Re: RE: My next
maddawg308 said:
I like the sign on the side that says "DO NOT HUMP". Must be some pretty freaky brass ridin in the Soul Train!
several cars at the local RR musuem say that. I assume thats referring to a special type of rail yard, a hump yard. From Wikipedia on Hump yards: These are the largest and most effective classification yards with the largest shunting capacity — often several thousand cars a day. The heart of these yards is the hump: a lead track on a hill (hump) over which the cars are pushed by the engine. Single cars, or some coupled cars in a block, are uncoupled just before or at the crest of the hump and roll by gravity into their destination tracks in the classification bowl (the tracks where the cars are sorted).
The speed of the cars rolling down from the hump into the classification bowl must be regulated because of the different natural speed of the wagons (full or empty, heavy or light freight, number of axles) and the different filling of the tracks (whether there are presently few or many cars on it). As concerns speed regulation there are two types of hump yards: without or with mechanisation by retarders. In the old non-retarder yards braking was usually done in Europe by railroaders who lay skates onto the tracks, or in the USA by riders on the cars. In the modern retarder yards this work is done by mechanized "rail brakes" called retarders. They are operated either pneumatically (e.g. in the USA, France, Belgium, Russia or China) or hydraulically (e.g. in Germany, Italy or the Netherlands).
. Thats cool, it looks "bullet resistant."
