Thursday, 06 Aug 2009

Complexity

Newcastle railway station, circa 1960:

From an online exhibition sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects.

And you think you’re having trouble keeping your life straight.

AfC

newcastle-station-tracks, posted by Andrew Cowie in engineering/railways at 2009-08-06T05:49:56Z

Friday, 21 Dec 2007

Innovative uses of bobcats

Ordinarily Rail car movers (aka HiRail trucks) are either enormous ugly yellow painted beasts (which are inevitably maintenance nightmares) or are glorified pickup trucks (which, while great for zooming around to fix a remote signal, that haven’t much hope of actually moving anything). This week, though, I came across an unusual approach to dealing with moving small numbers of cars in an private industrial rail yard that might do the trick. A Canadian company called Brandt Equipment markets a vehicle called the “Rail Yard Boss” which is nothing but a John Deere front loader adapted with rail wheels and a coupler. Photos from their website (I don’t live where there is so much grain, you know?):

The interesting part is that it uses its hoist to transfer some of the weight from the car its pushing to itself, thereby increasing the friction between its wheels and the track, improving its traction as a result. That’s smart.

The advantage over a real switcher, of course, is that it can just up the steel wheels, pivot, and drive out of the way.

On the other hand, given that this thing can only push a max of 5 loaded cars, you’ll probably end up needing a real switcher sooner or later anyway (and what yard doesn’t have a spur as a switching lead to get things out of the way?). Still though, pretty neat.

AfC

rail-yard-boss, posted by Andrew Cowie in engineering/railways at 2007-12-21T08:38:25Z

---