It’s hard to believe it’s been almost 15 years sience the infamous SP stringline derailment at Cantara loop. Now this curve / bridge over the Shasta river sports one giant guardrail.
Photos by Gerry Thomas
So the intent is that when the train derails, the tank car will hit that big steel pipe and crack open like a grade AA egg on the side of a skillet ?
That is a big rail, I remember when this happened, it was part of SP at the time wasnt it? killed everything downstream for miles.
Yup, it was on the SP Black Butte sub at MP327.6 between Dunsmuir and Mt. Shasta. They spilled Metam Sodium if I remember right, and it did devistate the river for a while although the area recovered a lot sooner than expected. SP paid dearly for this one.
I remember the big stink was they were concerned the spill would get as far Shasta Dam and kill off all the fish and contaminate the resevoir.
Well if you listened to the tree huggers it was the end of the world.[:O]
SDR- What coal branch in Wy?
When UP is setting up intermodal trains in LA to go to Portland or Seattle, they have an entire book on tonnage and layout of the weight distribution on that train, because of the Cantera Loop. It dictates the length of cars at the head end, total train length, weight, etc. Happened to see the document earlier this week. What a hassle for the yards setting up the trains. I wonder if UP will ever invest the capital to do the excavating, etc needed to broaden this curve.
You won’t broaden this curve. It is a very tight 180 (nearly). To fix this problem, you would have to go back to Lakehead and rebuild the railroad up on the canyon wall all the way to (nearly) Mount Shasta, which would bypass Dunsmuir.
When the Army Corps of Engineers built Shasta Dam, they had to reroute the SP main because the railroad had been built on the canyon floor, and offered to build new railroad, at Feds expense, all the way to Mount Shasta. For reasons noone has yet to figure out (or speak about if they do know), the SP declined.
There were three things wrong that caused the cars to roll over off the bridge – 1) was empty cars within 10 cars of the engine (rules violation by Roseville) – 2) too much trailing tonnage behind road locomotive (rules violation by train crew) – 3) not sufficient power on the train to get up the hill (no violation on anyone’s part here).
The road power (reported to be the lead unit) lost its feet just after crossing the bridge at Cantarra. The wheel slip program reduced the throttle on that unit and the train stalled for just the smallest moment. As the tonnage started to push against the road power, the unit found its feet and started pulling again at full power. This, of course, caused the head cars to have the slack pulled taught very quickly, and the empty flat car ahead of the tank popped off the curve and took the tank with it. Since there was nothing underneath the tank to hold it up (such as the mountain side) except air as it derailed, it fell off the bridge and into the river up-side-down.
Cantarra is not the only place between Red Bluff and Black Butte that causes these sorts of problems. On the north side of Dunsmuir is a siding named Small where these sorts of derailments normally occurr. Other places also exist where tonnage, grade and curvature conspire to cause derailments.
The only solutions are a straightening program (no room for that in the Sacramento River Canyon), paying st