Back in Kansas

Believe it or not, the on the job training portion of the locomotive engineer program is already done.  Yesterday, I flew back to Kansas City for the final two weeks of classroom instruction and exams.  Towards the end of my on the job training, I began to focus more on jobs based in Glendive, because it allowed me to be home more and minimize the rent I would have to pay in Forsyth.  I worked on the switch crew during the last two weeks, which always has something going on.  On my first day, we found a note in the depot indicating that our normal switch engines were sitting on the ties a few miles away, at a pipe yard.  Apparently the previous crew had been attempting to deliver some cars there and the rail had rolled over underneath them.  We called up the roundhouse to see if they had anything else we could use, and then we went and retrieved the cars that were still on the rails.  Usually we get stuck with some big road power when the usual switch engines are not available, but this time they had an SD40-2 for us, which is much nicer for switching than a lot of the more modern road locomotives.

The carmen had the switch engines back on the rails by the next day, but the roundhouse still had them, so we were left with a substitute, in this case a GP28.  Our foreman got a little bit ambitious with switching a track, and we ended up dragging about 80 cars out, through the switch at the west end, and out on to the main.  Pulling it all out with one little engine was easy - it was downhill.  Putting it away proved to be a bit more difficult than our foreman had anticipated.  Fortunately, I had thought about that as we were pulling out, so I had sanded the rails a bit already.  When I started pushing all those cars up the hill, it went pretty slowly.  I eventually got the engine up to full throttle, with the aid of more sand, but even with that, we could only go about 0.6 mph.  It takes a while to shove 80 cars lengths at that speed!  Quite a while later, when we had cleared the switches into a couple of other yard tracks, my engineer hopped off and grabbed the engines off a standing coal train, and used those to aid our little switch engine the rest of the way.  Once we had gotten all the cars put away, he put the engines back on the coal train, and for the rest of the day, we switched with smaller, more manageable cuts of cars!

Today was a rather boring day honestly.  We spent the morning going over the same paperwork we did when we first arrived here, back in June.  We did do a simulator run, with some unusual conditions.  I found that the simulator was a lot harder to run this time than it was last time I was here.  I think that is because I have gotten used to being able to feel what the train is doing, and run accordingly.  Obviously, the simulator does not move when we run on it, so there is nothing to feel.  The unusual conditions consisted of losing communication between the head end power and the distributed power, on the rear, an undesired emergency brake application, and a blockage in the train brake pipe.  I have dealt with the first two in reality too, so they were not anything new on the simulator.  The blockage in the brake pipe managed to fix itself with another set and release, so that did not turn into much of an issue either.  We will be doing more unusual conditions for the rest of the week, in the simulator.  We will have our final simulator runs next week, as well as two of our final exams.  On Friday we have our mechanical final exam, which is the only open book test we get.  All of the tests are multiple choice and at least 100 questions, so they will probably take a while even for the well prepared.