N&W Shop Codes (Was: Stencil on RS-11 Air Tank)

[NW Mailing List]

Abram,

Regarding your post on air brake testing and stenciling, your thinking 
that I might improve on what you wrote is a rare mistake on your part.   
Although I worked as a supervisor in both the Shaffers Crossing 
Locomotive Roundhouse and the Shaffers Crossing Freight Car Repair 
Track, I did not appreciate the need to remember the details that you 
obviously did, and even if tried I could not have remembered them as you 
did.  At least I enjoyed seeing many familiar terms from years ago in 
your post, but I have nothing to add to your excellent account.

Gordon Hamilton

On 6/21/2023 10:41 AM, NW Mailing List wrote:
> Senator Rector's question about the stenciling on RS-11 main 
> reservoirs led to a comment about N&W Shop Codes.  Which is an 
> almost-forgotten topic.
> Below is a list of the Shop Codes which I have found.  There were 
> obviously a few others over the years, which have now been lost.
> The place we working stiffs saw these codes was in the COT&S stencil 
> on each side of each car. COT&S stood for 
> Cleaned-Oiled-Tested-and-Stenciled.  This information pertained to the 
> Triple Valve in the air brake system on each car.  (Modern weenies 
> insist on it being called the "Control Valve," but I refuse to be 
> reconstructed, so I still call it the Triple Valve.  The function of 
> that valve is to Charge, Apply and Release, and those functions are 
> three in number, and three is called Triple, so the device is still 
> the Triple Valve.  Harrumph !!! )
> At one time, every freight car had to go to a Shop Track every two (?) 
> years for test of its Triple Valve.
>
> At certain intervals (which I do not now recall,) the Triple Valve had 
> to be "Cleaned, Oiled and Tested," which was generally done just by 
> unbolting and removal of the Service and Emergency segments of the 
> valve, and replacing them with reconditioned and properly tested 
> valves segments.
> If either the Service or the Emergency portions of the Triple Valve 
> failed to work, the brakes on that car might not apply, or they might 
> not release, and if the piston did not move smoothly, in a graduated 
> fashion, but released violently, that could result in a "kicker" 
> situation where the air brakes on the entire train went into Emergency 
> braking.  And that caused delays and wrecks.
> The test of the Triple Valve given on a Shop Track was administered 
> with a bench-mounted or a portable test rack called the Single Car 
> Test Device.  The portable devices were mounted on a small 
> four-wheeled cart which could be pulled around the shop area.  I will 
> not attempt to describe how that device worked, as I would probably 
> mess up the description, but if you are interested in this topic you 
> will find descriptions in the Westinghouse Air Brake literature.
> So, to keep track of this periodicity of testing, each car which had 
> received the was stenciled with the date and location of the latest 
> test.  The stencil would read something like this:  COT&S SC 11-5-65.  
> When Car Inspectors did their inbound train inspections, cars overdue 
> for COT&S were tagged and set out.  All the shop tag would say was 
> "COT&S" and everyone knew what that meant.  (Well, most people.)
> Things in the air brake side of railroading began to improve with the 
> invention of the Neoprene Gasket and the Neoprene Diaphragm, somewhere 
> around 1959.  The great advance touted for the #26  brake equipment on 
> engines was the introduction of the Neoprene diaphragm, replacing the 
> moving brass piston.  Pistons required good, effective lubrication in 
> order to function properly; Neoprene diaphragms did not.  And inside 
> the freight car air brake Triple Valves, a diaphragm replaced one of 
> the moving parts there, too.  If you ever see an air brake marked 
> "ABDW," the letter W indicates it functions with a diaphragm.  "W" 
> stands for Wilson, the Westinghouse mechanical engineer who invented 
> the improvement, and the company named the new version in his honor.  
> "AB," of course, stands for Air Brake, and D was the fourth version of 
> the equipment since the AB valve replaced the original Type K Triple 
> Valve sometime in the 1930s.  As of my last contact with active 
> railroading, the latest version of the Triple Valve was the ABDWX, and 
> as I recall the "X" version incorporated some improvement designed to 
> address the problem of drastically increasing train lengths.
> The railroads (and the lobbyists) have at last convinced the Feds that 
> all these improvements have resulted in freight cars which can run 
> forever without any attention to their air brake equipment, and now 
> days the only time a car gets its Triple Valve tested is when it goes 
> into a shop for some other work (e.g. broken carrier iron, bent 
> ladder, door problems, draft gear work, brake beam, wheel work, wreck 
> damage or whatever.)  Just think about that for a while.....  And as I 
> recall, the period for required change-out of locomotive air brake 
> equipment is now 96 months.
> There was another Shop Track test of the Triple Valve, which did not 
> require removal of the Triple Valve components.  That test was called 
> the Single Car Test and was given with the portable Single Car Test 
> Device.  This was a pretty complicated and sensitive test and men who 
> administered it had to be trained and certified on the test device and 
> procedure.  Cars which received this test were stenciled "IDT" with 
> the date, e.g.  IDT 11-5-65.  "IDT" meant "In Date Test."   The shop 
> code may also have been included in the IDT stenciling, I just can't 
> remember.
> Without doubt I have garbled a few details in the above description, 
> especially as relates to the intervals at which the COT&S and the IDT 
> tests were required.  Mr. Gordon Hamilton, an N&W Mechanical Engineer 
> who worked with such things, can level out the bumps in my rag-tag, 
> fuzzy little Brakeman-grade description.  Shucks, it was all I could 
> handle to switch out the red cars from the green ones, without making 
> a mistake...
> So, here are the Shop Codes, as best I have them:
> BL N&W Bluefield WV
> BR N&W Bristol VA
> CL N&W Clare Yard OH Cincinnati
> CO N&W Joyce Yard OH Columbus
> CR N&W Crewe VA
> DE N&W Denniston VA
> DU N&W Durham NC
> HA N&W Hagerstown MD
> IA  N&W Iaeger WV
> KE N&W Kenova WV
> LP N&W Lambert Point Yard VA Norfolk
> LY N&W Lynchburg VA
> NK N&W Norfolk VA
> NO N&W Norton VA
> PO N&W Portsmouth OH
> PR N&W Princeton WV after 1959 (previously VGN)
> RA N&W Radford VA
> RI N&W Richlands VA
> RO N&W Roanoke VA
> SC N&W Shaffers Crossing VA Roanoke
> SH N&W Shenandoah VA
> WC N&W Wilcoe Yard VA Farm
> WI N&W Williamson WV
> Has anyone assembled a list of Shop Codes used on the Virginian?  That 
> would be a good job for Attorney Jerome Sandermann and Judge Bongiovanni.
> I have never looked up the exact origin of railroad shop codes.  But 
> the Safety Appliance Act of 1896 would be a good place to start 
> looking for the origins.  All those requirements were taken over in 
> the ICC regulations, and all that morphed into truly massive Title 49 
> of the United States Code of Federal Regulations... good grief.  You 
> can get Title 49 USC for free on the Internet and learn more than you 
> ever wanted to know about the regulations under which American 
> railroads must operate.
> reading that volume is a good replacement for sleeping pills.
> If anyone wants, I can take photos of a few brass air brake pistons 
> from the insides of Triple Valves, which now live here.
> I also give advice on Farming, Horse Racing, the Lottery and Women.  
> If you need counsel in any of these areas, Mr. Rector, just send me a 
> Telegram.
> -- abram burnett,
> Send Up Your Old Turnips - Get Remanufactured Ones Back !
>      ... and we will stencil them for COT&S and IDT, too !
>
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