HOW IT ALL WORKS - All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide - page 172

their coaches or sleepers and boxes, crates, and heavy suitcases
can be unloaded right out of the baggage car onto the waiting
carts. The engineer often gets some help in spotting the train by
radio from the conductor, the baggage handler, or the station
agent. If the train is longer than the platform—often the case in
small-town stations—the engineer will have to “double-spot” the
train, meaning the train will stop to unload and board passengers
into the sleepers, then pull ahead to repeat the process for pas-
sengers riding in coaches on the rear.
Hills and Curves
When it comes to railroading, flatter is better. (That is, in fact,
why railroad tracks were often built along the banks of rivers.)
Hills, referred to as grades , can be a problem. Because of the
train's immense weight, the steeper the grade, the more difficult it
is to negotiate. The engineer's main concern is to keep the loco-
motive's wheels from slipping, causing a sudden loss of traction.
To keep that from happening, he must apply just enough power
to do the job, reducing speed gradually if necessary. Driving your
family car up a slope in icy conditions is a pretty good com-
parison. Speaking of ice, poor weather conditions just make an
engineer's job that much tougher. Most locomotives are equipped
with sanders, which sprinkle sand on the rails just ahead of the
locomotive's driving wheels to give them better traction. Take a
close look at the wheels of a locomotive when you next have the
opportunity, and you'll see what looks like a small metal tube
pointing right down at the track directly in front of the wheel.
That's it—that's the sander.
Railroad people measure the steepness of a grade in terms of
percent. A one-percent grade means that the track rises (or falls)
one foot for every 100 feet of rail. For a typical Amtrak passenger
train, grades of two percent can be handled without any particu-