Re: Air brake diameters

I don't get the 24 lb full service reduction leaving Monarch. It would take a long time to recover from that before you would have the brakes pumped up and in a condition to short cycle the air.

On La Veta we were running no more than 32 car trains - all loads. That was the max tonnage allowed coming up the west side of the hill without cutting a helper into the train somewhere. Beyond that point, we would likely get a knuckle in the train. We would set retainers on all the loads at high pressure. If we had any empties we'd put them on low pressure or slow direct. It was flat enough that when we arrived at Fir, the conductor would drop off at the west siding switch (where the food stand is now), and we'd pull by at a walk while the conductor turned up the retainers as the train slowly rolled by. Once the train got by, we'd stop and ease back while he crossed to the other side and got all those retainers as we backed up. I did whatever I could to keep from setting the automatic air while doing this, fearing that when I released it again, the retainers would hold so much air I couldn't get the train started going the other way. I remember a long train of outbound empty storage cars that had me stretched way over the hump before we got the rear of the train all set up. Then I had to shove it all back over the hump and keep it under my thumb as is went back over the other side. It began to get unmanageable and I had to stop and the conductor had to walk the rest of it.

We repeated the story when we got down to the La Veta, with the conductor dropping off and knocking the retainers down as the engineer eased along at a walk.

We did all this at night. In the winter snow it not much fun.

The east bound trains almost all empties. They came down the west side (which was 2.5%) on dynamics only. Occasionally, toward the bottom you had to put a minimum reduction (7 lbs) into the train to keep it steady.