Train of the Week

I'm in a little bit of a homesick mode so I will spend some time writing about a station I've known quite well and can't wait to go back to one of these sunny days. Though not that there isn't any information here which one cannot easily find elsewhere on the internet. Tracing back to the beginning, the Union Station as we know it today is actually the third Union Station the City of Toronto has seen. The first Union Station was built in 1858 in a location west of the current one by Grand Trunk , Northern , and Great Western Railway (and in those days, the North meant Lake Simcoe, and the West meant London and Windsor). Front Street was literally on the water front until the early 1900s. Union Station viewed from Lake Ontario Toronto soon had outgrown her original Union Station and a second Union Station replaced the original one at the same spot in 1873. It had a very British looking train shed and housed 3 tracks. With the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Rail...

I feel like writing about a little 6-axle Anglo French electric locomotive this week. By little I really only mean in physical dimensions, however, this locomotive is more powerful than any diesel in service in North America right now. She is used in transporting goods (or in freight train service I should say) domestically in Great Britain and through the Channel Tunnel between Great Britain and Europe. This locomotive is classified as the Class 92 in Britain and CC 92000 in France by the SNCF. The Class 92 is quite a modern looking locomotive The locomotive is jointly developed by Swiss company ABB and Britain's own Brush Traction. Since the Class 92 predates the High Speed 1 and has been built between 1993 and 1996, they have to have both a pantograph and the ability to draw current from the third rail DC system in the South of England. Due to the difference in electrical supply system, the maximum power developed by this locomotive differ. On top...

While passenger rail continue devolving in Canada, the world moves on without the parts that don't look forward. I hold on to the hope that even for just 5 seconds a week, this blog provides some catching up to those of us who are not so ignorant but unfortunately happen to live in the passenger grave yards of the world. Quite a nice looking piece of equipment really This week I'll write about a fairly recent addition to the express intercity fleet of the Taiwan Railway Administration, Class TEMU2000 built by Nippon Sharyo. The history of Japanese import multiple units in the express fleet of the TRA only started not long ago with the TEMU1000 tilting train used in the Taroko Express service. Like the TEMU1000, the TEMU2000 is also a tilting train. However, rather than a more complex hydraulic tilting system, the TEMU2000 utilizes a simpler pneumatic system but does not tilt as much. The TEMU2000 also has a higher top speed, 87 mph in service and 93 mph in test, maki...

Hell I'm late again... but anyway. History was made on the 6th of Feburary, 2014, as Amtrak 600, as the first ACS-64 rolled down the red carpet at Washington DC Union Station on Train 171 to head north with 9 cars. This began a new era on the North East Corridor of modern European high horsepower locomotives. Soon, and hopefully soon enough, all the good old Swedish workhorses ( AEM-7 s) and couldn't-really-work HHP-8 s would be replaced by these sensible but powerful 8,660 hp German Engineered speed machines. I'd like to redirect you to Amtrak's official blog and to some video footages gathered by railfans along the NEC of the inaugural run of the AMTK 600, Train 171. JOE BIDEN WELCOMES 1ST CITIES SPRINTER LOCOMOTIVE

Last week, we've identified the Janney coupler and briefly looked at its elegant design. This week, let's, again, very briefly, look at the different types of Janney coupler that are widely used today. I will only talk about the head of the coupler, and ignore anything that the general public may need to trespass onto railroad property and get in a unsafe situation in order to have a good look at. As far as coupler heads are concerned, there are 3 types in used today. Type E, F, and H. Types E and F are used on freight, and H used on passenger equipment. Since the withdrawal of passenger service in North America by private railroads, the Type H standard is no longer maintained by the Association of American Railroads, a trade group formed of major freight railroads, but is under the control of the APTA, the American Public Transportation Association. Now let me introduce another term, slack. Slack is an allowed gap between two coupled up couplers. In other words, when most ...

What makes most trains, trains, is the fact that locomotives and cars are interconnected by some mechanism (of course they no longer had to be since the introduction of the rail diesel car) that allow them to move along the railroad tracks simultaneously. Before I go further, I wish to introduce, very briefly, buff and draft forces. Two cars are in buff when they push against and are in draft when they pull against each other. A little bit on history: at the very beginning, this mechanism that connects cars together are made up of separate components that deal with buff and draft forces individually. The link and hook take care of draft forces, and buffers (they look like pancakes sticking out the ends of trains as seen in Thomas the Tank Engine) deal with buff forces. Although this system works well once the coupling is complete, which is why it is still in use in many parts of the world, there are many disadvantages to this primitive coupling system that make it unacceptable ...

This week I'll write about another electric multiple unit designed over half a century ago and is still going strong. The Series 103 is a workhorse of the Japanese suburban railroad fleet having carried millions and possibly billions or more passengers over the years. Over 3 447 cars of many variants in the Series 103 have been built since 1963 and more than 300 still remain in service today. Like many other rail vehicles in Japan, production of the Series 103 was taken part in by a number of manufactures and the last of this series of EMU was not built until 1984. A select number of sets were also refurbished between 1996 and 2005. Every axle of the Series 103 was powered by a 148 hp DC traction motor and the entire car body is constructed of ordinary carbon steel. This gives the Series 103 a top speed of 62 mph. To help stopping while help reducing brake shoe wear, electro-pnumatic brake is accompanied by dynamic brake. Like the mechanical variants of this EMU, th...