It’s raining cats & dogs here in n. CA. I was just looking at the weather reports for the Sacramento River and one of the warnings said that RR tracks are flooded in such-and-such location.
So that made me wonder how railroad operations respond to flooding conditions. At what flood depth do trains have to stop? How fast do operations respond to rapidly "fluid’ (sorry, couldn’t resist) situations? Are there folks who monitor weather conditions during weather watches or warnings?
The questions asked about flooding sort of reminds me of the great flood of 1955 here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the hurricane that came through was called Connie. Most of the flooding took place along the Lehigh River, many railroads were effected and in fact never recovered from the flood and had to merge. A couple of those roads were DL&W which merged with Erie, to form Erie Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley and Jersey Central Railroads didn’t fully recover. Jersey Central ended up giving up their lines in the Lehigh gorge due to the fact that Lehigh Valley railroad line’s were of higher elivation and perspired more than that of the Jersey Central line’s after the flood. This flood also shaped the pathway for the becomming of ConRail.
Sorry I didn’t answer any of the above questions but, I felt a story was nessacary here.
Railroads have become much more pro-active in taking actions concerning ‘flash flooding’.
Most Class I’s have contracts with Weather Services that make specific forcasts concerning the territory that the individual railroad operates. Whern Flood Warnings are issued MofW personnel are notified and begin hi-rail inspections of the affected territory until such time as the warnings are lifted.
Where water is discovered above the top of the rail (and above the top of the rail is the critical element) trains will continue to operate over the track as long as the water is no more than 2 inches ATR (Above Top of Rail). When water is more than 2" ATR it is at a point where it can be ingested by the blowers used for traction motor cooling and thus drown these electric motors in water…water and electricy don’t mix for the benefit of man or machine.
Flooding most often causes ‘washouts’ because of the high velocity nature of storm runoff.
I know one thing is that I have lived by railroads all of my life the old CNW now the UP and when we would get heavy rain over a short period of time a certain part of tracks would get flooded out and the. Railroad would send out a crew with pumps and they would pump all of the water off the tracks. And as far I can remember trains would still run at a lower speed so no problems occur with the trains and the motors. Also so no would get wet from trains going though, [(-D][(-D]