Quote, CG6468~
"Any locomotive, steam or diesel-electric, passenger or freight, cannot get a train moving unless there is space between the knuckle couplers. With no spacing, it would be like immediately moving the entire weight of the train as a single unit; the spacing allows for moving only one car at a time. The knuckle couplers are designed for this spacing. That's why when a train begins moving we hear the noise of each car's slack in the knuckle couplers being taken up by the moving cars that precede it."
When I worked as a "carknocker" in the old PRR roundhouse in Buffalo switching cars around the yard to and from the roundhouse and the various sheds was a regular daily task. Everyone was checked out on the GE diesel switcher and was trained as a brakeman. If it was your car that needed moved it was you that moved it (and maybe a dozen others in the course of getting it where it needed to be).
That old switcher was a twin engine model but only one engine worked, the other having been cannibalized for parts to maintain the first. The brakes were sketchy.
Most of the rolling stock being worked on usually had no brakes most of the time being they were in various states of repair or remanufacture. Slack action was a very dangerous thing for the unaware. New guys in training usually got right on board with the learning curve but now and then we had an accident or two with those who proved a wee tad slower on the uptake. Once those guys caught a brake lever in the ear or got knocked on their backsides in the slush while attempting to chock the wheels on a "stopped" car they learned about slack action the hard way.
The switcher and one car was no problem. The switcher and a string of half a dozen cars could see that last car creep several feet before it was actually stationary and safe to chock the wheels of with a hunk of 2x4.
I left that job after three years there. Suddenly it seemed several of the guys got the bright idea that we should go union, UAW. The whole sordid affair dragged on for more than a year and it got ugly. Fist fights, broken windshields, etc. When the opportunity came up I took another welding job and bailed. The new job was welding cement mixer truck drums, the big part on the back that turns and mixes the cement as the truck is on its way. Good job with more pay and better hours. Eight months into that we had an all hands meeting, going out of business.
Back at the rail yard I recalled seeing a map of North America on the office wall. There was a little red dot wherever there was a car shop (rail road repair or manufacture facility). Dozens all over the U.S., several across Canada and only two dots in Mexico. That map predated NAFTA. In the meantime it seems our mustachioed friends south of the border had been quite busy indeed. During the meeting I learned that our parent company based in Dallas was mainly involved in railcar manufacture and that since NAFTA went through there were now more than forty car shops down in old Meh-hee-co. As the story went the company had manufactured xxx thousand cars the last year before Nafta, xx thousand the next year, x thousand the next and most of those now being repairs as opposed to new builds and there went my job. Our mustachioed friends south of the border will work for forty bucks a week. How the
do we compete with that??? How the
was NAFTA "such a good thing for America"???
Gee
thanks, Willie!