Life on the Rails

[Savonarola]

Thanks, Jacob and KRonn

I also learned from the senior engineers that in the 1950s and 1960s there were about 100 different proposals for Maglev trains; today there are only four in existence (two in Japan, one in Korea and one in China.)  The reason that so many were proposed is that it was believed that steel wheel trains couldn't exceed 200 KMPH.  (Which, amusingly, is about as fast as anything goes in North America today.)

Maglev can go quicker than conventional wheeled trains; but construction and repair costs are considerably more expensive.  The senior engineers said it was all the problems of airplane design combined with all the problems of rail.

[Duque de Bragança]

200 kph max? Conventional lines reached that cruise speed long ago in France, e.g Paris-Bordeaux line (560 km or so), or formerly Paris-Toulouse in the '70s, now much older and slower so people go through Bordeaux, quite a detour but faster, as long as there is no rail crossing, if so 160 kph. Eliminating them is very expensive but it is done sometimes.
A hovertrain, ™Aérotrain™ almost made in France in the '60-'70s but was cancelled very late in the process. SNCF was pushing for TGV at the same time so maybe lobbying paid its part. 
Did these senior engineers mention Aérotrain btw?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aérotrain

[Savonarola]

200 kph max? Conventional lines reached that cruise speed long ago in France, e.g Paris-Bordeaux line (560 km or so), or formerly Paris-Toulouse in the '70s, now much older and slower so people go through Bordeaux, quite a detour but faster, as long as there is no rail crossing, if so 160 kph. Eliminating them is very expensive but it is done sometimes.

I see from Wikipedia that the current record for steel wheels on steel track is about 575 KMPH.  Presumably they didn't foresee the improvement in steel and welding technology when people were first thinking Maglev.

A hovertrain, ™Aérotrain™ almost made in France in the '60-'70s but was cancelled very late in the process. SNCF was pushing for TGV at the same time so maybe lobbying paid its part. 
Did these senior engineers mention Aérotrain btw?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aérotrain

No, but he did make it sound like most decisions about rail in France were political in nature.  All the Americans were amazed that so little freight travels on French lines (America has the largest freight capacity in the world.)  The instructor made it sound like the decision to carry the bulk of freight by truck was a purely political decision.  (Admittedly, as an Alstom employee, he might have been a little biased.)

[Savonarola]

Rail operation is done by signals as well as dispatch.  (That is there are electric signals which tell the train operator is occupied or empty.)  Areas where there is no signalling system are called "Dark Territory;" and all train control is done entirely by radio.  Because the signalling system was down; this crash occurred in dark territory.

I learned today that 30 miles of Metrolinx track (in the greater Toronto area) is dark territory.  That seemed dangerous in such a heavily populated area.

[Duque de Bragança]

Well, passenger trains have priority over freight trains (opposite of the US I believe) and businesses have less tolerance for strikes than people who have less of a choice.  However, with the liberalisation of freight, this should no longer be the case, yet all operators still lose money.  Most investments go for passenger lines as well.
Politics certainly played a part though, no question about that. SNCF is a state within the state, very unionised. Rail is indeed very political, but lorries just seem more practical or cheaper, with cheap, non-unionised labor, sometimes from Eastern Europe.

Even the biggest European wholesale food, Rungis, is still mostly operated with lorries, despite recently improved rail facilities
http://www.leparisien.fr/rungis-94150/l-avenir-incertain-du-terminal-ferroviaire-du-marche-de-rungis-28-09-2015-5134807.php
Cheaper by lorry, again, and more flexible labour force.

[KRonn]

Yeah, I do remember when Maglev rail trains were all the rage, very much talked about as the future of fast rail travel.

[Savonarola]

Inductions

In order to work on a rail system, you first have to go through safety training; called "Inductions."  The inductions are usually brief in passenger or freight, but much more in depth for mining.  This is because mining operations usually involve the mine, the transport and a port; all three have heavy machinery.  While you probably won't work all three areas, they try to make a generic introductory training to cover all three and then provide additional courses that focus on your area.

FMG is the most in depth inductions that I've gone through.  They provided three different types: first a series of online courses; then in office inductions and then field inductions.  The first I could do in the United States at my leisure.  There are over fifty courses offered online, but I only had to take the general safety, sensitivity training, environmental awareness and a couple courses specific to rail.

The online trainings each have little quizzes along the way.  A lot of people who work in the mines have never completed high school.  Instead they entered an apprenticeship program as teenagers, so the quizzes aren't very hard.  If "All of the above" is ever a choice; it's the right answer.

For me it was fortunate that the quizzes are multiple choice; things are sometimes different in Australia than in the United States.  One question was "One of your fellow workers reports spotting a bilby near the area where you working, what should you do?"  My initial response, "Son, drinking on the job is never a good idea," wasn't one of the option.  (A bilby, as it turns out, is a marsupial related to the bandicoot, if that helps.)

I also learned from the online training that FMG has a zero tolerance policy for slavery.  Sometimes you just have to stand up for what you believe in no matter what anyone else says.

The second part of the inductions happened at FMG's offices in downtown Perth.  I was there the day of the Christmas party; so they rushed us through the training as quickly as they could.  Even so they did emphasize the seriousness of the training; anyone caught on their phone would be taken out of class for a talking to.  This wore heavily on some of the younger participants, at the breaks their phones would appear as if by sleight of hand.

While the on line inductions gave numerous warnings about the dangers of excessive drinking; the company itself seemed to have a somewhat more realistic view of who was working at the mines.  Their vending machines all had enormous cans of Red Bull; not the wimpy eight ounce cans sold in the United States, these looked like full imperial pints of Red Bull.  I doubt even Jeeves's pick-me-up would work as well as that.

We were warned against using "The mining language" at the beginning of training, as that upset the owners and the office staff.  (Now hark at that, do.)  That seemed to be becoming a thing of the past anyway.  Cussing over radio channels was now grounds for dismissal.  This proved to be a great strain on bulldozer operators, as, I learned, they are always angry about something. 

The instructor told us, and most of the class seemed to agree, that many people on the mine site behaved like "Drongos" or "Absolute rock apes," that also seemed to be becoming a thing of the past.  Our contact at FMG lamented that the time where "The boys" could just take things out back and settle them was over; now you have to get HR involved in every little things

A lot of the training dealt with lock-out tag-out; that is how to shut off the power supply to a machine under repair or service.  Power supplies have to be locked off in such circumstances, and they have to be tagged as to the reason they were off.  Sometimes you knew a story was coming when we were told not to do something.  The first was not to tag washing machines Out of Service (OOS) unless they really were.  Some people at the mining camps will do that in order to reserve a machine.  The second was not to tag dead animals OOS.  Someone had done that to a dead kangaroo, and the mining operators had to conduct a full investigation, find the person who did that, and kick him off the mining property.

Anyhow the office secretaries were starting to put on headbands with reindeer antlers and workers were wheeling in pinball machines so we were given our mine cards and off we went.

The final part of the training was held in Port Hedland.  Port Hedland is about a 90 minute flight from Perth.  Port Hedland is the deepest port in the southern hemisphere so all mining operations in the Pilbara deliver their ore there.  Mining is such a big business in Western Australia that several flights every day head to Port Hedland.  (There are a couple more that go to the inland mine camps as well.)  Nearly two thirds of traffic in the Perth airport wears steel toed boots and the blue and yellow safety shirts that the mining companies mandate.

I got picked up at the airport by Chris, a radio tech covered in tattoos.  We went to the port to find out when and where the rail inductions would be and found no one knew anything about it.  I wasn't too perturbed by that; my entire time in Colombia was some variation on that theme.  After a series of phone calls I discovered that the training wouldn't be held until the afternoon (I had arrived at 8 in the morning) and was only for 90 minutes.  So I hung out in the comms shack all morning.

The training was pretty basic.  It was held in the temporary headquarters from when the rail operations were being built.  Today the headquarters are in the port; but the training hadn't been updated, so we learned the location and function of empty buildings.

There are some complexities with Australian law concerning the aborigines, which I do not fully understand.  The land the mine on is owned by the mining companies, but the underlying owners are the local aborigine skin groups ("Tribe" is considered an offensive term, as is "Chief."  "Skin group" is used instead of tribe; I don't know what the equivalent to chief is.)  Captain Cook declared Australia "Terra Nullius," that is land not owned by anyone.  So most of the aborigines ended up in the most undesirable parts of Australia; such as the Pilbara.  The mining companies therefore pay rent to the aborigines on this land.  FMG provides jobs, contracts and training in lieu of the rent they pay.  Most of the other mining companies simply pay in cash.

Most Australians wouldn't come out and say "Aborigines" when talking about them; instead they were "The locals."  None of the stories about "The locals" were very nice; but one that they mentioned in training did give me a certain amount of admiration.  We were told to never leave keys in a vehicle; not even for a minute.  One time when a trucker was relieving himself by the side of the track, when some of "The locals" jumped in and took off.  It was some sort of fuel truck.  They took it joy riding nearly a thousand miles to Thornlie in the south.  The authorities found the truck six weeks later, undamaged, but with all the tires painted vibrant colors.  That sounded like a wonderfully roguish adventure.

[grumbler]

I wonder how much of the infrastructure in Port Hedland today was originally built for servicing Allied submarines in WW2.  My understanding is that it was pretty much scrubland when the RAN took it over in 1942 and started to build a base there.  The US based a fair number of subs out of there (it was well-placed for attacking the Japanese shipping in the vital DEI) and so, I would imagine, built a lot of facilities.  I seem to recall reading that one of the first US floating dry docks was sent there to service submarines; when they measured its possible transits from (IIRC) New Orleans, it was exactly the same distance whether sent via the Atlantic or Pacific!

Anyway, i am still enjoying this very much.  Keep up the story. please.

[Admiral Yi]

They didn't invite you to the party? 

[KRonn]

More good stuff Sav. The heavy equipment and mining especially are so very different from what my working world was (retired now, working part time at my old company). That goes for rail operations and engineering also. I'm learning a lot.

[Savonarola]

Well, passenger trains have priority over freight trains (opposite of the US I believe) and businesses have less tolerance for strikes than people who have less of a choice.  However, with the liberalisation of freight, this should no longer be the case, yet all operators still lose money.  Most investments go for passenger lines as well.
Politics certainly played a part though, no question about that. SNCF is a state within the state, very unionised. Rail is indeed very political, but lorries just seem more practical or cheaper, with cheap, non-unionised labor, sometimes from Eastern Europe.

Even the biggest European wholesale food, Rungis, is still mostly operated with lorries, despite recently improved rail facilities
http://www.leparisien.fr/rungis-94150/l-avenir-incertain-du-terminal-ferroviaire-du-marche-de-rungis-28-09-2015-5134807.php
Cheaper by lorry, again, and more flexible labour force.

The situation is almost the complete opposite in the United States; the Class I (freight rail) carriers are politically important as are their unions (by US standards; which I realize pales in comparison to French standards.)  Amtrak, on the other hand, is underfunded and politically negligible.  Freight always has priority (to the best of my knowledge) even on tracks that Amtrak maintains.

We do have a truck drivers union in the United States (the Teamsters Union); they have a reputation for thuggishness and close ties to organized crime.  I'm not sure if that's fair or just a holdover from the Jimmy Hoffa era.

[Savonarola]

Yeah, I do remember when Maglev rail trains were all the rage, very much talked about as the future of fast rail travel.

It would be easier to do today, with "High Temperature" superconductors; (and it sounds so cool and science fiction-y.)  The thing is that conventional trains are so energy efficient, low friction and (potentially) fast that they Maglev trains aren't economically feasible.  Something like a hyper-loop might be worth it (especially when you factor in environmental costs); but that would be a competitor to air travel rather than conventional rail travel.

[Savonarola]

I wonder how much of the infrastructure in Port Hedland today was originally built for servicing Allied submarines in WW2.  My understanding is that it was pretty much scrubland when the RAN took it over in 1942 and started to build a base there.  The US based a fair number of subs out of there (it was well-placed for attacking the Japanese shipping in the vital DEI) and so, I would imagine, built a lot of facilities.  I seem to recall reading that one of the first US floating dry docks was sent there to service submarines; when they measured its possible transits from (IIRC) New Orleans, it was exactly the same distance whether sent via the Atlantic or Pacific!

Anyway, i am still enjoying this very much.  Keep up the story. please.

That's interesting; I didn't know about Port Hedland's role in the Second World War.

Prior to the start of the mining industry in the 1960s, I don't think there was much of anything in Port Hedland.  It does have a deep harbor; but it's adjacent to the Pilbara.  The Pilbara is one of the hottest places on earth and it gets cyclones; not a lot of people want to live there.  They did (and still do) raise cattle there, but there isn't much else in terms of agriculture.

[Savonarola]

The trains go over range land and the mining companies pay ranchers an indemnity if they run over a cow.  Allegedly ranchers put dead cattle on the tracks at night in order to claim that indemnity.

[Savonarola]

They didn't invite you to the party? 

I don't think they even invited their own mining employees to the party.  Too many absolute rock apes.   

In addition to "Drongo" and "Rock ape" some other aussieisms I learned:

Pineapple:  A metaphorical kick-in-the-ass
Hoon:  To speed; it's a complete verb with particle (hooning) and all
Too easy:  a stock phrase akin to "By George, you've got it."
Toasties:  Toasted sandwiches, similar to panini but on regular bread.
Rattle gun:  Impact wrench
Way Out:  Exit
Chrissy:  Abbreviated form of "Christmas."  Usually used for Chrissy trees, Chrissy tea towels and the like.  One of the FMG mines is located in a place called "Christmas Creek" it took me a while to figure out what "Chrissy Creek" was. (Australia: keeping the Chris in Christmas .) 

I was relieved that they didn't use "Hooter" for car horn the way they do in South Africa.  Apparently that was too silly for even the Australians.