East Side Snarl

Railed: It’s the most annoying traffic jam in Portland. (Whitney McPhie and Sophia Mick)

I thought getting to South Waterfront was the most fouled up road mess in Portland. Seems I was wrong (unbelievable, I know). Willamette Week tells us that the eastside has a real problem that makes my complaints about South Waterfront sound like entitled white boy whining:

It’s the Most Annoying Traffic Jam in Portland. Here’s How to Fix It by Garrett Andrews

Long trains moving extremely slowly equal maddening waits for drivers on the Central Eastside.

Problem is the railroad cuts the eastside in two and there are only a few place to cross it that are not grade level crossings, which means at rush hour those few crossings are going to be jammed as well.

Here's some more pics from the story:

The railroad crossings at Southeast 11th and 12th avenues. (Brian Burk)

A Union Pacific train passes through the Central Eastside. (Brian Burk)

Portland Railroads

The portion of eastside of Portland near the Willamette River is full of railroad tracks. It's hard to get a clear view of the situation. If you zoom out you see orange lines running from top to bottom. 

Union Pacific Albina Yard Portland
(black blotch on previous map)

Zoom in to see how many tracks and you can only see five percent of the line.

Tandem Steam Locomotives

Modified Hall No. 6990 'Witherslack Hall' behind Saint No. 2999 'Lady of Legend'

GWR 6959 Class 6990 Witherslack Hall was built in 1948.

GWR 2900 Class 2999 Lady of Legend was built in 2019 using a design from 1902.

Identified by Danny Bailey.

Bali Sea Ferry Rail by Ferrosur

MV Bali Sea

Naval Nostalgia:

The MV Bali Sea was a rare rail ferry that operated between Coatzacoalcos, Mexico and Mobile, Alabama, carrying up to 115 fully loaded railcars across the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of crossing land borders, trains from Mexico’s Ferrosur line were rolled directly onto the ship using a linkspan ramp system supported by two vertical towers. These towers allowed for precise height adjustments to match the ferry deck with the shore tracks, ensuring smooth loading regardless of sea level changes.

Originally launched in 1981 as a heavy-lift ship, she was converted into a rail ferry in 2000 to serve the CG Railway route. The Bali Sea offered a 900-mile maritime shortcut for rail cargo, cutting transit time and avoiding congestion at U.S.–Mexico border crossings. After two decades of service, she was retired in 2021 and replaced by larger, faster ferries, but her role in connecting two nations with seamless train-to-sea transport remains a landmark in intermodal logistics.

Ferry Dock in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico

Ferry Route from Coatzacoalcos, Mexico to Mobile, Alabama

Ferry Dock Mobile Alabama

 

Train to Toledo

We were talking about the train wreck in Toledo, Oregon, at lunch today and Jack related this little tale.

One fine spring day, about a zillion years ago, when he was a student at Oregon State University in Corvallis, he and about a hundred other kids hopped the train to Toledo. It rolled through town going only a couple of miles per hour, so it was easy to grab hold and climb aboard.

The train consisted of open top hopper cars filled with wood chips. Jack had brought a quart of beer. Sitting on top of the world, riding on a cloud of wood chips through the forest primeval, he drank it. Now nature calls, so he climbs down the ladder at the end of the car and hanging on with one arm, relieves himself. Unfortunately, at just this moment the train went by somebody's home where there was a big family picnic going on. Oops.

Eventually the train got to Toledo and the kids got off and roamed around town for a while. Later on it's time to catch the train back to Corvallis. Now it's dark and the hoppers are empty so they are sitting on cold steel, freezing their asses off. Far as we know, nobody died.

Toledo Locomotive Derailment

Back on the Rail [Toledo Derailment Update]
7idea Productions

This happened this week not too very far from here- 80 miles as the crow flies. Here's a couple more videos about this incident:

• Derailed on a Trestle! 12 minutes. Mostly background information.
• Trestle Derailment Update 2 minutes
• Timelapse: Crews work to free 3 locomotives stranded on Oregon trestle 4 minutes Building the temporary bridge

Railroad Line from Toledo, Oregon, to Corvallis
This line runs over the coast range. Toledo is at the left end of the yellow-green line, just east of Newport. The word Corvallis is partially covered by that same line. You can read the last part of the name: -allis. I-5 is near the right hand side of the image.

I don't think I've ever encountered slugs before, at least not the railroad kind. Seems they have been around for awhile. Trains tells us that they got their start in the early 20th century at a copper mine in Montana.

Google Map

Reefers

They Tried to Kill Swift’s Fridge Car — and Created a Monster Instead
Ewan Hargreaves

Swift and Armour, boy, those names are a blast from the past. I haven't come across them in a coon's age, but evidently they are still in business. Swift was purchased by Brazilian company JBS in 2007 and continues to operate. Armour has become Smithfield Foods.

Reefer Rail Car

I vaguely remember having a book about trains when I was a kid. It had pictures of various kinds of railroad cars, like boxcars and reefers, and they were loading ice into the reefer. I'm old, but I don't think I'm that old. Turns out the last ice cooled reefers were built in 1957, and the first mechanical refrigerated railcars were built in 1958.

Icing Reefers

Google gave me some numbers about railroads in North America. 

There are:

• 28,000 locomotives
• 1.6 million freight railroad cars, including:
• 570,000 covered hoppers
• 439,000 tank cars
• 208,000 flat cars
• 195,000 gondolas
• 104,000 box cars.

However, there are only 8,000 to 10,000 reefers.

Mechanical refrigeration (Thermo King) was adapted to long haul trucks in the late 1930's, just in time for WW2.

1965 DIVCO Milk Truck

Remember these old milk trucks? I got a look at one once. They had a weird refrigeration system. They had big blocks (tanks?) lining the freight compartment. These blocks were hooked up at night, chilled all night long, and then kept the truck cool all the following day. DIVCO stands for Detroit Industrial Vehicle COmpany.

Battery Operated Trains

Why does London have a "ghost bus"?
Chris Spargo

The video is mostly about absurd English rules for trains, but he does mention battery operated commuter trains that are recharged when they stop.

Loads of ways to get from here to there

More about the battery powered train:

GWR's New Battery Powered Train
Jago Hazzard

Blondihacks

Let's Build a Locomotive! Pennsylvania A3 Switcher, Part 1
Blondihacks

Jack recommended Blondihacks to my attention a couple of months ago and I finally got around to looking her up. I picked this video because I posted about a live steam model train not too long ago. In this one she spends a lot of time laying out the ground work, including sourcing materials, which turns out to be a bigger problem than I imagined. Very entertaining, if you like obscure technical info.

Industrial Complexity

Rail tracks at the Saint Jean train station in Bordeaux on April 3, 2018. (Photo by GEORGES GOBET / AFP)

The photo shows just a tiny portion of enormous complex.

Saint Jean Train Station Bordeaux

There is even a roundhouse.

Roundhouse at Saint Jean Train Station

I can't imagine how much freight must have gone through here in order to pay for the enormous investment that someone had to make to build this place.

House of Guinness - Netflix Series

House of Guinness | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

It's 1868 in Dublin Ireland and Guinness is a thriving operation brewing zillions of gallons of beer, putting it in barrels and shipping it all over Ireland and England. The old man dies and his kids have to pick up the slack. Only one of them has the will and ability to do so, the others are variations of flaky rich kids. Most of the show is about the contortions they go through to maintain their façade of 'respectability' in Victorian high society. Thinking about this for a bit, I realized they were just playing the Victorian version of political correctness. Now, thanks to the internet, everyone can play. Live by celebrity, die by celebrity.

The show has all the regular drama you might expect from a Netflix show about rich Victorians along with some fabulous sets. Talk about the divide between the rich and the poor, the Victorians had it in spades. It also has some bits of history and if you look a little deeper, trains.

Ireland has just endured a famine, and there are hard feelings about that.

Guinness Trademark

The Trinity College harp, also known as "Brian Boru's harp", is a medieval musical instrument on display in the long room at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. It is an early Irish harp or wire-strung cláirseach. It is dated to the 14th or 15th century and, along with the Queen Mary Harp and the Lamont Harp, is the oldest of three surviving medieval harps from the region. The harp was used as a model for the coat of arms of Ireland and for the trade-mark of Guinness stout. - Wikipedia

Brian Boru (c. 941 – 1014) was the High King of Ireland from 1002 to 1014. - Wikipedia

The Train within a Train & the Railway Built for Beer - Guinness Brewery Railways
Train of Thought

Somewhere around the late 19th century the brewery was expanded to 50 acres and a narrow gauge railway was laid down to serve the plant.

Guinness Brewery, Dublin. William Spence
Model Trains & Planes Channel Steam Trains too

The business about having a carriage that allowed the narrow-gauge engine to run on standard width tracks might be unique. Someone thought it was worth building a live steam model.

Train hits truck with wind mill blade

Train hits truck with wind mill blade
Dave Hughes Farm

Seems like videos like this pop up on a regular basis and I got to wondering just how often this happens, so I asked Mr. Google and he says nine per week! That's near 500 per year! You've got figure that every time there is one of these collisions it's gotta cost a million dollars, and that's if nobody gets hurt. Besides the immediate damage, there are the delays, the disrupted schedules, the investigation, the penalties, and there is a good chance there will be litigation, even if it's just the insurance companies arguing about who will pay.

On the other hand there are three million trucks in the USA. Figure they're driving 50,000 miles a year and each mile costs at least a dollar, that's $150 billion dollars. Compare to that $500 million is just noise, especially when the true cost of trucking is closer to a trillion dollars.

Still, you'd think that even a measly $500 million bucks would bestir someone in trucking or insurance to try and put a stop to these collisions, or least reduce the frequency. Actually, industry ought to get their act together cause if they don't, the federal government is liable to step in, and then nobody will be happy.

All of which reminded me of this tune:

Men Without Hats - The Safety Dance
Men Without Hats

Why do I persist in thinking this is a David Bowie tune? Does it sound like him, maybe? 

There's also a cool mashup of this tune with a bunch of different dancing people. The voice is not the same though.

Red Bull is out of Control

Red Bull e seus atletas [Red Bull and its athletes]
BMX 08

How Russia Plans to Rule Eurasia by River

How Russia Plans to Rule Eurasia by River
CaspianReportThere is an ad from 1:30 to 2:45

Video via Building Eurasia’s New Fortress by Sean Ring. Introduction:

Alfred Thayer Mahan & Halford Mackinder

For over a century, two dead advisors have shaped the way great powers view the world.

On one side, we have Alfred Thayer Mahan—the American naval officer who believed sea power determined global supremacy. According to Mahan, controlling the oceans means controlling trade. If you control trade, you control wealth. If you control wealth… well, you get the picture.

On the other side is Halford Mackinder, the British geographer who argued the exact opposite. Forget the seas, he said. Whoever controls the “World Island”—Eurasia—controls the world. Railways, rivers, pipelines, and land empires are what count. Not frigates and aircraft carriers.

Mahan and Mackinder are no longer with us, but their ideas continue to influence the world today.

And we’re watching it unfold.

Wikipedia articles:

• Alfred Thayer Mahan
• Halford Mackinder

Cock O' The North

The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) Class P2 locomotive, No. 2001, Cock o' The North, on the turntable at King's Cross Station, London, 1st June 1934. The new engine has just arrived from the LNER works in Doncaster. Image colourized by David P. Williams. (Photo by Douglas Miller/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Just looking around the industrial parts of town, I was overwhelmed by the amount of steel that goes into these machines, structures, raillines, tanks and towers, and that's just one town. Every town in the industrialized world is built on a zillion tons of the stuff.

U. S. Steel Production vs. Imports

U. S. Steel Production peaked in the 1970s. Since then it has fallen by half. 

So why did this happen? Why did the U.S. go from a steelmaking powerhouse to an also-ran? As usual, there are a bunch of competing explanations — import competition, bad management choices by steel companies, and unions raising wages to uncompetitive levels. But while these were factors, the biggest reason the U.S. steel industry went into terminal decline was that we stopped building things that used lots of steel. - Noahpinion

Global Steel Production

U. S. and Russia steel production are about equal.

Jigsaw puzzle here.

Italian Commuter Train

ALn 668 M003 overhauled waiting at Germagnano station. (Photo J. Galfré, January 18, 2021)

Germagnano is a town in Italy about 16 miles northwest of Turin. It is on the Turin-Ceres railway line.

The ALn 668 (Automotrice Leggera a nafta, Light Diesel motor car) series is a family of diesel railcars built by Fiat Ferroviaria between the 1950s and the 1980s. The trains were built for the Italian public railway company Ferrovie dello Stato (FS), now Trenitalia as well as many Italian private railway operators. - Wikipedia

Royal Scot Locomotive

Painting of LMS Royal Scot 6161 "King's Own" by Murray Secretan

In service from 1930 to 1963. King's Own Royal Regiment Museum Lancaster has a page about this loco, as does Wikipedia.

3 cylinder compound locomotive steam engine
This is only image I could find of a three cylinder engine. Sad, very sad.

In my mind, steam locomotives have two cylinders, one on either side of the front of the engine. The piston in each cylinder drives the wheels on that side through a connecting rod. Turns out that some locos have three and even four cylinders. The Royal Scot has three as shown in the drawing above. This means that the straight axle between the second pair of driver wheels has been replaced with a crankshaft. The center cylinder is slightly elevated so that the connecting rod clears the axle of the first pair of driver wheels.

This post on on the Trains Forum page about three clinder engines offers some explanation:

The three cylinders are high on my list of unique designs that never took off over here in the US.

3-cylinder locos had a speacial exaust chuff as well, from the four chuffs per driver revolution on normal engines, 3 cylinders had six chuffs, making for some very interesting “stack talk”

While here in the US they never really took off, they became fairly common across Europe. Among some notable European 3 cylinders is the A4, thats right, the “Mallard” was 3 cylindered, along with her sisters who still operate today!

[3 tiny pictures that purport to show the center cylinder of 3 cylinder locomotive. They made no sense to me. Perhaps they would if you were familiar with these locomotives.]

The center cylinder yielded more power in a smaller locomotive, the #12 (pictures above) is an 0-8-0, but still produced more than 60,000 lbs tractive effort! Thats more than some 4-8-2’s and 4-6-4’s of the time period!

Unfortuantely, the 3rd cylinder was difficult to service, and the costs related to maintenance outweight those saved by fuel economy. These engines became known as “Roundhouse Queens” as they sometimes spent longer under repair than in operation.

This is probably more than you wanted to know,

The Great Western Archive has audio recordings of a variety of steam locomotives. Simple, i.e. not compound, engines sound different than compound engines.

For a while I was thinking that steam locomotives could have been improved by using steam engines with several smaller cylinders running at high speed, like a diesel engine, but that would have meant using gears to transmit power to the wheels, and making large gears that would take the load may not been economically feasible in early 20th century. The Shay locomotives built for logging industry did in fact do this, but they weren't carrying the enormous loads that mainline freight trains did. Diesels got around this problem by using electric generators and motors. I suspect electric motor technology in the early 20th century wasn't up to the task.

Cuban Railroad

Cuba's Railways are TOTALLY CRAZY!
Nonstop Eurotrip

The narrator's cheerful demeanor is totally at odds with his environment. 10 hours to get a ticket and then 10 hours to make 5 hour trip?!? Google Maps says you should be able to drive it in three and a half hours. As if. This is Cuba after all.

Note that the pretty 1950's era automobiles shown early on are basically jalopies that are only still running due to the ingenuity and diligence of the Cuban equivalent of redneck engineering. That $10 bribe is likely the equivalent of a month's wages in Cuba.

Cuba runs on crime. People can't survive without it. Everyone has to give a cut of whatever they get to 'the beard' as Castro was known.

Havana to Santa Clara

Cuba is the only island in the Caribbean that has an extensive railroad. The Dominican Republic has some rail lines that serve the sugar mills and Puerto Rico has 10 miles of transit lines in San Juan, but that's about it.

Previous related posts about Cuba:

• Hershey Electric Railway
• Making Money in Cuba
• Cuba Cars

Note on temperatures at the train station:

• 35 degrees C = 95 degrees F
• 45 degrees C = 113 degrees F

Lusitania

RMS Lusitania departing New York - Ossie Jones

I'm reading a story about the Chinese plan to build a railway across the Andes mountains in South America. Okay, that sounds nuts, but it also sounds like something China might try.

Well, let's see if we can find a map. I found several speculative plans, but nothing definite. I'm reading about one and they mention Lusophones, which is a new term for me. Look it up and it turns out it means people who speak Portuguese and comes from the name of a Roman province which was located where Portugal is now.

Just bugged me that there were so many disparate things that all used the same name.

Spherical Cow

Giant Train Signal
Chris Boden

I got a chuckle out of his line about brakes on a train.

Downtown Chongqing China

Commuting to work in Chongqing China is hard!
UNILAD

China is just nuts.