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Another train derailment
brier-49
Member Posts: 7,090 ✭✭✭✭
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My Dad was in the RR "rebuilding" business for years. Always said it seemed the railroads never wanted to spend money on keeping the rail system in proper repair.
Seems standard for most business or industry. Repair/maintenance is way down the list of things to spend money on.
Does seem a little odd, eh,,,
spontaneous come apart
I think it happens waymore often just not in the news
Derailing not uncommon weather conditions especially heat can distort and buckle rails countless videos on trains and train cars being put or retailed on the internet
Poor maintance may be part of it but anything mechanical has issues
Just look at the rockets that have had major explosions and how well they are gone over
Cars did not just flop over. Broken rail and misaligned rails. Train had been moving, probably not at a high speed but it definitely had been moving. I worked on the NS for 40 years in the track dept. mostly as a track foreman and dealt with everything from just a set of trucks on the ground to 20+ car derailments. I have an intricate knowledge of these events.
I cross Norfolk Southern rails 6 times a day on my bus route. If I know there's a train coming, I stop well back from the crossing. There was a coal car derailment across the river a few years back. It would have taken out any vehicles that were near the crossing.
Rail cars do not just flip over, unless there was a tornado in the area and I don’t see any weather damage around.
It looks to me like they started to pull on a curve and the air wasn’t all the way released on the rear end of the train. It’s called a string line effect. The two motors/engines start pulling and if the rear end isn’t moving the motors will pull the cars to the inside of the curve, and with enough force to brake the rail and lay the cars on their side like that.
As far as they’re not being all the noise you expect. Those people living that close to tracks are more than likely use to hearing trains pull, just laying a stacker car like that on it’s side wouldn’t be much louder than and empty grain train pulling.
After 42 years on the railroad I’ve seen them on their side, upside down, sideways and so mangled up they just bulldozed them off the track and cut the cars up. The engineer will get the blame.
Just remember when your stopped at a crossing or see some one with their car pulled up with just a couple feet to get a head start
Any thing can and does happen and a train wins out
Stay back far enought to give your self at least a little room to get out of there or at least a fast prayer
I worked with several morticians over the years one told me the worst day of his career was early on his family owend a furneral home
any way a car with the whole family was hit at a crossing not the trains fault this had To be about 50 yrs ago
But he had to pick up all the parts along the tracks and the kids involved will always be in his memories
He has also passed on cancer took him he was good guy and fun to work with
RIP JIm
Memories of the movies they made us watch when I was taking drivers Ed back around '71. One of those old B&W fliks was made in the 50's and it was called "Mechanized Death" Gross enough to never ever forget!
Back in the mid 70s I was working in a body shop in a small town. An old man drives a car in for an estimate. It is torn up from the front to the back all four sides. We asked him what happened and he told us that he was sitting waiting for a train, and got distracted and slowly moved into the train. It caught him and flipped him around and around and finally cut loose. He drove it to the body shop for the estimate. Soon after that, the cops showed up. He was shook up, but not hurt. The train was probably moving fairly slowly through town.