LIRR to Install Defect Detectors

After an MTA announcement that came out yesterday saying that the Long Island Rail Road will be installing inward- and outward-facing cameras in an effort to "improve saftey" on the railroads, another announcement came out this afternoon saying the LIRR will also be moving to install a defect detector system, or a "Train Fault Detector System."

I wrote a bit about defect detectors back in January following the January 10th Derailment of a NY&AR Train at Pineaire Siding.  That derailment, which occurred at low speed as a train was trying to enter Pineaire Yard on the Mainline (located between Deer Park and Brentwood), was caused by a freight car that had a broken wheel.  The car picked the switch and part of the train derailed as it was heading into the yard.

Here is an excerpt from that 1/10/14 post:

The trouble with the various freight cars is that they come from all sorts of different places all over the country and travel for days (sometimes even weeks, as certain freight railroads tend to "lose" cars often enough).  While it would be operationally difficult to stop and inspect each freight car that comes onto LIRR property, I do think the use of things called "detectors" (in particular wheel impact/sliding wheel detectors) could be beneficial in this case.   Detectors are devices that go along the tracks and check trains that pass over them for "defects."  If everything is fine, they stay quiet, but if the detector does sense something is amiss (like a broken wheel, in the case of the this derailment) it alerts the operator and corrective action is taken.  Placing detectors at various points on LIRR property (especially right by the places where freight trains enter and leave LIRR-owned tracks) would likely help in situations like these.

At the moment, the LIRR has no detectors whatsoever on its tracks.  Metro-North (east of Hudson) only has two detectors, a wheel impact detector just inside the Park Avenue Tunnels and a "hotbox" detector near Poughkeepsie.  (In addition to third rail foulers outside Mantiou station on the Hudson Line.)  Those are the only two detectors on the Metro-North system.  (Metro-North also has a number of talking detectors on the Port Jervis line, as up until recently that line was owned by Norfolk Southern, a freight company).

Detectors are frequently used on busy lines of track owned by freight companies, but passenger railroads are often reluctant to implement them.  The mentality with passenger railroads is that their trains are inspected frequently enough in shops and yards therefore they don't really need them since the chances of a train with a defect escaping a yard is slim.  Also, detectors can often "cry wolf" and set off an alarm when there is nothing wrong.  Whenever a detector is set off, the train is either stopped immediately or is advanced to the next station at which point the engineer gets out and walks the entire train checking for any defects.  Passenger railroads often see this false alarm as a delay (and stopping and walking a train cause trouble if they happen on busy mainlines during rush hours).  On isolated passenger railroads this is fine, but once you have freight trains and Amtrak trains that travel for hundreds of miles, the risk of having a car with a defect sneak onto your rails and cause trouble rises.  It will be interesting to see if the LIRR moves to implement detectors on the railroad following this incident.

Here we are two and a half months later and it looks like the LIRR is gearing up to to put install defect detectors.  This is likely not a direct response to the 1/10 NY&AR derailment which was pretty minor (although it did cause several significant delays and suspensions on the Mainline for the morning they were cleaning everything up), but rather a response the derailment of a CSX freight train (that just happened to be hauling trash cars that originated on Long Island) near Spuyten Duyvil this past summer.

Like I said in the January post, the LIRR currently has no detectors on its property at the moment.  The news item put out on the MTA website earlier this afternoon stated that the LIRR will be installing a "Train Fault Detector System," which will include three different detectors: a wheel impact detector, a "hotbox" detector, and a tag reader.

A wheel impact detector installed on a railroad line in Victoria, Australia.

A wheel impact detector is a wheel sensors placed along the tracks that feels for flat spots on the trains wheels.  Any flat wheel that becomes too dangerous to travel on (like a big flat spot on the train wheel, or even a broken wheel which would register as a giant flat spot if it is still turning) will be counted as a defect.  The image shown at the right shows what a wheel impact detector assembly looks like.  Slip-slide season usually wreaks havoc on the wheels of LIRR trains as they are can hopelessly slide past stations due to low adhesion on the rails.  This sliding causes flat spots to develop (and subsequently the loud thumping you'll sometimes hear coming from train wheels in the fall).  The only way to remedy flat spots is to run the wheels over a wheel lathe or a wheel truing machine, and the LIRR has limited resources to do that (and they cannot keep up with the amount of cars that develop flat spots).  This is why trains are kept out on the road despite having flat spots (and having flat spots is not necessarily unsafe, it's just really annoying to everyone in or around the train), and if really bad flat spots develop on a number of trains, a shortage of equipment can arise.  It will be interesting to see if this detector affects how the LIRR muddles through slip-slide season.  If lots of trains trip the detector and have to be taken out of service enroute, crowding and congestion conditions can develop, and those always stink.  Cars might have to wait their turn on the wheel lathe out of service sitting in Hillside instead of out trudging along.  Hopefully it doesn't have too many bad side effects.

A hotbox detector.

Also included in the installation will be a "hotbox" detector.  A hotbox detector consists of two infrared eyes that sit on each side of the tracks staring up at the trains bearings (the wheels/axles). They register the radiation from every bearing that passes over it. If a bearing reaches the maximum temperature for safe travel, the detector will flag and count it as a defect.  Hotbox detectors commonly catch trains that have locked or sliding wheels.  If a wheel is locked and sliding along the track, the friction between the steel wheel, steel rail, and/or the bearings heats up as the wheel is dragged along at track speed and the hotbox detector can then pickup on it and alert the interested parties.  This also would help prevent incidents involving broken wheels, like the 1/10 NY&AR derailment.  If the broken wheel was still turning, a wheel impact detector would be able to pick it up as it would register as a giant flat spot.  If the wheel wasn't turning, it would be dragging along the track, causing friction and heating the wheel to the point where a hotbox detector would be able to pick up on it.  The photo at the right shows what a hotbox detector looks like.

The installations will also include a tag reader which would be able to determine the identity of freight cars passing over them.

Like I mentioned above, the LIRR's three detectors will be going in on the two Mainline tracks near Bellerose.  These detectors are primarily aimed at capturing defects with freight trains traveling over LIRR property.  Passenger trains are serviced and inspected frequently enough that trains with defects rarely ever make it out of the yard.  These days, freight traffic on Long Island only goes east of Jamaica on the Mainline (as all of the LIRR and NY&AR's former customers on the Montauk Branch are now gone), so they will be installed there, and not on any of the other branches.

I'm sure the LIRR has some reasoning as to why it is going in at Bellerose, but, personally, I would have liked to see the detectors going in on the Lower Montauk by Richmond Hill, since that is right where 95% of NY&AR freight trains that are entering LIRR territory enter at (and the cost of installing the detectors pawned off onto NY&AR).  While putting the detector in at Bellerose will catch trains heading east with defects on the Mainline, it will not stop a train with a defect from going through Jamaica and possibly derailing (and causing extreme havoc) in one of the Jamaica interlocings.

Metro-North (who will be leading the procurement) will also be installing two of these "Train Fault Detector Systems" (the three detectors) near Green's Farms station on the New Haven Line and Scarborough on the Hudson Line.  These detectors will supplement Metro-North's wheel impact detector currently installed in the Park Avenue Tunnel and the hotbox detector in place just south of Poughkeepsie.   CSX, which is the freight railroad that most frequently operates over Metro-North tracks, will also be installing a wheel impact detector on the Hudson Line just before it becomes the Hudson Line in Poughkeepsie as well as a weigh in motion sensor system that will measure and transmit information so that Metro-North can audit compliance with weight limits.

In summation, moving to install defect detectors on the LIRR and Metro-North is a good move on the part of the MTA.  Unlike the in-cab cameras, defect detectors can actually prevent derailments before they happen, as a train with an unsuspecting defect would get stopped and the issue resolved before proceeding further.  Just like the cameras, the MTA will be looking to use a Request for Proposal bidding process, which would allow them to issue a RFP, solicit bids, then choose among vendors instead of a low-bid contract, which obligates the agency to go with the lowest bidder.  It's a good move that I think the MTA should have made years ago, but it's better late than never.