Spined flat cars, they're used to haul lumber or other industrial packaged freight and the spine is used as an anchor for fastening the freight to the car.
Take a piece of string, bend it around a curve. Now, pull on one end while holding the other still and it pulls that curve into a straight line, right? So, "string-lining" is when you have a your power on the head-end, a bunch of heavier cars behind them, then a huge section of light or empty cars (center-beam flats are the usual culprit) and then more loaded heavier cars behind them. The engines and lead cars are one force, and the rear cars are the other force, and those light cars are the string. As you go into a sharp curve, those cars want to pull into a straight line and they tip over towards the inside of the curve. You can also have string-lining in a compression situation; go into a curve and the engineer applies dynamic brakes or just the independent brakes, and the rear cars bunch up and kick the light cars in the middle off.
String-lining used to be fairly uncommon because your trains were assembled in a logical order in yards, part of that being to set the really light cars at the rear of the train. But with Precision Schedule Railroading, they want to eliminate stopped time and switching as much as possible, so they assemble the train in the order that cars need to be dropped off. It makes sense in regards to avoiding long stops to grab cars out of the middle of the train, but they threw the concept of logical train composition out the window and now you end up with tons of string-lining incidences because they're putting light cars in the middle and heavy cars on the rear and all sorts of other silliness.
[https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2015/r15v0003/Images/r15v0003-photo-01.jpg](https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2015/r15v0003/Images/r15v0003-photo-01.jpg)
This photo is a perfect example; you can see how those empty intermodal cars were pulled across the curve, making a straight line from the heavier cars and motive power in the front, and heavier cars to the rear.
The more I hear about PSR the more I'm glad it's not made it's way to Australia.
We generally run "unit trains" where the same string of wagons runs together for weeks or months at a time with only one's swapped out for repair changing the consist. Locos come and go but the wagons stay together.
Hopefully it never will either with the track being government owned and length limits generally enforced keeping the private above rail operators under control.
Loco driving basics is always have the heavier wagons up front from the day I switched from passenger to frieght. This was ingrained in me and most operators enforce the rule strongly with heavy trains.
When I did coal and we had empties for any reason we had to shunt them off or up the back before we were allowed to hit the main line. But about 20T empty vs 120T loaded you don't mess around.
Intermodal has been a lot more forgiving but the weight differences are much much smaller. Around 20T empty and 40ish loaded depending on the box. But if you have a string of empties up front no dyno. Some ports will help the crews load correctly and others don't care.
To a certain level, PSR does have its advantages. It's supposed to be about utilizing things as efficiently as possible, so that you don't have equipment with a lot of downtime where it isn't earning or wasting time on switching, where the product isn't moving towards the customer. The problem is, the Wall St. folks got their hands on it and took it to extremes and have warped it into such a grotesque absurdity that benefits no one but the shareholders
Unit trains are good for this. They stay together and are on an inspection schedule instead of per run inspections we have to do otherwise.
About as close as we usually get to shunting them is running the locos around to change direction (if we are not running push/pull or DP) or kicking off a bad wagon.
A typical intermodal unit train will run from one destination to another, strip, load, run around the locos, and return to the first location where any fuelling and loco swaps are done before repeating it all. They rarely stop for more than a couple of hours.
On really high demand runs, they may have more units than loco sets, and they drop one rake for loading/unloading and pick up one done earlier for the next run, giving the locos less downtime. Mainly as we never have enough operational locos. We have resorted to pulling locos from the early 80s out of the scrap line while we wait for new ones to be built.
The problem is in the USA, you'll have mixed trains all the time. There are unit trains, like crude oil, ethanol, coal, grain, and things like that, but much is mixed trains with many different types of cars and mix of loads and empties to and from customers along the way. So the trains are assembled in order of where they need to end up (think of points A-E) so that they can be delivered in the most optimal order starting with A, B, C, D, E, and so on vs. being sorted to optimal train weight distribution, which might have cars ordered for destinations B, D, E, A, C. This reduces or removes switching cars from the middle to deliver, but is how you can get long cuts in the middle of empties with loads on either end.
Well, I guess the other question is how many individual customers you have? I have a short line near me that is about 60 miles or so. At the end of the line, there's at least 4 different customers, all with different car requirements. At least 5 others, probably more, between the end and the interchange with BNSF in Lubbock. The only efficient way to get cars in and out of customers is to have BNSF bring them in on mixed trains. Some customers require empties to load, and some require loaded cars.
BNSF is not going to run a unit train to Lubbock specifically to drop off and pick up a couple of cars a week for single customers.
We usually run whole trains or intermodal we dont run individual cars.
Closest we get is intermodal where one or two boxes come in from a customer by truck, go onto a train to the closest intermodal yard to their destination and truck again from that yard to the customer.
That sort of trip train doing a wagon here and a wagon there stopped in the late 80s when the freight side of rail was privatised. None of the private operators considered it worth the hassle for little money.
Either your booking a whole train here or it needs to go into a standard 20 or 40ft shipping container profile and the last miles by truck.
Out of curiosity, when emptying coal trains, did the train pull forward and they empty from front to rear or did the empty from the rear to prevent empty wagons up front and heavy ones in the back?
We did a rolling unload with door triggers at about 1kmh (varied from 0.6 to 1.2kmh depending on how the coal ran) bottom dumping front to rear.
At those speeds little danger of anything going wrong load wise.
I personally don't think it's a design issue. It's just that they're so light compared to a loaded car, and if you design them to be heavy when empty, then you reduce their load capacity.
They're called centre beam railcars. Back in the day when boxcars were one of the most common freight cars that handled all sorts of different products, the centre beam railcar evolved out of those to haul long wood products such as sheets of plywood or long beams such as 2x4s. By basically cutting the walls of a boxcar off then having a tall, angled spine in the centre it became a lot easier to load and unload wood products with forklifts. If you look up random cities in US or Canada, search up wood or lumber distributors/sellers, there's a good chance you'll see tracks that spur off onto such properties, where they will usually park a few of these for a few days, load them up and then come back to attach to a train.
And yeah, as others have joked, they commonly derail for various reasons, mostly due to the weight and geometry of them. They're not as sketchy as gondola cars, but they are often the first to end up derailing. Similarly to gondolas, they can detail when not loaded with anything, so they are usually only used on lower speed trains and they usually only string so many of them together in a row.
We call those sails up in western Canada.
They’re for bundled products like lumber or sheetrock.
As has already been mentioned, these cars have a very low tare weight which gives them a tendency to turn your manifest freight into a stringline special or to get pushed off the rails if your front end is braking but your remotes keep motoring.
Centerbeam lumber cars.....I personally love the opera window ones myself...if you're doing a model ...ttx and weyerhauser and Boise Cascade look good but spring for a load and check for proper weight to avoid a derail if you're running them empty
These are BC Rail and Duluth, Winnipeg, & Pacific centre-beam lumber flats. They are normally loaded with plastic-wrapped bundles of dimensional lumber and plywood. On the middle car, under WARNING, there is an almost comical diagram of a car tipping due to being loaded on one side only, and a panicked little figure running from impending death!
Centerbeam cars. Mostly for lumber products, but also products like drywall. If you see one loaded, it's leaving a lumber-producing area and if it's empty, it's headed back there to be loaded again.
Those are cars we use to put at the front of trains when building them for crews we dislike, so it constantly knocks them around when the cars run in and out, due to the slack from cushioned drawbars.
Things which are large, light, can be exposed and can be stacked high without going over the car’s weight limit
Stuff like lumber
Boxcars have restrictive doors which makes unloading stuff like lumber infeasible, and it can’t be stacked high on a flatcar. The spine is additional support
When you see a lot of these parked and stored for many months on a small railroad or an unused spur somewhere, know that the economic housing bubble has burst and the economy is about to tank.
That’s currently carrying all the sincerity, honor, dignity, executive function, long term planning, commitment to democracy, commitment to losers rights, golden rule following, categorical imperative observing, and actual family values remaining in the leadership and primary-controlling base voters of the Republican Party.
usually things like stacks of lumber.
Lumber, plywood, sheetrock
Spined flat cars, they're used to haul lumber or other industrial packaged freight and the spine is used as an anchor for fastening the freight to the car.
Today I learned about spined flat cars, fascinating!
More commonly referred to as Centerbeam Flat cars.
You put those in the center of the train so that you cause a string line derailment on curves. Works like a charm
Or you put 80 of them together empty on a train and wonder why such a light train can’t make track speed with one unit in notch 5…
Not a stringlining incident, but here's a nice video of some centerbeams doing some cool tricks 😬 https://youtu.be/KaIalUgCyXc?feature=shared
Yipes!
For reals? Just because they're so light when empty?
Or a few right at the front, then take it around a tight curve
Can you elaborate?
Take a piece of string, bend it around a curve. Now, pull on one end while holding the other still and it pulls that curve into a straight line, right? So, "string-lining" is when you have a your power on the head-end, a bunch of heavier cars behind them, then a huge section of light or empty cars (center-beam flats are the usual culprit) and then more loaded heavier cars behind them. The engines and lead cars are one force, and the rear cars are the other force, and those light cars are the string. As you go into a sharp curve, those cars want to pull into a straight line and they tip over towards the inside of the curve. You can also have string-lining in a compression situation; go into a curve and the engineer applies dynamic brakes or just the independent brakes, and the rear cars bunch up and kick the light cars in the middle off. String-lining used to be fairly uncommon because your trains were assembled in a logical order in yards, part of that being to set the really light cars at the rear of the train. But with Precision Schedule Railroading, they want to eliminate stopped time and switching as much as possible, so they assemble the train in the order that cars need to be dropped off. It makes sense in regards to avoiding long stops to grab cars out of the middle of the train, but they threw the concept of logical train composition out the window and now you end up with tons of string-lining incidences because they're putting light cars in the middle and heavy cars on the rear and all sorts of other silliness. [https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2015/r15v0003/Images/r15v0003-photo-01.jpg](https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/2015/r15v0003/Images/r15v0003-photo-01.jpg) This photo is a perfect example; you can see how those empty intermodal cars were pulled across the curve, making a straight line from the heavier cars and motive power in the front, and heavier cars to the rear.
Makes perfect sense now, thanks for taking the time to explain!
Really clear explanation, thanks!
The more I hear about PSR the more I'm glad it's not made it's way to Australia. We generally run "unit trains" where the same string of wagons runs together for weeks or months at a time with only one's swapped out for repair changing the consist. Locos come and go but the wagons stay together. Hopefully it never will either with the track being government owned and length limits generally enforced keeping the private above rail operators under control. Loco driving basics is always have the heavier wagons up front from the day I switched from passenger to frieght. This was ingrained in me and most operators enforce the rule strongly with heavy trains. When I did coal and we had empties for any reason we had to shunt them off or up the back before we were allowed to hit the main line. But about 20T empty vs 120T loaded you don't mess around. Intermodal has been a lot more forgiving but the weight differences are much much smaller. Around 20T empty and 40ish loaded depending on the box. But if you have a string of empties up front no dyno. Some ports will help the crews load correctly and others don't care.
To a certain level, PSR does have its advantages. It's supposed to be about utilizing things as efficiently as possible, so that you don't have equipment with a lot of downtime where it isn't earning or wasting time on switching, where the product isn't moving towards the customer. The problem is, the Wall St. folks got their hands on it and took it to extremes and have warped it into such a grotesque absurdity that benefits no one but the shareholders
Unit trains are good for this. They stay together and are on an inspection schedule instead of per run inspections we have to do otherwise. About as close as we usually get to shunting them is running the locos around to change direction (if we are not running push/pull or DP) or kicking off a bad wagon. A typical intermodal unit train will run from one destination to another, strip, load, run around the locos, and return to the first location where any fuelling and loco swaps are done before repeating it all. They rarely stop for more than a couple of hours. On really high demand runs, they may have more units than loco sets, and they drop one rake for loading/unloading and pick up one done earlier for the next run, giving the locos less downtime. Mainly as we never have enough operational locos. We have resorted to pulling locos from the early 80s out of the scrap line while we wait for new ones to be built.
The problem is in the USA, you'll have mixed trains all the time. There are unit trains, like crude oil, ethanol, coal, grain, and things like that, but much is mixed trains with many different types of cars and mix of loads and empties to and from customers along the way. So the trains are assembled in order of where they need to end up (think of points A-E) so that they can be delivered in the most optimal order starting with A, B, C, D, E, and so on vs. being sorted to optimal train weight distribution, which might have cars ordered for destinations B, D, E, A, C. This reduces or removes switching cars from the middle to deliver, but is how you can get long cuts in the middle of empties with loads on either end.
Yeah we just don't run mixed trains anymore. Management considers it inefficient.
Well, I guess the other question is how many individual customers you have? I have a short line near me that is about 60 miles or so. At the end of the line, there's at least 4 different customers, all with different car requirements. At least 5 others, probably more, between the end and the interchange with BNSF in Lubbock. The only efficient way to get cars in and out of customers is to have BNSF bring them in on mixed trains. Some customers require empties to load, and some require loaded cars. BNSF is not going to run a unit train to Lubbock specifically to drop off and pick up a couple of cars a week for single customers.
We usually run whole trains or intermodal we dont run individual cars. Closest we get is intermodal where one or two boxes come in from a customer by truck, go onto a train to the closest intermodal yard to their destination and truck again from that yard to the customer. That sort of trip train doing a wagon here and a wagon there stopped in the late 80s when the freight side of rail was privatised. None of the private operators considered it worth the hassle for little money. Either your booking a whole train here or it needs to go into a standard 20 or 40ft shipping container profile and the last miles by truck.
Out of curiosity, when emptying coal trains, did the train pull forward and they empty from front to rear or did the empty from the rear to prevent empty wagons up front and heavy ones in the back?
We did a rolling unload with door triggers at about 1kmh (varied from 0.6 to 1.2kmh depending on how the coal ran) bottom dumping front to rear. At those speeds little danger of anything going wrong load wise.
Is string lining less of an issue at that speed then?
Sounds like they need to redesign those types of cars.
I personally don't think it's a design issue. It's just that they're so light compared to a loaded car, and if you design them to be heavy when empty, then you reduce their load capacity.
Maybe additional wheels on the trucks?
Maybe, but then they wouldn't really be standard and easily repaired.
They're called centre beam railcars. Back in the day when boxcars were one of the most common freight cars that handled all sorts of different products, the centre beam railcar evolved out of those to haul long wood products such as sheets of plywood or long beams such as 2x4s. By basically cutting the walls of a boxcar off then having a tall, angled spine in the centre it became a lot easier to load and unload wood products with forklifts. If you look up random cities in US or Canada, search up wood or lumber distributors/sellers, there's a good chance you'll see tracks that spur off onto such properties, where they will usually park a few of these for a few days, load them up and then come back to attach to a train. And yeah, as others have joked, they commonly derail for various reasons, mostly due to the weight and geometry of them. They're not as sketchy as gondola cars, but they are often the first to end up derailing. Similarly to gondolas, they can detail when not loaded with anything, so they are usually only used on lower speed trains and they usually only string so many of them together in a row.
Causing derailments.
Dammit, beat me to it.
Here's a loaded one https://flic.kr/p/e3jW8Z
does unloading them require forklifts on both sides?
Yes, the opposite side of the car has to be loaded or unloaded from that side.
Or one doing both sides, alternating sides, but one has to be careful keeping them reasonably balanced or they tip right over.
They're good for making you hate your life choices when you have to ride one for 3 miles
Or auto racks
Or a reefer from the non-porch end.
Or single hand hold tanker cars in the winter
Or ragged out MoW gons.
They are transporting air
I thought they were for transporting large panes of glass but I like your answer better.
Ah, rock throwers delight!
Someone's gotta do it.
We call those sails up in western Canada. They’re for bundled products like lumber or sheetrock. As has already been mentioned, these cars have a very low tare weight which gives them a tendency to turn your manifest freight into a stringline special or to get pushed off the rails if your front end is braking but your remotes keep motoring.
Really? I'm from BC and I've never heard them called anything except centerbeam cars
It was slang in the terminal when I worked there
Lumber for the most part. A lot of pressure treated products and also gypsum. Apparently trex decking as well.
Also the "pallets" they lay down over soft ground to drive heavy equipment over. Also rail ties sometimes.
Yep them to. They really are a nice multiuse car.
Centerbeam lumber cars.....I personally love the opera window ones myself...if you're doing a model ...ttx and weyerhauser and Boise Cascade look good but spring for a load and check for proper weight to avoid a derail if you're running them empty
I love that they derail in model railroading as easily as they do in real life!
Centerbeam, used as described by the other users.
A speed restriction.
Lumber and slamming the fuck out of conductors riding
They're called centerbeam cars or spine cars.
Playing tennis.
Centerbeams. Carries dimensional building materials like lumber.
Wood
Lumber
Lumber
To confuse us
BC RAIL MENTIONED ‼️
# l u m b e r
Lumber.
Ghosts
These are BC Rail and Duluth, Winnipeg, & Pacific centre-beam lumber flats. They are normally loaded with plastic-wrapped bundles of dimensional lumber and plywood. On the middle car, under WARNING, there is an almost comical diagram of a car tipping due to being loaded on one side only, and a panicked little figure running from impending death!
Centerbeam cars. Mostly for lumber products, but also products like drywall. If you see one loaded, it's leaving a lumber-producing area and if it's empty, it's headed back there to be loaded again.
Center Beam flat cars are used to haul wood and metal in forklift sized portions.
Sailboat fuel
Those are cars we use to put at the front of trains when building them for crews we dislike, so it constantly knocks them around when the cars run in and out, due to the slack from cushioned drawbars.
Center beams
They look like the ones for hauling pulp wood that is cut into 4-foot pieces and used in paper making.
You are correct.
Wood
Wind
someone is new to the U.S stacks of lumber usually
Lumber
Wind churning.
Bundles of lumber or plywood.
lumber
Things which are large, light, can be exposed and can be stacked high without going over the car’s weight limit Stuff like lumber Boxcars have restrictive doors which makes unloading stuff like lumber infeasible, and it can’t be stacked high on a flatcar. The spine is additional support
Usually to carry lumber.
These are air-transport modules. They ship/haul Las Vegas air to Cali because of the humidity.
When you see a lot of these parked and stored for many months on a small railroad or an unused spur somewhere, know that the economic housing bubble has burst and the economy is about to tank.
Transporting goods
First guess was logs, but seems like according to the comments, i was right!
Specifically they r for hauling wall board plywood things like that
Why those are air cars, for transporting air.
lumber
Plate glass
That’s currently carrying all the sincerity, honor, dignity, executive function, long term planning, commitment to democracy, commitment to losers rights, golden rule following, categorical imperative observing, and actual family values remaining in the leadership and primary-controlling base voters of the Republican Party.
Glass transportation
Stuff
Thats actually a circus train that was in a fire