Doug, you said:
"Since roller bearings are used almost exclusively today, the hotbox is a dead term on a mainline railroad."
Hot Boxes are stil alive and well despite the presence of Roller Bearings.
As the previous posters mentioned, there are Hot Box detectors along the Right-of-way. What they don't mention is that on the UP there is also an employee assigned to track bearings that are warmer than normal temperature but not hot enough to trip the "Bitch in the box".
There are many times that cars are set out because the bearing desk sees an imminent failure coming and wants to prevent a derailment.
With the gross weight limit being raised to an average of 122 tons, if a bearing fails at 50 or even 30 mph, it can create one Helluva mess.
Personally, the worst one that I ever experienced was on a loaded grain train. It was about the 73rd car, and there was no caboose. The bearing had gone bad between MP 632 and MP 650. I could see the glow from the bearing from 10 cars away.
The dispatcher wanted us to walk the car 10 miles to the next siding. This would have allowed the steel to break and crumble as the heat from the hotbox had pretty well made mincemeat out of the axle. I told him "No", and that it was unsafe t move.
What did we do? Well... today they send a wheel truck out that has replacement wheelests at the ready. After we broke the joint at the bad order wheel, they jacked up the car, jacked up the truck and traded out the wheel set right there on the main line. All it took, after they got there, was about 45 minutes.
It was a total of about a 3 hour delay, but we made it to Rawlins (our far terminal) with time to spare.
It's not narrow gauge, but it could be....
Rick
