uncoupling?


LoudMusic said:
Also, I would suggest constructing a hump yard breaking system the same way the big guys do. Pinch the wheels. A simple bent piece of thin metal between the rails pushing on the inside of both wheels should do nicely.
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The only draw back to using wire, is that you will scratch off any paint (weathering etc..) that you have on the wheels..

Airslide said:
scord - i do follow except for the term "sleeper". I had to google that one lol. until now i thought a sleeper was a passenger car where passengers can sleep.
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I do apologise, my obvious English slipping in.. I did of course mean ties, I sometimes forget the translation when I'm on a flow & temporarily forget from time to time how much you guys cocked up our language lol... ;)
 
Wait a minute. In the UK, you guys say "sleeper" are ties? Now that is strange mate!

Flats are apartments. Oh bloody hell. ;)
 
Lift, lorry, flat, tram, boot, bollocks, mobile, trainers, jumper ... for it being their language they sure do use the wrong words a lot ;)

Sleepers, shunting, carriage, railway ...

D&J: fun is relative. Building a reliable effective system can be fun, to some. But it can also be taken to far for others :)
 
Motley said:
Wait a minute. In the UK, you guys say "sleeper" are ties? Now that is strange mate!

Flats are apartments. Oh bloody hell. ;)
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Sleepers are indeed ties and also a type of hooped earing.. Ties are what you wear round your kneck with a shirt! And I think you'll find that it's apartments that are actually flats lol.. ;)

LoudMusic said:
Lift, lorry, flat, tram, boot, bollocks, mobile, trainers, jumper ... for it being their language they sure do use the wrong words a lot ;)

Sleepers, shunting, carriage, railway...
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At least we wear our pants under our trousers! Well, apart from Superman of course, with all of his super powers, he still never quite got it right.. lol... :D
 
I'm waiting for one of the Brits to correct Mr Wimberly ... Ok I'll do it myself.

American's speak English. British speak The Queen's English. Clearly not a common language ;)
 
pants under trousers? i thought pants were trousers -


http://youtu.be/-1LVQSEQdK8

At the top of the hump there are 4 Kadee magnets. As the cars are pushed, the couplers open up and as they start the downgrade, the cars will uncouple. on each of the four tracks, at multiple spots, there are small nozzles that blow air up at the car to slow it down. The air comes from a compressor. The operator has a small control panel that allows him to control the train speed, press a button for auto switching of tracks and activate the air.
 
Air Jets are a good idea for retardation, they didn't seem to be slowing those cars down very much though.. However, would you really want a compressor firing up every five-ten mins...
 
Scordicus said:
Air Jets are a good idea for retardation, they didn't seem to be slowing those cars down very much though.. However, would you really want a compressor firing up every five-ten mins...
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Five to ten minutes? :D
If I were to use a system like that, I know how much air that is needed (almost none at all, compare with an airbrush...), so I guess that a 10 liter air tank would last for at least 500 cars....
 
Here are some pictures of a hump yard that used to appear at the Springfield show a few years ago. As the pictures suggest, it was "looked great, ran awful". They ended up rebuilding it as a flat yard.

http://files.myopera.com/John98wbr/albums/661338/dryhill2.jpg

http://files.myopera.com/John98wbr/albums/661338/dryhill1.jpg

If you can tolerate cars screaming down the slope at main-line speeds, maybe a hump yard will satisfy you. For me it would have to look right or I wouldn't want to deal with it. Anyway, does anyone have enough cars each with a known destination to make it worth building and using a hump yard? If you have to stop the train, shuffle paperwork, throw a bunch of turnouts and then shove a car over the top, it's not prototypical. The whole idea is to sort lots of cars fast.
 
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John P said:
Here are some pictures of a hump yard that used to appear at the Springfield show a few years ago. As the pictures suggest, it was "looked great, ran awful". They ended up rebuilding it as a flat yard.

http://files.myopera.com/John98wbr/albums/661338/dryhill2.jpg

http://files.myopera.com/John98wbr/albums/661338/dryhill1.jpg

If you can tolerate cars screaming down the slope at main-line speeds, maybe a hump yard will satisfy you. For me it would have to look right or I wouldn't want to deal with it. Anyway, does anyone have enough cars each with a known destination to make it worth building and using a hump yard? If you have to stop the train, shuffle paperwork, throw a bunch of turnouts and then shove a car over the top, it's not prototypical. The whole idea is to sort lots of cars fast.
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Well I think the other point is to have that work done ahead of time. Slots in the yard are predetermined for next destination before a train arrives to be broken down into the yard. And you know the order of cars coming into the yard before they arrive (before they depart their prior yard, even), so you can plan the switch throws ahead of time as well. There should be a single button push to line all turnouts to a yard track. As the car is free rolling down the hump press the button for its destination. The pusher locomotives can be set to a crawl speed pushing cars over the hump while the operator just punches one button per car to send it where it belongs. The next step would be some kind of identification system on the cars and a way to automatically read that information and throw the turnouts, just like the real guys. Then the human operator just pushes a train over the hump and the cars fall into their destinations.

It certainly takes a large club operation to necessitate a full blown scale hump-yard, but it would be fantastic to watch it operate. I wonder sometimes if the real railroads build models of future projects prior to starting construction. That would be a fantastic job to have ;)
 
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