Prototype Railroading: M Trains

M trains, or merchandise trains, generally have a bit of a bad reputation.  Most of my coworkers would rather have a coal load or empty, because they are simple and straightforward.  Sometimes M trains are too, but usually they are not.  Around here, there are no locals, so the M trains, being the lowest priority trains on the railroad, get stuck doing all the work that a local train would normally do.  This can mean setting out cars and picking up cars at multiple locations during the day.  Doing all that extra work takes extra time, and can add quite a few hours to even the best trips.  For that reason, M trains also have a reputation for being slow.  People around here have joked that it would sometimes be faster to jump out and swim the river home!  Additionally, the cars are not all uniform in an M train.  Some are longer, and some are shorter; some are loaded, and some are empty; and some have great brakes and some make you think they have no brakes.  This mixed up combination of cars of all sized, weights, and mechanical circumstances makes train handling a little harder for the engineer.  The train does not behave as a uniformly assembled and loaded coal train would.

Yesterday I was called to work the M-DICLAU1-26A, of the merchandise train operating westbound between Dickinson, ND, and Laurel, MT.  Being a short distance M train, this one really does make all the local stops to do work, even more so than on other M trains that also use this line.  When I arrived at work yesterday morning, my work order confirmed that we would have a busy day, even if it were a quiet day on the railroad.  When I first flipped through the stack of papers, I found that we had cars to pick up in Glendive and Shirley, and cars to set out in Miles City and Forsyth.  There was a switch crew on duty in Glendive, so I was hoping they had taken care of the pickup, so we could just highball out of town.  As I was getting my other paperwork ready, the switch foreman found me and said that they had put the whole train together, air tested it, and it was ready to go.  He explained a few things that were odd about it, and gave me an up to date car list.  I thanked him and finished with the rest of my paperwork.

We got underway, and had an uneventful trip to Shirley.  We had only met one train, and it was waiting for us at Colgate, so we did not even have to slow down.  When we got to Shirley, about 60 miles west of Glendive, we had just one car to pick up.  It had been set out of an empty coal train months ago because of a defect.  The carmen had been out to fix it, and we were to grab it so it could get to Laurel, where it would probably be sent down to Sheridan or Gillette, Wyoming, and meet up with a coal train.  Being as our train was under 5,500 tons, we could put the car anywhere in the train, even though it was empty.  That simplified things.  If our train had been over 5,500 tons, that car would have had to be behind the first ten cars, since it was empty.  We stuck the car on the head end of the train, right behind the locomotives, did an air test, and then continued west.  Somewhere along the way, probably as we were stopping in Shirley, my engineer made the comment that the train seemed to have good brakes, and stopped pretty quickly.

We made it to Miles City pretty quickly, as we had no one to meet.  There was a track inspector in Miles City but he was out of the way before we were close, and we were not delayed by him at all.  In Miles City, we had six cars to set out to the west transfer, which leads to the former Milwaukee Road yards, now a privately owned shop which repairs and maintains freight cars.  In years past, the west transfer served as an interchange point between the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Milwaukee Road.  Some of the cars we were to set out would go there for cleaning, while others needed maintenance.  When the switch crew in Glendive had put our train together, they put these six cars about 25 cars back in the train.  The engineer stopped the train at the switch to the west transfer track, and I hopped off.  He pulled up, and while he was doing so, I dropped the derail so we could get the cars into the track.

When the train was in position, I made the cut behind the last car going there, which was about the 30th car on the train, and had him pull up past the switch.  I then lined the switch into the west transfer, and protected the end of the train as he shoved the cars into the track.  Once we got them in the clear and past the derail, we stopped, tied them down, and cut off, to put our train back together.  Again my engineer pulled up through the switch, and I lined it for main track movement again.  Once on the main line, I protected the shove to put our train back together.  As I told the engineer he had six more cars to the joint, I got the feeling that he was coming in a little hot.  By the time I told him he had four left, I could tell it was going to be a pretty hard joint, because he had hardly slowed down at all.  Three cars, and he was still moving much faster than coupling speed; two cars and I decided to start walking away from the tracks, just in case; one car, I knew it would be a doozy; half a car...and...SMASH!  They hit, and boy did they hit hard!  As they hit, all the cars seemed to jump and then shuddered, rattled, and squealed for several seconds.  The standing portion of the train was shoved nearly two car lengths, even with the brakes in emergency, and when the noise finally stopped, my ears were ringing.  My first thought was, "I sure hope we are still on the rails!"  I walked back over to the tracks, and took a look down the rail in both directions.  If everything is on the rails, it lines up as you look down the length of the rail.  If not, it is obvious because something, even several cars away, will not be lined up with the rest of the cars.  Everything looked good, so I had the engineer stretch the joint.  As the stress was taken off the cars, they began to creak and groan.  The joint was good, so I laced the hoses and walked to the front.  I wondered to myself how many people in Miles City been woken up by that loud joint!

When I got to the engine, I first asked the engineer what had happened, because I had been giving him proper car counts, so the train should have slowed down appropriately.  I was not upset, because everything was on the rails and there was no reason to be, just curious.  He looked at me and said he had no idea.  He went on to explain that when I had told him he had ten cars to go, he set a minimum reduction on the air brakes.  By the time I told him six more, he realized that the brakes were not grabbing very well, so he set more air.  At four cars, he went to full service, because the brakes still had not seemed to grab, and he also went to dynamic braking on the locomotive.  By then however, it was too late to make a difference, and in the next 200 feet, if the brakes grabbed, it was too late to slow the train down significantly.  The joint had thrown all my paperwork to the floor, over 20 cars away, and he too had wondered if everything was on the rails.  He said the speedometer still showed 12mph when he felt the impact.  Four miles per hour is usually considered a hard joint!  I guess those good brakes he had talked about earlier were on the last 25 cars in the train!

We got underway after the brake pipe pressure recovered, and the rest of the trip to Forsyth was uneventful.  We managed to get about an hour of nap time in at Rosebud, because the dispatcher put us in the siding there to meet a couple trains and wait for our track in Forsyth to open up.  Once in Forsyth, we had four more cars to set out, but they were not together.  The first of them was 24 cars back, and the other three were 34, 35, and 36 cars back, so it took a couple of switch moves to get them out and on the right track.  It was not too complicated, just a little more time consuming.  As we were switching there, both of us were a little gun shy after what had happened in Miles City.  I gave slightly longer car counts, to give the engineer more space to stop, and he used the air brakes quite a bit more liberally than usual when switching. The result was that for almost every joint, he would stop about five feet short, and would then have to start everything moving to close the gap and make the joint.  But, we did not have any more crazy joints!  Once we finished the Forsyth work, we tied up and went to the hotel, where waited for the train to take us home.  We had had a good trip, but because of all the work en route, it ended up earning us some overtime anyway.