BNSF Ding-a-Ling
Mar. 27th, 2022 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeI wrote a few days ago about how BNSF sent an (apparently) freshly-painted locomotive 502 out to serve as the power for the "little BN" job that serves the Fernley area. Crews often park this locomotive across the street from our house while a contractor shuttles the crews back and forth to Sparks Yard, rather than taking it back to Sparks. This is usually okay, but last night things went wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, but very annoyingly wrong.
About 10:40 PM last night, 502 started ringing its main bell. This is not in and of itself unusual. The locomotive is equipped with an automatic restart gear that starts the engine when it detects that it needs to do so to keep it warm enough. This saves fuel because it doesn't have to idle all the time. Locomotives generally use plain water as coolant, not anti-freeze, and thus are susceptible to freezing.
What usually happens when the engine is about to restart is that the main bell starts to ring, then a secondary bell that sounds more like an old ringing telephone sounds, then the engine restarts and the bells stop ringing. The engine then idles until it thinks that is is warm enough, and it shuts back down again. Last night, instead of restarting, the engine made the sounds that suggested it was about to restart but failed to do so, and the main bell kept ringing.
The main bell on the locomotive rang all night long. It never stopped. Every now and then the secondary bell sounded and the engine attempted another restart, but nothing happened, and the bell kept ringing.
After an hour of putting up with the bell, Lisa called BNSF's 24-hour alert line, as it's their locomotive. BNSF told her to call Union Pacific, as the locomotive is sitting on tracks owned by Union Pacific and is apparently operated by crews contracted from UP. They asked her for the cross-street where this was happening, which is very easy: the corner of Front and Center Streets. The UP agent told Lisa that they would send someone right out. They never did.
Around midnight, a Lyon County Sheriff car turned up. The deputy examined the locomotive for around twenty minutes, then went away. Now, the Sheriff's department is supposed to have the emergency contact information for the railroad. They might even have contacted them, but nobody came to fix it.
The grey, bulbous object in the center of this photo is the locomotive bell. It was very loud when I ventured out to photograph it. It is obviously designed to keep things from fouling the bell, but that also means that in cases like this, we couldn't just stuff a board or something into it to muffle the clanger.
As of 9:30 AM Sunday, nearly twelve hours since it started ringing, the locomotive's bell was still clanging away. Lisa did not sleep very well at all last night. At this point, we expect it will ring either until the locomotive's batteries die (which might take a long time; locomotives have big batteries) or the little BN crew shows up. We can only hope that they will be out today, as they typically work a Sunday-Thursday schedule these days.
About 10:40 PM last night, 502 started ringing its main bell. This is not in and of itself unusual. The locomotive is equipped with an automatic restart gear that starts the engine when it detects that it needs to do so to keep it warm enough. This saves fuel because it doesn't have to idle all the time. Locomotives generally use plain water as coolant, not anti-freeze, and thus are susceptible to freezing.
What usually happens when the engine is about to restart is that the main bell starts to ring, then a secondary bell that sounds more like an old ringing telephone sounds, then the engine restarts and the bells stop ringing. The engine then idles until it thinks that is is warm enough, and it shuts back down again. Last night, instead of restarting, the engine made the sounds that suggested it was about to restart but failed to do so, and the main bell kept ringing.
The main bell on the locomotive rang all night long. It never stopped. Every now and then the secondary bell sounded and the engine attempted another restart, but nothing happened, and the bell kept ringing.
After an hour of putting up with the bell, Lisa called BNSF's 24-hour alert line, as it's their locomotive. BNSF told her to call Union Pacific, as the locomotive is sitting on tracks owned by Union Pacific and is apparently operated by crews contracted from UP. They asked her for the cross-street where this was happening, which is very easy: the corner of Front and Center Streets. The UP agent told Lisa that they would send someone right out. They never did.
Around midnight, a Lyon County Sheriff car turned up. The deputy examined the locomotive for around twenty minutes, then went away. Now, the Sheriff's department is supposed to have the emergency contact information for the railroad. They might even have contacted them, but nobody came to fix it.
The grey, bulbous object in the center of this photo is the locomotive bell. It was very loud when I ventured out to photograph it. It is obviously designed to keep things from fouling the bell, but that also means that in cases like this, we couldn't just stuff a board or something into it to muffle the clanger.
As of 9:30 AM Sunday, nearly twelve hours since it started ringing, the locomotive's bell was still clanging away. Lisa did not sleep very well at all last night. At this point, we expect it will ring either until the locomotive's batteries die (which might take a long time; locomotives have big batteries) or the little BN crew shows up. We can only hope that they will be out today, as they typically work a Sunday-Thursday schedule these days.
no subject
Date: 2022-03-28 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-28 01:36 am (UTC)TLDR, I feel your pain.