Leftover Maintenance

Short story: left montreal, still more problems with the computer measuring a half inch wider than what was actually there, the data streams failing completely, and hydraulic pump controls not working. Spent 2 days in Toronto fixing it, finally seems to be working alright now, and are in Sudbury for the weekend.

Longer story: After the customary wake-up-at-5:30-don’t-leave-till-9 in montreal, we were finally moving again! Something wasn’t quite right though, there were a lot more defects than there should have been, considering they had just replaced all the ties earlier that year. We stopped the car and physically measured the distance, and found that the car was measuring a half inch larger than what it was actually was, meaning a lot of the defects weren’t valid. And after about 40 miles, the GRMS (Guage Restraint Measuring System, measures the lateral stiffness of the rails) data stream failed completely. We stopped the car, rebooted everything, and it lasted 1.5 miles before failing again. We stopped again, rebooted, and it lasted about ¾ of a mile. We ran the rest of the way to Toronto without the GRMS running, and did some troubleshooting that evening until 10. 

Tuesday we spent all day troubleshooting, I got sent to bed at 12:30am, but the supervisor stayed up until 4am trying to get it to work. The failing data seemed to be speed correlated, that the faster we were going the more data was being processed and it overloaded the processors until it failed completely. But there was also noise in the network. So we bought new network hubs and moved some stuff around, and it seemed to work up to 55mph. Then the hydraulic pump controls weren’t working properly, so a whole lot more troubleshooting to fix that up. We continued testing on Wednesday, but it was still measuring half an inch wider. We took apart the cameras to see if they had been shaken loose, and by the time we had them back together we didn’t have enough time with the current crew to make it to Mactier, the next station, so we turned around and went back to Toronto. We re-calibrated the cameras from scratch, and discovered that whoever had done the calibration previously hadn’t done it correctly, which would explain the half-inch of measurement difference. There wasn’t much else to do except run and see how it turned out, so we went to bed for the first time that week before 11:00pm. 

Thursday we ran to Sudbury, and aside from the data flatlining occasionally, it recovered as it should and continued working. We couldn’t really continue any further, as we needed to be in a larger town to get groceries and any other supplies needed, so we stopped there for the weekend.