Engineer Training: Week One

It is hard to believe the first week is nearly over.  It did get a late start though.  Last weekend, I flew from Billings to Kansas City, to attend the classroom portion of the Locomotive Engineer Training Program.  I was supposed to arrive last Sunday, however, due to delays and exceptionally poor customer service of a particular airline, I did not arrive until lunch time on Monday.  Fortunately, the four of us who were delayed had all been in contact with our Road Foreman, in Glendive, and the Training Coordinator, in Overland Park, KS, and we were able to work around the delay.  As it turned out, we mostly missed paperwork.  We went straight to class from the airport, and arrived just in time for lunch!  We spent a little time during lunch getting caught up on the paperwork we had missed, and then by the time the lunch break was over, we were on the same page as the other 12 people, who has all arrived closer to their scheduled times!

This week has consisted primarily of studying air brake systems, in significantly more detail than we ever did in the Conductor program.  Some of it has been a review, but a lot of it has been new information to us.  We have also been studying the basics of train handling, including how to stop and start trains on different types of grades, and different coupler slack situations.  One thing that has been emphasized a lot is to make gradual changes to avoid any violent coupler slack changes.

In our classroom, we have a train, of sorts.  It is designed to help us understand how the air brake systems on locomotives and cars work.  There are a series of audio visual carts, with all the brake equipment normally found on a freight car.  They are coupled together and have air hoses running between them.  One cart has a locomotive air brake system on it, and a control stand.  The whole thing is connected to a source of compressed air, and manipulating the brake levers on the control stand makes the brake equipment move appropriately.  At the end of this train, there is a Fred.  In class, we have used it only a couple times, but some of us have used it more during breaks or during lunch, to try to figure something out that was unclear to us.  It is a neat setup.  Each of the cars also has air pressure gauges connected to different parts of the brake system, so we can actually see where air is going when we do different things with the controls.

One of the features of a Fred is that it can dump the brake pipe air and put the train in emergency, simply by pushing a button on the locomotive, on a device called Mary.  At lunch yesterday, we were using the train setup in the classroom, and when we got done, one of us had the bright idea of dumping the air from the Fred.  Well, we have all heard trains go into emergency lots of times before, because it happens every time cars are uncoupled or locomotives are removed.  What we did not consider, when we pushed the button on the Mary, was just how loud it would be when done indoors!  There is a delay of a few seconds as the signal is sent, via radio, from Mary to Fred, and while Fred processes the signal.  We pushed the button, and nothing happened immediately, so we figured the Fred must not be armed.  Just as we were shrugging it off and about to walk away, the air dumped.  I think we all jumped about four feet in the air when it happened, despite the fact that we had caused it to happen!  We reset the air, recharged the brake system, and sat down to read over some stuff before our teacher got back.  Once everything was reset, our teacher burst in the door, looked around the room for a second, and finally said, "Alright, which of you plugged the train?"  We all just looked at him, with the most innocent looks we could come up with, and said nothing.  He walked back out to finish his lunch, and that was all we ever heard of it.  We laughed a little after he left, because his office is halfway across the building from our classroom, but he had still heard all the noise.  Oops.

Starting on Tuesday, we have been going to a locomotive simulator for about an hour each day.  We are paired up and work together in the simulator to learn the techniques and practice the tasks assigned to us.  If you have ever heard of or used Train Simulator, a game produced by Microsoft about ten years ago, it is actually a lot like that.  Each simulator is in a small room, which has a mock up of a locomotive control stand inside, and a large screen on the wall where the windshield would be.  When we log in to the simulator, the scenario we are supposed to run loads up, and railroad tracks and some basic scenery appears on the screen.  On the control stand there are a few more screens, and the various gauges, lights, and buttons found on a locomotive appear on them.

On Tuesday, we mostly spent the time familiarizing ourselves with the simulator.  We had some basic tasks to perform, such as cutting out the brake valves, and then cutting them back in, and performing a locomotive air brake test.  Once we were done with that, our teacher had told us to use whatever time was left to play around and get a feel for how the thing operated.  Of course, my partner and I wanted to see how fast it would go, since the screen had indicated that the overspeed was set to 500mph.  We got it to 95mph before our time was up!

On Wednesday we got some practice actually moving the simulated train, according to train handling rules.  It was a pretty basic scenario, we just had to accelerate to 30mph and then stop, but we had to  manage our coupler slack and in train forces.  A little graph on one screen helps us to know what the rest of the train is doing and give us an idea of how smooth the ride would actually be.  For both of us, it was a little rough, and I think on our first attempt at a stop, we would have gotten quite a wallop from those cars bunching up behind us!  Of course, in the simulator, you cannot feel any of the movement, or any of the slack run ins, which is a little disorienting.

Today we got practice starting and stopping on hills.  We each took a turn starting and stopping on an uphill grade, and then again on a downhill grade.  I was more concerned about the downhill trip, because I figured uphill would be easy.  I mean, all you have to do is throttle up to speed up and down to slow down.  I was surprised that I had a harder time making a smooth stop going uphill, and my downhill run had much lower in train forces.  Tomorrow we have a more realistic run to do.  It will about 50 miles in length and take an hour to complete, and the terrain varies from very gentle hills to some longer grades.  That will also be our first scored simulator run, which will start to give us an idea of what we do well with and what needs to get better.  I am a little nervous about it, but only as nervous as you can possibly be knowing it is a simulator, and not the real thing.  I have looked over all the paperwork, track charts, and timetable, and I have written down all the speed restrictions and turnout speeds, so as long as I can keep on top of that, I should be able to finish the run, even if some spots are a little uncomfortable for the simulated freight.