-Greaseball views him as less of a serious threat because who the hell is gonna run catenaries over the Rocky Mountains?

-The one thing they can really be united is is hating cars (though Electra is WAY more of a car hater) and getting increasingly aggravated at railroads overworking them

-I view them as enemies with benefits. They hate each other but can’t resist each other. Caboose likes to pit them against each other so he can gets stuck in the middle and have double the fun. I’m Greasedinah-neutral, but I can see Greaseball trying to rope Electra in as an on and off third wheel and Dinah being unenthused about participating because they just fundamentally don’t fit with each other.

[trainsgenderfoxgirl2816]

Trains? >:3

TRAINS :D

[guerrerense]

Lake Estling Falls por Michael W Sullivan Por Flickr: A veteran New Haven FL9 built in October of 1957 looks right at home under wire as it trails on the eastbound return trip of a Morristown & Erie Office Car Special that ran between Whippany, NJ and Randolph, NJ. The train is seen here on the causeway built during the Morris & Essex electrification project between Lake Estling and Indian Lake by the Lackawanna Railroad. ME OCS-2 @ Lake Estling, Denville, NJ ME C424 18 ME FL9 489

[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!