PHANTOM SHUNTER

Hokitika Guardian, 20 July 1929, Page 1

PHANTOM SHUNTER

NEW RAILWAY DEVICE. TRUCKS SCOUTED RY STEEL . , DISCS. IJONDON, May 24. I have just been watching goods trains being marshalled and shunted by an automatic device very similar in appearance to a steel gramophone record, writes a correspondent of the “Daily Chronicle.” This record is the “star turn” of the most wonderful shunting yard in the country,\ if not in the world, that has just been brought into operation by the L.N.E.R. at .March, its great East Anglian key point for goods traffic. In this effort to meet the nationwide, demand for a speeding-up of rail traffic, thirty miles of new railway track have been laid down. The centre point of the yard is known as the Hump, a small artificial hill with a steep gradient, down which runs a single track of metals acting as a bottle-neck between the ten reception tracks above and the forty marshalling tracks in the yard be’ow. GIGANTIC TYPEWRITER. Tnto the reception track steam goods trains from all parts of the country, ready to be split up into thirty or forty new trains for various destinations, and the ooject of the Hump, the gramophone record,” the control tower and the other devices of the yard is to do this splitting-up in the shortest possible time. A goods train from the Midlands reaches the top of the Hump. It consists of fifty waggons that are going in ones, twos and threes, to thirty different destinations. A porter goes along the (.rain and makes out a list of tlie destination and shunting siding of' every waggon or group of waggons, at tlie same time uncouping them. i.e sends, this list by pneumatic tube to the control tower, where the control officer, working a sort of gigantic tpyowriter as fast as any city typist, translates the order of running on to the steel record.

This record is then connected with .no switch points, of which there are fifty or sixty, and which it automatically controls, and as fast as the waggons come down the slope from the Hump it sends each of them to its appointed siding. It cannot make a mistake, and it worus throe times as fast as any signalman.

The object of tlio steep gradient on the Hump is to get enough clearance between each waggon so that there i; sufficient (time—about a second—for the points to lie changed. But the speed down the gradient- —about fifteen miles an hour—is too fast for shuntin''' purposes, and that is where anothei feature of the system comes into operation.

At the foot of the slope there are hydraulic brakes, called retarders, which grip the tyres of the wheels and slow down the speed to a few miles nr lioilr or whatever speed the eontio 1 tower men think desirable.