Doug Williamson, The Windsor Star
Published: Monday, June 16, 2008
A Canadian Pacific Railroad train heading heading through the CP rail tunnel from Detroit suffered significant damage Sunday afternoon when shipping containers on 24 intermodal cars were partly crushed on the tunnel’s roof, damaging contents but causing no injuries.
Full article-
http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/local/story.html?id=02c4ec5e-814f-49f0-b710-bc088c97447f
Metric system strikes again [:D]
Every few months something like this happens at the ole Detroit Windsor railroad tunnel. The roof of that tunnel bears the scars of many of these incidents. The north bore has been “raised” to accomodate double stacks. Maybe they sent the train through the south bore? Either way it makes the Conrail and CP dispatchers day…NOT!
This is very similar to a situation under the 18th Street overpass on the Chicago Union Station south approach some years ago. A double-stack was on a BN-to-CR move and only one of the tracks has enough clearance under the overpass to clear double-stacks. The train was routed onto the wrong track and a number of containers got their tops removed.
It’s always interesting when you see this happen on one track, and the one next to it is obviously dipped down under the bridge or whatever structure was to be avoided.
…Wow…That article didn’t seem to imply of {what seemed like a high potential}, for real damage to the tunnel…The tunnel lining must really be of the very heavy duty catagory or maybe of solid rock. It just seems the risk was there to really have become a critical problem and damaging the bore to the point of collapse.
My first thought was, what if there would have been enough resistence to actually stop the train in the tunnel after so much of it got into it. Then one would think it would have had to be removed car by car and that’s if the tunnel would still have been intact…Wow, sounds like the RR got off pretty lucky despite the major damage to the goods being hauled.
This was a detour move.
It contained some North American Containers (EMP, from the pictures), which are taller than the international containers. The tunnel can clear double-stacked international containers on the lowered track, but put a domestic container in the mix, and this is what you get.
Why the CP doesn’t employ height detectors at a point where they could do some good…
On the U.S. side for a high load detector to be effective for the Detroit Windsor Tunnel, CP would need to install it either on the NS near Oakwood Yard or at Delray Tower where they come on the Conrail Shared Assets. This would allow them to set the car out at Oakwood Yard or the NYC tracks at CP George before heading into the tunnel.
saxman
It happens to trucks too of course. From this website
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23692146-2761,00.html
comes this picture
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Dave Nelson