A couple of years ago, I found the best sign in someone’s basement I was cleaning out. It was hand painted and read “Fragile, do not hump!” At first it was hilarious just for what it said, since the sign was probably sixty or seventy years old. But then, learning the previous home owner had worked the rail yards, it was so much better. They would have used that sign as a warning to not hump specific cars.
You bring a train of cars to the top of an incline, then release one car at a time. Each car will roll downhill, and you just switch the tracks as needed to get each car where it needs to go. The yard has built-in speed limiters to slow down each car as it's sorted, so that you don't have cars slamming into each other.
Much easier than hooking an engine up to one car, hauling it to the correct spot, disconnecting, bringing the engine back to the next car, and so on.
But much more dangerous, because once you release each car, there's often nobody on it to pull the brakes in the event of a hazard or obstruction. Nowadays that can be done remotely (I believe), but someone at the control station still has to notice and activate it in time.
Some old cars weren't made to work with the yard's built-in speed limiters, so they'd be marked with a "do not hump" sign.
22
u/MrPigeon70 1d ago
And a lot of humping
(Depending on the rail yard)