Wheel burn

Wow. This is some crazy wheel burn! Got these two photos from http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/show ... count=2375" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (but you have to be registered and logged-in to see it). Here's an offered explanation:
"Distributed power unit (DPU) on rear of train did not get the radio signal from front engine to shut down. No signal, last command was to throttle up. Maybe going up hill and needed pushing power.
Rest of train was stopped,brakes set, engineer and conductor out of hours? No one in cab to see dpu was still active. Everything that could go wrong just about did.

T.J. 27 years on old CNW- !4 years on UP"

Pretty drastic pictures you found. My brother is an engineer for a Class 1 and he was put on a ballast train one day where the track workers didn't set the spreader bar correctly to spread the ballast as it was unloaded and burned six holes in the track. Needless to say he gave the gandy-dancer foreman a well deserved "I told you so" after that day.

Why isn't there any automatic control to prevent this? I would think it wouldn't be difficult to reduce power when wheel slippage is noticed.

CLamb wrote:Why isn't there any automatic control to prevent this? I would think it wouldn't be difficult to reduce power when wheel slippage is noticed.

Normally you don't want to reduce power when you're getting wheel slip, you want more adhesion. This was probably a comm loss with the DPU and Headend. Or maybe the hoghead left the fence up or something lol Comm loss happens a lot on curvy terrain in deep canyons or through long tunnels.