Easy and hard derailments

Derailments seem to fall into two categories, easy and really really hard. Empty cars, geese, diesel locos, and lead and trailing trucks of steam locomotives seem to fall into the easy category. Frogs and a few blocks of wood (preferably oak), maybe a track jack will usually get the easy ones back on the rail with a reasonable amount of sweat, persistence, and reasonably quickly.

The real fun ones are loaded cars, and maybe steam loco drivers. It is a whole different ball game getting a loaded car back on. I have minimum experience with steam loco drivers, but from what I have seen they can be challenging. Loaded cars don't like frogs and wood blocks.

Good tools help. I remember many years ago being transferred from the SP "Pacific Lines" to the "T&L" in Texas. The Pacific Lines generally had good track and derailments tended to be rare. But the T&L had a lot of bad track and on some jobs it was rare to finish a shift without going on the ground. What I found interesting is because derailments out west were so rare, we pretty much were left to our own devices to fix the problem....meaning frogs, blocks and so on. But around Houston derailments were so common we had fancy hydraulic rerailing trucks that would arrive quickly, pick one end of an empty car up, and set it back on what remained of the track. Of course, loads were another story.

Just the mental meanderingss of an old fart. FWIW.

JBWX



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2010 12:18PM by John West.