[HN Gopher] Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes [video]
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Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes [video]
Author : zdw
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-10-05 02:55 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The presenter and the video are super-high-quality! This is the
| kind of content I expect to see from PBS or some 90s era
| Discovery channel show. The creator must be professionally
| trained, or just have a natural talent for education.
|
| Bravo!
| watersb wrote:
| Nuclear Waste Transport rail car, nearly operational as of 21
| September 2023:
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/new-railcar-designed-tran...
| jvolkman wrote:
| He's got a new video about rail shapes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nteyw40i9So
| seatac76 wrote:
| Love Brady's work. I bought his book too. While I was hoping for
| a more coffee table type book, it is more dense than that but
| still a delightful read.
|
| Book Title: Engineering in Plain Sight.
| richardjam73 wrote:
| Main ones I see are hoppers and cattle cars. I live quite close
| to a railyard so it is interesting to see all the trains from a
| distance. There is no regular passenger services here so I rarely
| see passenger cars. Most of the freight is coal or grain. Heavy
| things are generally transported by roads since the mines and
| powerstations are not always near the rail line.
| HankB99 wrote:
| I live about 100 yards from the Union Pacific mail east/west
| line out of Chicago and we see a great variety of freight cars,
| but I cannot recall the last time I saw a stock car. I guess
| that's because the Chicago stock yards no longer exist except
| as a neighborhood.
|
| The only passenger cars this like carries are the Metra double-
| deckers (except for the very occasional heritage trail such as
| the Big Boy entourage.) Amtrak uses the BNSF rails a few miles
| from here.
| jvolkman wrote:
| Is this in the US or elsewhere? I don't think livestock travels
| by rail in the US anymore, but autorack cars (that carry
| automobiles) look similar.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/ETTX_905...
| dvh wrote:
| Not every. Draisine is missing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draisine
| eesmith wrote:
| The presenter clarified it was for unpowered cars pulled by a
| locomotive.
|
| A draisine does not fit that description.
| sitkack wrote:
| This railbus is adorable!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rail_bus01.jpg
| twic wrote:
| Don't say that to anyone from Northern England, they had to
| suffer these things for a generation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(British_Rail)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A bit larger and you can use these as legitimate standard
| trains, like this VT 98 from Germany [1]. Either you attach
| them at the rear of a regular train for longer distances and
| then separate it to serve a leg on some rural side track, or
| you attach a passenger car should you face higher demand on a
| day (e.g. popular tourist destinations), or you attach a
| freight car for express service to some industry along the
| tracks [2].
|
| I seriously miss these things, there are _so many_ rural
| railways that got shut down following the privatisation
| frenzy in the 90s, and could really be made to work again
| with a modern variant.
|
| [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baureihe_798_752-
| 2.j...
|
| [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_VT_98
| throwaheyy wrote:
| Strangely no mention at all of EMUs, DMUs or single self-
| propelled rail cars. "Every train has a locomotive" is quite US-
| centric.
| paddy_m wrote:
| I would love to see an in depth study of Switzerland's freight
| rail system. Apparently it works well for quick movements of
| small amounts of freight (single container).
|
| From what I can tell, the much lauded US freight rail system
| only works for slow (30 mph or less average speed over
| distance) high latency shipments in massive quantities (coal,
| and raw minerals). There are frequently delays, which makes US
| freight rail noncompetitive with trucking.
|
| Open to suggestions if anyone knows where I can read a good
| explanation of the Swiss practices that enable their system to
| be low latency.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Part of it is large, methodical investment. Switzerland
| explicitly pays for rail improvements using taxes on heavy
| goods vehicles, and a referendum committed a reduction in
| Alps heavy goods traffic into the Swiss constitution.
| https://www.euki.de/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/09/20180827_CH_M...
| p_l wrote:
| Important pay off it is that us railroads AFAIK have
| optimized for the high latency and humongous trains whereas
| in many other places there are constraints that prevent such
| strategies.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| I was about to point this out, too. This entire video is US-
| centric, which explains the dearth of passenger rail content.
| It completely skips many other types of passenger train. Many
| high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and almost
| _all_ rapid transit carriages are EMUs.
|
| Double-decker cars are significantly more common in continental
| Europe. The TGV regularly runs Duplex[1] carriages on the LGV
| Sud-Est (Paris-Lyon) route, and Swiss Federal Railways has
| IC2000, IR Double Decker, and the LD Double Decker.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_Duplex
| mindslight wrote:
| Please find or make similar videos for other parts of the
| world. As a USian that mostly knew about all the types of
| railcars in this video, that would be awesome.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Many high-speed rail (Japanese Shinkansen, German ICE) and
| almost all rapid transit carriages are EMUs.
|
| Nit pick: The German ICE 1 and 2 series are pulled/pushed by
| a locomotive [1] that's a direct evolution of the BR 120
| locomotive - the world's first electric locomotive to use
| solid-state converters [2].
|
| As a result of that, the trains have different top speeds
| depending on the locomotive being on the front (faster) or
| rear (slower) end [3].
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_1#Triebk%C3%B6pfe_(Baur
| eih...
|
| [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_120
|
| [3]
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_2#Betrieb_bei_Seitenwind
| rob74 wrote:
| The ICE1 being the longer version with locomotives
| ("Triebkopfe", literally "driving heads") at both ends,
| while the ICE2 is only half as long, with only one
| locomotive, and two of them can be coupled - the
| restriction you mentioned only applies to these.
|
| ...but actually the ones to first use this configuration
| were the French with their TGV, which was then copied by
| the Germans and Italians for their respective high-speed
| trains (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV#Allgemein). And
| then the Austrians implemented a "budget version" of a
| high-speed train with their Railjet
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railjet) which uses an
| unmodified Taurus locomotive and a control car which has
| the same design as the locomotive.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > Double-decker cars are significantly more common in
| continental Europe.
|
| And west of Chicago in the US. Amtrak runs double-decker cars
| west of Chicago and in fact Chicago's passenger rail service
| (Metra) is mostly (all?) double-decker.
|
| My understanding is that tunnel clearance in the east is not
| sufficient for the double-decker cars.
|
| I also see containers stacked two high and auto carriers that
| appear to be similar height and these probably also don't
| travel east in the US for the same reason.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Double deck cars do exist on the east but are configured
| differently. West of Chicago the floor is level with the
| door, east the double deck is achieved by having the lower
| floor halfway below.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C3_(railcar)
| klinquist wrote:
| And even the US is coming on board.
|
| Caltrain (commuter train in the SF Bay Area) is actively
| testing a fleet of new EMUs now, scheduled to begin passenger
| service in Sept 2024.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There are also already DMUs and EMUs in service in the United
| States.
|
| Of the legacy carriers, New York's MTA has been usig multiple
| units for the better part of a century. These days, a lot of
| rail services like SMART in Sonoma, DART in Dallas, and
| Sprinter in San Diego to name a few use them as well.
| samtho wrote:
| He is doing a full series on the engineering of railroads and
| mentioned this is just the basics. He did not cover locomotives
| (propulsion, types, differences among passenger, fright, etc)
| in this video and focused solely unpowered rail cars.
| ragebol wrote:
| Had to look those up:
|
| - EMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_multiple_unit -
| DMU https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_multiple_unit
| User23 wrote:
| Reading about how these are generally made of an even number
| of cars reminded me of this[1].
|
| [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd05xx/EWD594.PDF
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(page generated 2023-10-05 23:01 UTC)