At the end of last week, I was called to go to Forsyth again, on an empty coal train. When I got to work, I met up with my engineer, and we got on the train. The utility had already put the power on it, so all we had to do was get on the train, untie it, and leave. As an empty coal train, it had no work to do en route, and there was only one or two trains coming at us from Forsyth, so it looked like it would be a pretty easy and quick trip. Of course, nothing is definite until it happens on the railroad, but it looked good for us.
The trip started out alright. We got a warrant to West Colgate, which seems to be the typical way to start the day. Shortly after receiving the warrant, the dispatcher changed his mind and asked us to go in the siding at Colgate instead. As we were headed towards Colgate, the engineer noticed that the brake cylinder still had one pound of air in it, and even though everything was supposed to be fully released, that one pound would not go away. Once we got in the siding at Colgate and cleared our track warrant, he decided to notify BNSF mechanical, in Fort Worth, just so they would know about it and it could be checked out next time the locomotive was at a shop. One pound was not a serious problem. It is not enough pressure to actually drag the brake shoes, and the engineer had verified that they were released and not touching the wheel.
As we waited in Colgate, two trains went by us to Glendive. After those two, we only had one more train to meet, and it was still over 100 miles away. When mechanical finally answered the radio, the engineer explained what was going on. Their first reaction was to tell us that the second engine should never have left the shop. That was reassuring! Then they suggested we check the hoses between engines and make sure none of them got crossed over each other and connected to the wrong one. That does not happen much, but if the engines were put together in a hurry, it could have happened, and it would make the independent brakes do funny things. The hoses were connected properly though, so that was not the problem. The engineer relayed that to the mechanical, and his next suggestion was to cycle the air brake and computer control circuit breakers. We had to tie the train down first though, because doing so would reset the computer and the air brake system, which would leave the brake system in question for several minutes. As I walked back to tie down the train, I double checked the hoses between engines, which were still put together right. When I got back to the cab, we turned the breakers off. The computer monitors stayed lit but all the information on them was cleared off. After several minutes we turned the breakers back on, and the computers started back up and the air brake system cycled through its start up procedures.
Once the air brakes and computer had been reset and everything seemed to be back to normal, we tried releasing the brakes to see if the one pound problem had been fixed. It had not. The monitor still showed one pound of air in the brake cylinder. Additionally, we noticed that the air flow was not dropping below about 40, and was flashing back and forth between 40 and zero. The air flow meter is used to help determine what the brakes are doing, and measures how quickly air is flowing through the brake pipe. When nothing is going on, it should be at or near zero. When the brakes are released, it typically goes up as air is pumped back into the brake pipe, but once the brake pipe pressure has stabilized, the flow should go back to zero. We also noticed another new problem. When the independent brake was applied, the pressure was only about 45 pounds in the brake cylinder, when it should have been at 72 pounds. We relayed all this information to mechanical in Fort Worth. We were instructed to cycle the breakers several more times, although the results were the same every time. Finally after several tries at correcting the problems, with no success, mechanical decided we needed someone with mechanical knowledge to come take a look at the locomotive. The contacted the Glendive roundhouse and assured us someone would be there shortly.
By the time the roundhouse had been contacted, we had been sitting in Colgate for nearly three hours, trying to troubleshoot the brake problems. Two trains were waiting behind us, and we suggested to the dispatcher that they be allowed to go around us, on the main track, since we were likely to be there a while longer. It was just a few minutes before the shift change at the roundhouse, so we knew it would be a little while before anyone got there. They would wait until the new shift started, and before they came out to us, they would have to have their meetings and conference calls and job safety brief, so it would probably be close to an hour before anyone even left the roundhouse.
When the mechanical personnel arrived from the roundhouse, they put blue flags on the train, so that they could do any work they needed to on it. They then came up to the cab and asked us a little about what we had done with mechanical on the radio, so we told them what we had done and what had happened as a result. They tried a few different things and tried cycling a few different breakers, but the results were the same. Then they got into the maintenance options on the computer, which allowed them to run diagnostics and tests on the locomotive, which we did not have access to. After some time of diagnostics and tests, as well as walking around the engine and inspecting it again, they determined that the locomotive had to go back to Glendive for repairs. It had failed some of the tests they ran, and could not be operated on the road. We had to use the second engine to tow bring it back to town. We explained what needed to be done to the dispatcher, got a track warrant, and then cut off the train and headed back to Glendive. The roundhouse guys had already left, and so the roundhouse knew we were coming and would need a pair of engines to replace the ones we were bringing back to them.
When we got to town, we contacted the dispatcher again and got some new track bulletins and talked about the possibility of dog catching us. We were more than halfway through our allowed work time, and we were back in Glendive, so making it to Forsyth just did not seem likely. We could still have made it if we had a straight shot, but even then it would have been close! Once I was done talking with the dispatcher, we got on our new engines, which were ready by then, and headed back out to Colgate. Once in Colgate, we had to relink the distributed power, on the rear, and then we put the engines on the head end of the train. We let the dispatcher know when we were ready to go, and he took us to Terry. We finally pulled out of Colgate, headed west, about seven and a half hours after we had gone on duty. It is only about that many miles from Glendive! As we left Colgate, the dispatcher told us they had decided to dog catch us, and that crew would be on duty at 0415, in Glendive.
When we got to Colgate, the train we were meeting, which had been in Forsyth when we had gotten to Colgate, was not quite there yet. We stopped short of the crossings in town, and figured we would pull in between the siding switches when they got there. We ended up having almost an hour to kill there while we waited. When they did finally arrive, the dog catch crew was also nearly there. We began to pull forward, the DP would not load, and the engineer got an alarm message on his monitor, from the DP. The message only indicated that there was an alarm, and said nothing about what it was. The engineer on the train we were meeting offered to take a look at it, and when he called us on the radio from our DP, we could hear bells and alarms in the background. He was unable to make the bells go away, and the dog catch crew had arrived there in Terry and decided to take a look at it. They spent several minutes on the DP, and we rang up mechanical again. The dog catch engineer tried troubleshooting the DP for several minutes before coming up to the front. When they go to the front, we got off and got in the van to Forsyth. I do not know how that turned out, because by then I was tired and just wanted to get to Forsyth so I could sleep. The sun was starting to rise, so I had been at work all night and only gone 40 miles! By the time we tied up in Forsyth, we were only about 20 minutes short of our 12-hour work limit.
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