Hi PRSL, I appreciate the information that you post and don't want to get in an argument with anyone. I would like to make a point however, that having been intimate with rerailing a steam locomotive, that rerailing frogs will not work at least in the situation I was involved in. The problem is that in the case I am thinking of the the frame of the trailing truck once dropped down over the rail leaves insuficient clearance for a rerailing frog. The area inside this frame between the rails is very hard to reach except with something flat like a plate that you can place one at a time. I've heard the same is true on some steam locomotives on the front end because of the cylinders. In our case which occured years back on a switch that has since been replaced, the various aspects of the switch were also a hinderance to rerailing in a text book manner. The heavy steel plates we used after a little experimenting were blocked in place with wood blocking to form ramps out of the stacked steel. Blocking wedged against the ties helped prevent the plates from shifting. It was crude, but not dangerous, as we were careful not to put ourselves in harms way in case something shifted and expecially when we were actually moving the engine. I suspect this method is more common than you might think as the local shortline running with diseasal derailed one truck of their engine on some track that spread last summer. There mgr. was giving me an account of how they rerailed it which was also with plates, and rocks and blocking. He said they could not get rerailing frogs inplace because of the location of the brake shoes on the engine. (As an asside, the mgr. had a little addtional excitement as he got down on his knees and started to arrange some of his material. There was a rattle snake between the rails under the derailed truck. A crew member saw it and yanked him by the collar back out of harms way of the snake which was ready to strike.) My observation is neither pro or con with regard to your advice to the C&TS.
