ALTOONA, Pa. — Long freights and experimental, long haul trains with distributed power are becoming increasingly common on Class I railroads in the east. On Tuesday morning, that was the case on Norfolk Southern's Pittsburgh line.
Equipped with two mid-train distributed power units, a massive NS 12G train successfully rolled across the railroad's West Slope grade into Altoona, and east toward Harrisburg with 176 cars. The Conway, Pa., to Harrington, Del., general merchandise freight was led by NS EMD SD70ACe No. 1133, a Union Pacific GE AC4400CW and two mid-train DPUs, NS GE ES44AC No. 8056 and CN GE C40-8W No. 2146.
The train is one of the first of its kind in recent history on this route. Local sources familiar with operations say this move is something the railroad has wanted to experiment with in recent months as a way to run longer, bigger trains.
While distributed power is occasionally used on the railroad's Pittsburgh line, high tonnage freights are unusual across West Slope grade, with most trains rarely exceeding 150 cars.
Put two trains together and eliminate one crew is the way I see it.
I've heard of at least two trains in the past month on the Reading line (eastern PA) having DPU's.
PA Dan
I have seen these mid-train helpers twice in the last month coming east out of Conway Yard. The last time was this past Sunday, and the units were an ES40DC & a ES44AC. Both up and running. I've never seen these before on this line and it's interesting. They kind of sneak up on me though, as I'm not usually expecting them.
I do not know where the excitement comes from. The standard merchandise train on Conrail for years has been 135 cars and well over 10,000 tons. This is due to the lenth of conway departure tracks and the limit of '2 doubles from the hump bow.
Conrail (pre 1999) commonly ran 160 car coal train (20,000 tons) from PGH (brownsville ) to the east with mid train helpers (manned back then without any problems. Again this was limited by siding length and loadout facility limitation.
The only difference today is the use of unmanned DP"U units and this doubles the load on the engineer and requires good engineers.
Job cutters, as usual!
Is this practice continuing?
I think it died off, I will be heading to the west slope in a week and a half and will report if I see any trains with DPU's.
Dan