transportation – Page 4 – Geeky Girl Engineer

Durbin Rocket

Posted on June 3, 2016 by geek

I took a ride on the Durbin Rocket this afternoon. The Climax geared logging locomotive was built in 1910 and powers a vintage train, including an old postal car. The train is indeed a rocket, as it moves along at a whopping 8 miles per hour. At one point a butterfly passed us. The roundtrip route from Durbin, West Virginia, however is gorgeous as it follows the Greenbriar River in the Monongahela National Forest. The only problem is after seeing all the smoke the coal burning created, I feel the need to go plant an entire grove of trees.

The locomotive

A look inside the locomotive

Greenbriar River

An old telegraph pole

Greenbriar River

Locomotive and coal supply car

Coal fired steam engine blowing smoke

Irises by the Greenbriar River

Greenbriar River

Durbin Rocket traveling by a field

Refilling the locomotive with water on the return trip

Stream where train stops to refill water for engine

Greenbriar River

Billy Bishop Airport

Posted on May 29, 2016 by geek

Billy Bishop Airport opened up its behind the scenes areas for Doors Open Toronto. The airport is located on a little island just off of downtown. By just off of, I mean late last year they opened a pedestrian tunnel connecting it to the mainland, so you can literally walk to the island. They pulled out a lot of the equipment they use for maintenance including snow removal and also for emergencies including fire fighting. They have so really cool equipment. One thing I found really interesting was that they don’t use a snow plow on the runways; they use a snow brush. The snow brush is better because of the short length of the runways. They use plows for taxi areas and places where cars go. The brushes also are used during the summer to remove rubber build up from the runways. Planes braking as they land leave rubber marks, and when enough builds up, it lowers the traction, so the rubber has to be removed. They spray a chemical to the runway, then come through with the brush to break up the rubber.

New pedestrian tunnel linking airport to mainland

View from a hanger

Snow brusher

Front of snow brusher, the brush

Snow plow

Fire truck in action

Fire truck

TTC Leslie Barns

Posted on May 28, 2016 by geek

As a part of Doors Open Toronto, I got to tour Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) Leslie Barns. Leslie Barns is a streetcar maintenance and storage facility, and it is brand new. It is not completely finished, but it is already being used. I had to ask several employees about this because I find it difficult to believe that it is being used at all. It is without a doubt the cleanest, neatest, prettiest maintenance facility I have ever been in. If you look at my blog at all, you will see I have seen a few. I love touring them. This place is ridiculously clean and organized. The pipes are not only labeled, but they are also color-coded. It makes my chemical engineering heart go pitter patter. The facility was built for the new street cars that Toronto is purchasing, which are very sleek looking. The place has a paint booth, maintenance areas, and car wash for street cars. Outside is a storage area for the street cars, and in the middle of it is a stormwater retention pond.

Pipes and ducts and everything else

Overhead crane lift area

Maintenance area

Work area between two tracks

Brand new street car

Pipes, ducts, and gantry galore

Look at these beautifully labeled and color-coded pipes

Ridiculously organized supply area

Street car in the paint booth

Doors for street cars to enter the facility

Street car in the storage area

Stormwater retention pond in middle of storage yard with facility in background

Storage area with view of downtown Toronto

Re-Ball

Posted on May 22, 2016 by geek

Dupont Underground is an abandoned trolley station underneath Dupont Circle that recently had a design competition to reuse a whole lot of plastic balls from National Building Museum’s The Beach. The winning entry was Raise/Raze, which formed the balls into 3 x 3 cubes that were used to build columns and walls in a portion of Dupont Underground. The structures built by the balls were rather interesting, especially when considering they were built with spheres. I also rather liked the way the cube blocks mimicked the tiles on the outer wall of the underground.

Grand Avenue Central Maintenance Facility

Posted on May 16, 2016 by geek

On the level above the Grand Avenue Bus Depot is the Grand Avenue Central Maintenance Facility, which can do repairs, overhauls, and painting of buses. It can also handle compressed natural gas (CNG) buses, which are not allowed in the bus depot below for safety reasons. The facility has storage of parts galore, two huge paint booths, and numerous bays for repairing buses. Also, at the time I was there, it had a vintage bus in for repair, which was really cool to see. There were also all these cool looking parts for the buses, none of which I could identify.

Buses in maintenance bays

Bus in for maintenance

Back of the bus with all the stuff that makes it run

Fans for bus mechanical parts

Engine pulled out from bus

Wheel parts

Methane sensors in ceiling of facility. Facility handles CNG buses, so special sensors needed.

Bus paint booth

Bus in paint booth. Machine on wall is a platform with spray gun for a painter to paint from.

Vintage bus

Vintage bus with poor man’s lock out tag out “Do not start bus”

Grand Avenue Bus Depot

Posted on May 15, 2016 by geek

I toured the New York MTA’s Grand Avenue Bus Depot with the New York Transit Museum. The depot is relatively new, which is evident when you are inside. I don’t know much about bus depot design, but I was astounded by the amount of ventilation in the building. Considering the number of vehicles going and in and out every day, the ventilation is needed, but still I was surprised by the amount of it. The bus depot occupies the first level of this huge building, and the second level holds the Central Maintenance facility. They are considered to be different facilities. The bus depot is, well, a depot, or parking area for when the buses are not in use. The depot also where regular maintenance is performed and everyday activities like fueling, money removal, and washing.

Multiple bays for maintenance

Regular maintenance performed on buses

Hoses needed for normal maintenance hang from ceiling

Lanes for parking and to maintenance bays

Buses parked closely until needed

I asked the facility manager what this garage style door was for. He looked at it and me and said he had never been asked that and wasn’t actually sure. Leave it to me to be able to stump people.

Confession: Other people in the group asked the depot manager to please let us go through bus wash, so he granted their wishes, and we all boarded a bus and went through a wash.

Bus wash

The ceilings and walls were almost completely filled with ventilation ducts, pipes, and conduits.

Ventilation everywhere

Ventilation, pipes, and conduit everywhere.

I couldn’t get over the amount of conduit.

One of my favorite parts of the tour was learning that they vacuum money out of the fare box. MTA buses only accept coin and not bills. They hook up a hose to outlet at the bottom of the fare box, and the money is vacuumed out to secure boxes where it falls into bags or some other movable containers. The staff of the facility never touches the money. Then the money is removed from the boxes on a regular basis by armed staff. I think it is because I have a B.S. in chemical engineering that I found this so fascinating. We learned about pipes and other conduits and pump design for fluids. Coins are obviously not fluids. I am intrigued by the design that would be needed by items that are going to bounce around and not flow the way a fluid does. Also the pressure needed to pull coins out must be interesting.

The outlet at the bottom of the fare box is where a hose is inserted to vacuum out the money. They vacuum the money to a secure box.

Hoses and vacuum pump used to vacuum money out of fare boxes.

NY East 180th Street Maintenance Shop

Posted on December 14, 2015 by geek

I was lucky enough to get the chance to tour New York’s MTA East 180th Street Maintenance Shop. The maintenance shop is located in the Bronx and is one of several shops that service NY subway cars. It was built in 1917 and has been renovated more recently. There are six shops inside the shop and 26 storage tracks outside the shop in the yard. The shop is constantly doing maintenance on the subway cars, and also while we were there at least, had two old trains inside, including one World War II (or possibly older) era train. In short, if you are a transit nerd, this place is totally cool. We got to walk alongside trains and see their underside. We got to see parts of the train that normally you never get to see, or at least you never get to see unless you are about to be hit by one.

The outside storage yard

Two trains inside the shop. The one of the right is clearly a vintage one.

Looking down one of the inside tracks

View underneath one of the trains. Not a view you normally get.

A rail of an inside track. I never did find out where you place the main bugs.

A really cool looking part underneath an older train

An older train with fading paint

Underside of an older train, which I find fascinating due to the duct tape and marking to designate two different technologies or parts from when NY had three different subway systems.

An old train which has clearly seen better days

An old rail car that was converted to a rail adhesion train, used to add sand or a coating when leaves start to coat the rails. It is no longer, or rarely used, as contractors are hired to clear the rails of leaves.

Looking down the inside tracks from the rail entrance to the shop

Rail at entrance to shop

Rail inside the shop

Brooklyn Army Terminal

Posted on October 18, 2015 by geek

As part of Open House New York, I toured the Brooklyn Army Terminal. It was built at the end of World War I and was a huge military base that was used to transfer people and materials from land to sea. It was built in an entirely utilitarian design and in the incredibly short time of 17 months. However, its utilitarian design is what I find incredibly interesting. Building B has this huge atrium with two sets of railroad tracks. Trains would travel directly into the building where material would be off and on loaded from various levels. There are several bridges connecting several buildings so that material could be moved between buildings on vehicles without interfering with the train traffic below. The atrium is dramatic, and I love that the concrete pour lines are visible.

Building B Atrium

Building B Atrium loading docks

Building B Atrium

Building B entrance, the black lines show where railroad tracks originally were

Exterior of Building A

Building A

Bridge between Building A and Annex

Bridge between Building A and B

NY Nostalgia Ride

Posted on August 8, 2015 by geek

I have been a member of the NY Transit Museum for a couple of years now, and they always have fun excursions. Some of the excursions, you probably have to be a transit geek to fully appreciate though. Anyway, today I took one of their nostalgia rides. It started in Grand Central Terminal where we boarded a vintage WWI rail car. We then went all the way down to the end of the 6 line, which is the Brooklyn Bridge station, then took the loop through the Old City Hall subway station, and came back up to our final destination of Pelham Bay Park station. There we boarded vintage buses to either Orchard Beach Park or City Island. We spent a couple of hours there before heading back to our vintage rail car and back to Grand Central Terminal.

The destinations were nice, and the ride was so much fun. The train and buses were in great condition. Honestly they were in better condition than some of the modern ones in which I have ridden. Since the journey was supposed to be part of the fun, they slowed down as we went by a few abandoned subway stations including the Old City Hall station. With the exception of the Old City Hall station, which they keep in good condition for tours, the other abandoned stations were completely abandoned and filled with graffiti and sand bags and debris. They also let people stand in the front and take photos out the front window, but I actually got better photos on a previous trip with them. Of course I still love looking.

Another wonderful thing about this trip was people’s reactions. My guess would be that about 80% of the people in the subways didn’t even see that a rather different train was going by or did see and didn’t seem to think much of it. Most of the rest would either look at the train with a rather confused look of “what is that?” or would quickly grab their camera and smile. There were a few people who are evidently transit fans and knew we were coming and were already set up with still and video cameras and some even with tripods. There was at least one at every aboveground station we went through, and there also some on the ground to get photos of the buses. As a certifiable geek and nerd, I can completely relate and and admire them. Then there were the MTA employees who seemed to be just as excited about the vintage train and buses as we were. They took as many photos as we did. This included workers repairing tracks who stopped what they were doing, took photos, and waved at us (see photo below). I am not even sure why we all get so excited about these vintage vehicles. Maybe it is because nothing mechanical or electrical seems to last that long anymore, so we are all excited by the things that do.

WWI rail car in Grand Central Terminal

WWI rail car fan and ads

WWI rail car interior

WWI rail car coming into Pelham Bay Park station

vintage bus

abandoned subway station somewhere along the 6 line

view from the Bronx River bridge

rail workers taking photos as we pass by

WMATA L’Enfant Plaza Fire

Posted on January 13, 2015 by geek

Today there was a fire in a WMATA subway tunnel near L’Enfant. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is now investigating, and I have confidence that they will do a thorough investigation. I have some questions about actions taken right after the smoke was reported that no one, or at least no one in the media I have seen, has asked. The station filled with smoke, and they evacuated it. WMATA stopped running green and yellow trains through L’Enfant. However they kept running blue, orange, and silver trains through, but these trains did not stop at the station, as they normally would. For those not familiar with L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station, orange, blue, and silver lines share the same track on the lower level, and yellow and green share the same track on the upper level. My question is, were they sure it was safe to keep sending the orange, blue, and silver trains through? I am not asking from the standpoint of the fire, because presumably, they traced the location of the smoke enough to know it was not in the lower tunnel. By safe, I mean because of the potential inhalation of smoke in the lower level tunnels. If the station filled with enough smoke that it needed to be evacuated, then how were they sure that smoke would not enter the trains running through it?

A couple of quick points:

Just because air smells bad doesn’t necessarily mean it is toxic or hazardous, but conversely, just because air smells fine doesn’t mean it is safe.
Particulate matter in air and/or smoke is in general not something you really want to breath, but there are different levels of toxicity associated with it. That is, some particulate matter is not more than just an irritant. However, the effect particulate matter has on a person is also affected by that person’s health. People with respiratory issues are more susceptible to any effects.
Exposure to hazardous or toxic materials can cause effects on different time scales. People who were trapped on the WMATA train in the tunnel, would have acute (short-term) effects from breathing the smoke, such as coughing and having trouble breathing. However, they were probably also exposed to chemicals whose effect is not immediate, such as carcinogens.

The questions I have, that I have not heard anyone ask include:

What is the air exchange rate between the subway trains and the surrounding air? Can the ventilation be turned off manually, so that there was no air exchange between the train and the surrounding air while the trains were near L’Enfant?
Were there any measurements taken of the air in L’Enfant, particularly on the lower level where the orange, blue, and silver trains were still running through? If so, what were the measurements of? Just measuring particulate matter will not indicate almost nothing about organic compounds or other chemicals in the air.
How far did the smoke spread?
Assuming air measurements were taken, did anyone calculate the amount of contaminants that people in the trains would be exposed to while running through the station based on time and air exchange rate?

My educated guess is that no air measurements were taken. There are probably some sensors in place to measure smoke, but depending on how that measurement is taken, it will tell you information about the particulate matter and that is it. I seriously doubt there was initially any sensors that measured organic compounds or any other type of compounds in the air. I have my doubts that any portable system was put in place during the response. The priority would have been evacuating people (as it should have been). It is possible that WMATA had some qualitative data that there was not much smoke on the lower level. That is, someone may have looked at a video screen and decided the air didn’t look bad. However, unless they had actual quantitative data of what was in the air, then visual assessment of air is a really bad way to make assessments on the quality of the air.

The early statements by WMATA and all other sources, like the fire departments involved, was that they did not know the source of the fire, location or cause. Thus they could not have possibly known what was burning and what would be in the air. For example, if wood is burning, you can expect certain chemicals in the air. If rubber is burning, you can expect different chemicals in the air. WMATA probably decided that the air on the lower level didn’t look that bad, and the trains would go through the station quickly enough that very little exposure would occur. They very well may be right, but with no data and no statements about any calculations, they have no way to prove that. Also, did they inform their passengers of this? If I was on a train, and I knew that the train was going to go through, but not stop, at a station that was filling with smoke, I would get off the train. I don’t feel the need to expose myself unnecessarily to hazardous substances, even if in small amounts. I do not like standing near people who are smoking. The second hand smoke may only minimally increase my risk of disease, but I still don’t see the need for that tiny increase. Thus, was WMATA considering passengers’ exposures at all? Furthermore, did they communicate the possibility of exposure to their passengers on the orange/blue/silver lines to allow their passengers to make their own educated decision about staying on the train? My guess is the answer to both those questions is no, and that is another thing to which WMATA should be made to respond.