A train just derailed down the street from my house.

Yeah I too am curious as to how trains can derail. Switches not fully closed?

 

All that carnage, and not one power line is down. Amazing!

 

Let us know how long the clean up takes. I'm curious.

 

I will go by there again today after church and see how the clean up progress is going. Personally, I hope it shuts down the rail system for a long time. I hate the trains in this town. They park across intersections so you have to go several miles out of your way to get to the street you need to or if they are moving, they take forever to open up the rail crossing and there is a train that comes through every night around 2am or 3am and the guy lays on his horn for about 15 seconds every time he comes through town. Numerous people have complained to the railroad but they won't do anything about it. The guy does it just to be a jerk too. I have spoken with a few of the other engineers and they know who the guy is and they even say he does it to be a jerk. I'm glad nobody was hurt in this crash but all I could think was I don't feel the least bit sorry for the railroad losing all the money they are because of the inconvenience they cause the people in this town and the one guy that wakes up our entire town every night when he comes through.

 

Talk to the county or state and get a noise ordinance so he can't blow his horn after dark. That's what we have here. I can see railroad tracks from my window and I never hear the train after dark.

 

We have done that but the rail road has the County Commissioners in their back pocket and they too refuse to do anything about it. For a small town, we have a ton of political corruption unfortunately.

 

That's not the case most of the time. In the winter, the tracks shrink a bit and can actually pull apart, and in the hot months, the tracks expand and produce what is called sun kinks that can happen for hundreds or thousands of feet where the tracks make a rapid bendy motion back and forth and stick like that. Instant derailments for these situations. There is also machine failure. Main line railroads are dangerous.
Here is an example:

http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1214266_.html

 

Interesting. Never heard of this and I've been to tons of railroad events and ridden many trains. I even have a 1.5" scale steamer that I used to ride around.

 

Google sun kinks and the pics are not pretty. My dad was a train hobby guy forever, and we had never heard of this stuff either. Then my brother got a job with UP, and the stuff he learned and told us about was scary. They even have small sensors on the tracks called hot-box detectors, and they are in place to sense the heat of the axles passing over the top of them to monitor wheel bearing temp.

 

That small scale steamer is neat. What kind of fuel does it run to heat the boiler?

 

This one's propane fired. Behind the engine is the tender that carries a LP tank and has a seat for controlling the engine. It's pretty cool when it's puffing. I tried selling it a couple times but I want about 15k for it and the market was pretty weak during the recession.

 

That would be a blast! So I'm assuming you have a track set up for it?

 

If it was human error, the entire crew will be fired.

Too much drawbar tension will pull the cars off of the track in the middle of a curve, too much speed going down a hill transitioning to an uphill where the rear of the train overruns the front....

Any number of things can cause this.


Or it could have been track damage.

 

Not anymore. Everything else I had is sold. My grandpa built 3 engines, a couple gondolas, a couple flat beds, a caboose, and about 3,500 ft of track. This 0-4-0 steamer was the cream of the crop and is the last thing left because it's worth quite a bit more than everything else. It has about $24,000 in it. It's only been test run, hasn't pulled anything like the other engines did. They used to pull kids at train events and stuff.

 

We get trains here too, sometimes in early morning hours. At first it used to wake me up, but I've gotten used to it.

 

My wife grew up in this town and her parents house is literally 100 feet from the tracks so she sleeps right through them but in the 10 years that we have been in this town, they still wake me up.

 

This. Love that song, btw.

 

I just looked sun kinks up, and you're right, they're not pretty. I'd be scared shitless if I were in a train going over some of that stuff. Yikes!

 

I bet that was loud as hell