They have also added minimum/maximum temp of fuel tanks, which may be lower than max temp for ops. And weird stuff happens anyway. Think of long skinny planes that end up getting tail skids........And weight and balance is also more complex than most people realize. it's not just the weight, but where it is placed/distributed.
Heat Speed Restrictions
- Thread starter John Bobinyec
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jis
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jis
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I have seen that happen on CRJs and ERJs more than once.
Ditto! On the way to my dad's Funeral they made my daughter and I sit on Separate sides of the Plane for Balance reasons.
trainman74
Conductor
west point
Engineer
Places like Phoenix. In summer there is no pre fueling of Airplanes. Fuel expands when it heats so putting the allowable weight in the fuel tanks might have the fuel to spill as it heats up all day. Fueling at last minute with cool underground fuel is usually planned to finish about 10 minutes before aircraft is to taxi out.
Wonder if any loco has ever spilled fuel when fueled with cool fuel have the diesel heat , expand, and overflow ?.
Wonder if any loco has ever spilled fuel when fueled with cool fuel have the diesel heat , expand, and overflow ?.
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Wouldn't shock me. Fueling errors are not uncommon. Every year we get a few oil deliveries out here to a wrong address where the house converted to natural gas, and someone puts 250 gallons of oil into a basement through a pipe that no longer goes to a tank. In my coop development some years ago we were getting new boilers one building at a time, and the tanks/lines were getting heaters to allow for #6 instead of #4. My building was done, but they accidentally dropped 6500 gallons of #6 at the building next door which had not been converted yet. Temperature dropped to below freezing that night, and 76 families lost all heat and hot water.The oil company spent a fortune fixing that.
dogbert617
OBS Chief
OlympianHiawatha
Engineer
Regional jets don't have enough "meat" on their engines to get the 'plane safely up on the available runway.
Ryan
Court Jester
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_CRJ
No. From a pilot, in the thread where it was discussed:
I doubt that the mountains were an issue out of Denver. Departing flights could just depart north or south to gain enough altitude before turning west to traverse the mountains.
Have done it several times in years past on United to San Franciso, having diverted all the way north to Cheyenne before turning left to head to The Coast.
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I have had United and Delta cancel flights once the temp in Phoenix was 120. We were doing a major project with highs up to 123 around the airport. DL and UA, not sure about the other flights, shifted to middle of the night take offs with no middle seats filled, no mail sacks, or packages, or over weight luggage. We boarded the plane quickly, push back started as soon as the door was closed, and there was no wait for take off. Fastest gate to being in the air ever. During this hot spell we had to change our work shifts from daytime with sunlight to midnight to noon with portable flood lights. thought it is always hot in Phoenix, not 123 very often.
Most materials including steel and wood expand and contract with temperature changes. Wood ties are also susceptible to changes in the humidity.
Ryan
Court Jester
Or people with jobs.
NW cannonball
Conductor
It wasn't the mountains as high things to fly over so much,
it was the strange fierce winds that often come off the downslope west of Denver.
If I remember rightly, one of the NTSB reportable incidents at the new DIA airport involved a plane that failed takeoff because of those hard-to-predict gusts comiing over the Front Range, plane got slammed and torqued, ran off one of the northbound runways and landed in the snow in the ditch. No fatalities but took a while to get all the pax to safety.. NTSB requested more and better wind detection, since complied with.
http://www.denverpost.com/2009/07/17/report-on-dia-jet-massive-gust-of-wind/
One can only guess, but those hard-to-predict gusts were likely even more likely in the Stapeton years
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west point
Engineer
Mountain wave activity is always a problem. You can even have it going over a city though not as bad. The downdrafts can exceed an aircraft's certified climb rate ( 2nd segment climb ). If an aircraft takes off to the east the ground elevation drops fairly fast so any mountain wave has very little effect. Not always but mountain waves usually dissipate about 500 feet above ground level..
The Continental airline's DC-9-10 series cited at DEN had ice and snow contamination as the primary cause . That model did not have leading edge slats which increases take off speeds especially with snow and ice.
The Continental airline's DC-9-10 series cited at DEN had ice and snow contamination as the primary cause . That model did not have leading edge slats which increases take off speeds especially with snow and ice.
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It's that time of year again. I rode 91 from Washington, DC, to Cary yesterday (5/27/2019) and CSX imposed a 20 MPH speed reduction until 7 p.m. because of heat.
That got me to thinking about the way they "set" the temperature of continuous rail when they lay it. The trouble with sun kinks is that they don't trip the signals to protect the trains, but pull-aparts do. So why isn't the rail "set" for a high enough temperature so that sun kinks don't happen? In the winter there might be pull-aparts, but they affect the signals and the trains would be protected. If this practice were adopted, it seems like the trains could run at normal speed all of the time until something actually happened - not at reduced speed in anticipation that something MIGHT happen.
jb
That got me to thinking about the way they "set" the temperature of continuous rail when they lay it. The trouble with sun kinks is that they don't trip the signals to protect the trains, but pull-aparts do. So why isn't the rail "set" for a high enough temperature so that sun kinks don't happen? In the winter there might be pull-aparts, but they affect the signals and the trains would be protected. If this practice were adopted, it seems like the trains could run at normal speed all of the time until something actually happened - not at reduced speed in anticipation that something MIGHT happen.
jb
Pull-aparts occur at the joints, but sun kinks could occur anywhere along a section of welded rail. So would you have to "stretch" every section of rail to prevent a future kink? Or only install rail on the hottest days of the year when it might already be "pre-stretched"? Or artificially heat every foot of rail as it is lowered into position on the ties in order to maximize its length?
Devil's Advocate
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So far as I am aware, no matter what temperature the equal tension state is set there is a maximum temperature range before deformation. It's true that you could reset the tension to favor preventing heat kinks over cold breaks, and this might be preferable for our purposes, but you'd still be chasing a moving target. Track that is relaid to avoid heat kinks today would likely experience them again as temperatures increase over time.
If the only consideration is the temperature the track is set to, how is it that CSX generally imposes a heat restriction while NS generally does not, for the same territory?
jb
jb
Acela150
Super Buff
Cause CSX is run by morons who don’t know a thing about how a railroad works.
jloewen
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I remember taking a train halfway across Java to get to Jakarta to fly to JFK, then taking the Vermonter home to Burlington. The VTR went 24 MPH because it was hot. The Indonesian train went 70 MPH in the same temperature. Maybe continuous welded rails aren't the best?? Maybe an occasional "clickety clack" is OK?
jis
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Java has less extreme temperature variations than Vermont. It has nothing to do with stick rail vs. welded rail.
Long welded rail tracks if laid properly on adequate ballast with adequate anchoring and maintained well will kink much less frequently and won't need heat restrictions until higher temperatures. Problems arise when corners are cut in track maintenance. And that at the end of the day is a business decision. How much risk of derailment are you willing to take in order to reduce your track maintenance cost.
For example, CSX has a long history of laying and maintaining tracks with inadequate ballast and anchoring when compared to even other railroads in the US. Hence their need to slap on heat restrictions before anyone else, because they know that their tracks are more likely to kink than others. For example, the Crescent City FL Amtrak derailment was almost entirely blamed on inadequate track maintenance with inadequate ballast and anchoring.
Historically, CSX has apparently found it OK to run trains slower or not at all due to tracks blocked by apparently preventable derailments, since as it seems, in their reckoning the cost of these mishaps is less than the money saved in maintenance. So their trains seem to fall of the tracks every so often. They clean up the mess and carry on until the next time. Sometimes unfortunately it is an Amtrak train, in which case Amtrak gets to clean up the financial mess, while CSX cleans up the physical mess and bills Amtrak for it, while still pocketing the money saved in track maintenance. Rather convenient don't you think?
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