Following the “how long” wreck question…
What’s the furthest / weirdest place you’ve seen part of a wrecked car get to?
I know of a loco falling out the end of a yard and rolling down a road a fair bit and a ferrywagon that got dredged back out of a harbour - in bits… and NO I have absolutely no knowledge of how it got in there…
Back in the 60’s, the DL&W local ended-up in some old woman’s living room while a “prayer meeting” was taking place. This happened in my hometown of Gladstone, NJ, which is the end of that line to Hoboken.
Years ago I think in Trains was the story of a car that tipped over while in a train on a mountainside. Took the trucks and everything. So the train went into emergency and recoupled. the brakeman recoupled the air hoses figuring that was the problem. It took them months to figure out where the car went.
That’s an old Erie Railroad tale. The car went into a swamp, not down a mountain side. The Old Dog has seen old newspaper accounts posted on the web.
Have fun
Didn’t see it firsthand, but in Sacramento, a boxcar went off the tracks in the Southern Pacific Shops & Yard complex and barreled across I Street, smacking directly into the front door of Espanol Italian Restaurant (long story.) After the repairs were complete, the owner of Espanol mounted a large cannon above the entrance, pointed at the SP yards, as a threat in case another incident occurred.
The restaurant isn’t there anymore, but the cannon (actually a wooden cannon) stayed put until the whole block got leveled to make room for a freeway–the restaurant is in a new location a couple of miles away and they have a great O scale model of the restaurant in their lobby, complete with cannon, and reprinted articles about the great runaway boxcar!
Not too long ago, here in the UP yards, one of the radio controlled switcher operators wasnt paying attention and ran his loco off the track, through a yard office (sadly killing 2 people) and it was still running! Had he been inside the engine, it might not have happened.
I don’t remember where it was on the internet, but I read a story a while back of railroad personnel finding a pair of freight car trucks next to a mainline. The trucks looked fairly new so the question was where did they come from?
Turns out that in a rail yard miles down the line, a freight train was parked with its couplers still fully stretched. In the middle of the train…a tank car, still coupled,… with no trucks!!
That would have been one cool photo!
ive seen some beer cars off about 700 feet from the tracks after a small derailment.
The worst real life one i saw was on one of those TV shows…“Amazing Stupid Human Tricks” or something like that …anyway…a container train was put on the wrong track by the yard dispatcher and the engineer decided to go for it anyway… he took out nine containers by pulling them under a bridge that was too low for the train to pass under…once he saw it wasn’t working and he took out the first 9 containers, he decides to back the train, further damaging the containers…he caused over $3 million dollars in damage to the contents in the containers not including the damage to the train cars…My bet is that this particular engineer doesn’t work for the railroad anymore…chuck
I like the pic of the deisel that ran off into the turn table pit on CSXSUCKS.com.
How about the bottom of Boston Harbor?
You’ll find an entire freight train, including the loco, that rolled off a ferry boat when the brakes were not tied down properly.
This was back in the 1950’s I beleive.
The important question is… Where’s the Beer?[:-,][:-,][ [sigh]
The best is still the GG1 that wound up in the basement of Washington
(D.C) Union Station after a brake failure on the Capitol Limited in 1953.
This was covered in Trains Magazine at the time.
We had one of those coal unloaders with a return ramp. More then once coal hoppers went off the ramp, and into the Delaware River.
Another time a gondola was driven up a bumping block, leaving the trucks on the rail. Another crew mistakenly coupled up the cars and pulled, the car dropped back down on it’s trucks and came right out. (And don’t say it’s impossible, I was the person responsible.)
The locomotive in the turntable pit is always good for a laugh too.
Nick
26 years ago this Thursday, (Nov 10, 1979), A CPR Freight train carrying chemicals derailed in Mississauga, Ont. from a hotbox. In the ensuing fire and explosions, part of one car went either 2222 or 2214 feet. Car contents included propane and chlorine plus a few other nasty chemicals. Half the city was evacuated for a week.
(I wrote this up last year on the 25th anniversary.)
Ever see the post on the super chief accident photo
That is awesome! Was there any damage done to the gondolas, or anything?
Belive it or not, there was very little damage. The brake rigging was all messed up and the car came down off center. After they pulled the car out, sparking like mad, crew cut it out. The car knockers or it might have been Hulcher, with a crane, lifted up the car and rolled the truck back into postion. Then it went to the shop for the rest of the repairs.
Nick (1-800-BIG-HOOK) Brodar
Luck was a lady, eh Nick? Did the railroad do anything to you? Because on some railroads, for certain mishaps, they suspend you. Anything happen to you?
My cousin was an engineer for U. P. through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. His family tells a story about one of his trains (late 1970s I believe) being parted by a tornado in Nebraska, about two thirds the way back from the engines. The train was the better part of a mile long.
By the time Cuz walked back to the derailed cars, about a half a mile, some of the cars that were leaning finally fell over just when he got to them. He jumped back, tripped over a rock, fell, and knocked himself out. He recovered, went back to work, and retired in the early 1990s. [:O][:O]
Just a little bit of family folk lore. [swg][swg]