Chugman posted:Big_Boy_4005 posted:This item is on page 66 of the volume 2 catalog. Price $79.99. These are located fairly frequently along the mainlines of the major railroads, well under 100 miles apart. They are audible if you have a railroad radio scanner and are close to one. They report in a computer generated voice, so the onboard crew can hear the report. It counts the axles, and if there are any defects found, it tells which axle(s) are bad.
This looks like an interesting accessory, but I probably won't get one because it's on Fastrack, even though it doesn't look too difficult to modify.
That's great Elliot, I didn't know that you could hear them that easily. I now must make a trip to the local RR and check it out further. I asked my retired engineer buddy how could they tell which train it was? He said the engineer and conductor would easily know that it was their train that just passed milepost # blank. I also didn't know that they talked about train speed either. I asked how hot it had to be to trigger an alert and he said it was based on a percentage above the rest of the train. Usually they would be less hot in the dead of winter and hotter in the summer. So when an axle was X percent above the rest of the train it must be a hot box or defect. Interesting stuff.
Art
Well Art, you can only hear them with a railroad scanner, which that guy who shot the video obviously had. I have one. The railroads have been allocated something like 102 channels by the FCC. Crews are told which channel to tune to as they enter different areas, usually by a sign next to the track. The crew always knows the track they operate over. It's second nature to know where the detectors, after just a few trips over a given subdivision, just like they know which channel to tune their radios.
Knowing where detectors are is a handy rail fanning tool, because if you set up near them, a couple miles down track, they will tell you when trains are coming your way, but only in the one direction, because trains in the other direction haven't passed it yet (duh).
If you go out to Rochelle, they have the radios for the UP and BNSF at the pavilion, but I forget which railroad had a detector near there. Maybe it was both. I'd be willing to bet Jim has a scanner.
