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Will they ever return?
By adamg on Wed, 10/07/2015 - 7:28pm
Frustrated commuters are checking in from a Rockport Line train that has joined the choir eternal in a tunnel in Salem.
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I was on the train behind it.
I was on the train behind it. The 5:40 express from Beverly to Boston. It's one of the worst places to have this happen as there's only one track at Salem and in the tunnel- both directions were blocked. After hanging out at the junction just outside Salem for a while, a conductor told us we'd be pushing the other train into Boston and it would be a 20-30 minute delay. We pulled in, bumped up to the train, and they cut the power. An hr and 40 mins of sitting in the (literal and figurative) dark, they turned the lights back on, told us our little engine couldn't, and we had to get off. Our train then managed to push the broken train off and through the tunnel sans passengers. Two trains in the wrong direction later, we boarded for Boston arriving 2:30 hrs late. I've had worse (all of Feb 2015).
You guys must be heavy
I find it hard to believe the (very few) passengers on a 540 express from Beverly to Boston (??) would be the difference in whether or not your little engine could or could not.
Might not be for weight...
Perhaps it's a liability thing.
Trains have pushed trains
Trains have pushed trains before, with passengers on both. It's just what the do when a train breaks down. Don't know why they made the people get off in this situation.
Most likely...
...some issue with coupling and MUing (transit vocab moment - MU=Multiple Unit, the controls that allow multiple subway, light rail, or locomotives to operate together) the cab car on the dead set to the locomotive on the working set. The push pull commuter rail trains use the same principle (MU control) for the cab cars to control the locomotives in push mode, and you need both the electrical and air brake connections to work across both sets to operate normally. One working commuter rail engine can easily shove two trainsets and a dead engine (just the acceleration will be a bit slower), but if the engineer can't operate from the lead cab car then the rules say it's a 30 mph max with the engineer working from the locomotive, and conductor watching from the leading end. I don't work for the railroad, so I've never had to do it, but stuff doesn't always work the way it should on the first try out in the field. That's partly why under normal conditions the trainsets are made up/broken up in yards/shops.
They may have decided to off-load passengers if they weren't sure they could operate at track speed back to Boston, and had something else out there to make the run instead. When the first set shoved it out, they might have just been trying to get the single track cleared.
And here's the culprit - photographed passing Reading Jct, on the 5:15 Newburyport, photographed from the 5:15 Haverhill.
https://twitter.com/eddiefelker/status/651874373234728960
Most likely the problem was that
they couldn't engage the full train brakes on the combined sets. While it is still possible to control such a train with the locomotive brakes only, the would not want passengers on the train for liability reasons.