11-27-2019, 06:39 PM
(11-27-2019, 05:44 PM)KevinL Wrote: Can the freight movements be moved later into the evening, such as after the end of Ion service?
My understanding is that freight operations are allowed to send one train northbound between 23:00 and 01:00. From 01:00 to 05:00 freight has more or less unfettered use of its track. In practice, it’s a single southbound train somewhere around 04:00 or so.
This ties into the design of the interlocking. It is designed so that, short of sabotage, it is impossible for a freight train to enter track that is currently reserved for LRT. Before the derails can disengage, the LRT signals have to be set to red and the switches have to be aligned to take the freight through uptown, across the crossover at the Perimeter Institute, up the southbound LRT track, and onto the freight track where it branches off at Northfield. This implies that the LRT system is disconnected while this is happening.
I’m a bit unclear on some details. In particular, I don’t know how far the northbound freight has to get before the switches through Uptown can be moved to allow LRT to move. I would hope that once the freight has cleared the freight crossover, any southbound LRT waiting on the northbound track would be able to proceed across the LRT crossover and down to Willis Way; but maybe the freight has to get further than that (conceivably, it could be required to clear the derail at Northfield, although this would go beyond good safety planning and well into the realm of paranoia).
For southbound trains, my understanding is that LRT runs 3 south to Fairway before 05:00, starting at about 04:20. The first deadheads while the next 2 come into service at R&T. At this time there is no northbound service, because that can’t happen until the first LRT gets back from Fairway, which happens around 05:30. So the northbound LRT track can be used and the only interaction with freight is at the double crossover at the Perimeter Institute. My hope is that the freight would wait in the park for its turn; it should be possible for this movement not to cause noticeable impact on those early LRT runs. However, I have an idea that they might have to line up the entire route all the way through Uptown before the freight can come south of Northfield. I don’t know what time the freight actually goes through however; it may be that in practice they’re usually gone by the time first LRT goes out.
One thing I would like to know more about is how the freight spends its time. I think it takes about 4-5 hours to make the round trip from Uptown to Elmira and back. This seems like a lot of time, even with a certain amount of coupling and uncoupling of cars and with the slow speed at which they travel. So I wish I knew more about what specifically takes up the time. Maybe they are performing more individual actions than I realize, or maybe each one takes longer than I think, or maybe something else.