What Railroad Defect Detectors Do

hello again rail fans i hope you're having a good summer so far i certainly am it's been a little toasty here in florida but it it always is every summer got a new edition of the fence back there welcome to harman road that was sent to me by nathan jordan he wrote and told me that the crews in his neighborhood were replacing all of the street sign markers and when they were replacing the one on harmon road he asked them if he could have the old one and they said yes he got it packed it up shipped it to me now it's on the fence back there so thank you so much nathan jordan nathan's a fan of the channel and uh much much appreciated all right let's get on to the business now a lot of folks recently have asked me about defect detectors new rail fans with scanners have heard the the talking voice on the radio near them they're all over the country the defect detector spitting out mile posts or axle counts or lengths or other information about the trains that have just passed defect detectors they are an integral part of railroading and have been for decades and they are also an integral part of rail fanning so let's take a look and i'll show you how it's a hot saturday morning in july train m452 is backing into csx's winston yard in lakeland florida he's midway on his daily run from miami to wake ross georgia stopping here to drop some cars and pick up some others this train more than a mile and a half in length today is typical of american freight rail in 2022 that's a mile and a half of rail cars that go largely unseen and unfelt during the trip car inspectors check the train before it leaves the originating terminal but after it gets out on the main line things can go wrong and sometimes do each rail car has two trucks each with two axles and four wheels the axles spinning on roller bearings brakes with multiple moving parts brake hoses that carry compressed air from car to car to operate those brakes draft gear that's the coupler assembly on each end of each car which the entire train depends on the closer you get to the locomotive if any of these parts fail while the train is on its way the result can be anything from a minor train separation all the way up to a catastrophic derailment with loss of life and a hazardous material spill the end of train device monitors air pressure and car motion and will notify the crew by radio if there's a loss of train line air brake pressure or if the train comes apart and these devices have averted many a mainline incident but that is all info after the fact it's important to detect a problem before it becomes a disaster the answer is to check the train at intervals along its journey that's the job of the trained defect detector here at campville florida on the x seaboard airline main to tampa and miami is a typical defect detector these installations normally have several types of sensors infrared scanners to measure axle and wheel hub temperature sensors that watch the wheels as they pass over looking for flat spots and cracks and flaps that will swing down and trip the detector if any dragging equipment crosses over them the bungalow houses the controlling appliances which are connected to a vhf radio it broadcasts in a synthesized voice a report after each train movement csx has recently upgraded its dd radio antennas to these sinclair folded dipole designs these apparently point the signal up and down the track rather than 360 degrees it's the general goal of railroads to have a defect detector every 20 miles on the main line the seaboard airline was one of the first if not the first railroad in the u.s to deploy talking defect detectors devices that announced their test results on the dispatcher phone circuit and later over the radio with a pre-recorded voice the bungalow for the old sal talking dd still stands here at campfill journal boxes were enclosures on train wheel assemblies that held grease that kept the bearings lubricated if the grease melted out the friction bearing would start to heat up and soon you'd have a problem this is an old sal caboose that's been stuffed and mounted next to the seaboard airline main at waldo florida mile post s690 452 engine 5331 enter the thousands of work authority to see a modern defect detector in action we're about 129 miles south of waldo at knights florida on that same seaboard airline main at milepost s 818.9 here we have essentially the same setup that we saw at campvel infrared sensors to check axle and bearing temperature the dragging equipment flaps and the wheel impact load detectors it's early afternoon now and we've got a green northbound signal that m452 train we saw backing in this morning has finished his work at winston and is rolling north toward waycross csx got it clear we got lucky here cause 452 is creeping along at 10 miles an hour through a slow order about a half a mile back there now you can't really see anything happening while it goes over the dd but this angle shows the proximity of the sensors to the train wheels that scanner is reading the temperature of each wheel as it passes above if it detects a hot bearing the dd will immediately transmit a warning on the radio here's what it sounds like when the defect detector catches a problem csx detector 756.8 you have a defect csx detector [Music] 756.8 v3 niners dragging equipment near axle five two niner total axle six seven four this one was a dragon cut lever i caught that in 2017 on a northbound freight at oxford just north of wildwood when m-452 finally clears the dd the appliance inside the bungalow compiles the data and in about 21 seconds makes a radio report csx equipment defect detector file post eight one eight point niner no defects no defects total axle three six eight end of transmission upon hearing this report m452 is clear to keep going this digitally synthesized voice is relatively new on the dd's up until about 2015 most were still pre-recorded human voices here's what nights sounded like in the early 1990s csx knife florida no defect total axel four i know you're wondering and i was too why those flappers are hand numbered here and i don't have the answer up through about mid 20th century seaboard maintained a station here at nights it was on passenger timetables through the 60s but no trains stopped here there was a siding here but it was pulled up around 2000 a propane dealer still had rail service but that went away when the siding did a piece of that track remains in the ground today it even has a derail still protecting this unconnected track a new night sighting was built about a mile north of here in 2013. on the atlantic coastline main between jacksonville and folkston georgia now the csxa line are several defect detectors a double track main each track has a dd and reports as either track one or track two here at dial hill is another typical dd installation train u-728-05 is coming northbound on track one 728 is carrying a u-symbol today as it's either an extra or a re-crew it's normally l728 a local turn from jack's moncrief to waycross and back it's a big one today and just like every freight train everywhere the crew in the cab really has no idea if there are any problems developing back there the dds are a line side checkpoint to help alleviate the uncertainty defect detector will check both freight and passenger trains and even some on track equipment this dd at dial hill has one of the first synthesized voices csx detector mile post six one niner point five track main one no defects repeat no defects total axles one of my favorite defect detector voices was a guy i nicknamed the old man he sounds like that guy you worked for who was respected throughout the company as the absolute authority here he is on the dd at winter haven florida csx equipment defect detector mile post 8 2 9.3 no defects total axle five six speed eight one length of train one one six seven end of transmission the old man is gone now or at least his voice is may he rest in peace csx has bumped up the defect detector state of the art with an all-new train checking system in early 2020 they deployed their first train inspection portal at race pond georgia this installation is 21 miles southeast of rice yard and waycross built by duo's technology it has more than 20 high-speed machine vision cameras and high-intensity lighting the cameras image the train while it passes through at speed the system then pieces all the images together to make a single image of each freight car that image is then scanned by inspection software that looks for irregularities train b63804 is returning empty ethanol tanks from tampa florida to bentonville illinois the engineer doesn't have to slow down or make any changes as he enters the portal it all happens at track speed if any trouble is found an alarm goes off and the proper people are notified and this all happens in just a few seconds [Applause] at 5700 feet running at what looks like about 50 miles an hour it takes b638 one minute and nine seconds to pass through the inspection portal did you notice on that tank train that there were two hopper cars one on each end of it one in between the locomotives and then one on the bottom those are called buffer cars they're required by the rules to put some space in between hazmat cars in this case ethanol tanks and the locomotives now there's one on the top obviously to space out the cars between the the head and engines and one on the bottom for when the train is in terminal and a locomotive a terminal locomotive hooks on and either shoves it into tracks or pulls it out so you've got uh those buffer cars that's what those are and that's why they're there those they're often hopper cars they are often partially filled with sand to give them some heft so that they can run they're not completely empty so they can run either on the top of the train or on the bottom end and that's what buffer cars are all about please hit the like button if you like this video subscribe to the channel if you haven't already done that please write your comments in the comments section down below i read them all i try to reply to as many as i possibly can so let's make plans to meet up again somewhere out there on the high iron and until we do this is danny harmon out

Channel: Distant Signal

Views: 494,178

Keywords: Railroad, Rail, railfans, Defect Detectors, Florida, CSX, Danny Harmon, Knights, Dyal Hill, Train Inspection portal, Train wreck, Train derailment, derailment

Id: lzpcWNcJr0U

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022