Now With all of the news of all of these derailments and head on collisons. I was wondering how they tow or move a train that has been involed in an accident . Like for instance when that amtrak derailed here in milwaukee. How was it moved back to chicago for repairs. Also like today when the two KCS trains collided head on how are those 2 going to get moved. Now one thing I do know is that most of the time the damaged cars are put onto flat cars and.Moved to the repair site but how are engines moved from an accident. Site and offten do the railroads determan to send a car or an engine to the scarp yard because it has to much damage to try to even fix. [|)][;)][bow]
Start with the last question first, repair or scrap. Early in the process the mechanical department will survey the wreck and estimat damages car by car. Those that cost less to fix than their AAR value will be scrapped. In most cases the call is obvious. Of the rest of the cars most will be rerailed, on their own or replacement trucks, and held in a nearby track and moved to the nearest repair track in a “hospital train”. In a few cases a carbody will be loaded on a flat car. Typically this will be for a move to “home shop”.
I have not seen near as many locomotes handled in derailments but the choices are the same. Suspect few 6 axle unist go on flat cars as would have to span two cars of use a special high capacity car.
Mac
I thought sometimes they would dig a bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggggg hole and put all the stuff in it then bury it.[:p]
I thought the RRs hire contractors to chop them up[:o)][:p]
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Originally posted by railfan619
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I worked on an SP wreck cleanup at Ambrose on the Modoc line in 89’. There were no engines involved. There were over a dozen cars on the ground and 6 were loads. There were two boxcars full of plywood, two boxcars full of decorative red cinder brick, a boxcar full of packaged Aunt Jemima’s syrup and a tank car full of molassas. The tanker ruptured and the whole area was mess of mud & molassas. We had to lay the boxcar doors on the ground to walk on cause if you didn’t you would sink up to your chest in that mess. Anyway after we transloaded the brick,wood & syrup into new cars they cut them up into managable peices and loaded it into gondolas. They used this big Catapillar with a huge scissor atachment. The guy running it was seriously skilled. I was impressed. He cut open the boxcars for us to unload and after that we were all talking about how impressive that was during a break. A couple of us made a bet with him to see if he could pick up a soda can without denting it. Well we lost, he picked up the soda can without so much as scratching it !!!
There was another wreck on the Modoc line in 83’ (I think) not too far from the one I worked where they did bury it. Well they buried alot of it anyway. There were several cars that sat there truckless for years. Then sometime in the late 80s they came back and dug everything up and hauled off the cars.
I was told a story by a friend that after a UP wreck in Troutdale, Or. they buried a boxcar for a short time because it was full of guns and the feds didn’t want anybody to get a hold of any of them. I don’t know if thats true or not.
We had a wreck when I was very green (train hit a gravel truck at a crossing) the locos (brand spanking new) ended up in a swamp. They just craned them out of the mud and set them on what appeared to be heavy duty trucks, repaired the couplers on site, coupled them to the rear of a work train and dragged them off.
I have heard of that happeneing out here. I can take oyu to the exact spot where there are a few autoracks worth of BRAND NEW Dodge pickup trucks. this was from a derailment that occurred about 6 years back, and i saw some of them, they looked as if they hadnt been damaged at all. I have also heard of a whole takner full of peanut oil(tanker and all) buried along the rails somewhere out here in the desert.
So long as it rolls on its own trucks, or a replacement set, the locomotive is towed away on the rails.
There is a whole fleet of hospital cars, home built by many roads, to haul away the cars.
Those that roll on their own get towed; those that cant either get scrapped on site, or abandoned in place.
Often sold on the spot to scrap dealers, some get trucked out, or loaded later on flats; you can see them end up in odd places.
I have seen them turned into barns, work rooms, storage sheds…one even turned into a dinner.
Yes, they do bury some of them.
If the accident occurs out in the boonies, it makes more economic sense to just leave them there, if the scrap value is less than the cost of the car and moving it.
Mudchicken can elaborate more on how they pick them up…
Ed
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Most of these responses are crazy…and funny.
I know i’m [#offtopic] but I was checking this out and I got a good[(-D][(-D]
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Anyways…
I would think they took some of it apart so it would be easier to transport.
Then send it to a place to get fixed.
Then it’s back on the rails!
[8D][:D][:)][{(-_-)}][swg][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D]
That’s easy.They call up a helper and tow it away.I saw it on a movie were Amtrak hit a garbiage truck and UP towed it away.
In the age of environmental laws I would think that burying peanut oil or cars loaded with oil and some gas would be against the law. Are the railroads not answerable to environmental regs?
At a local auto scrapper I could not believe they things they have to do to send a car to the steel mill, remove the battery, transmission fluid, oil, gasoline…
Not long after the railroad accident involving the Amtrak train and a UP coal train on 9/11/01, I saw the passenger cars and locomotives on a hospital train heading south through Salt Lake City. The Amtrak engines were on flat cars, and the damaged cars were traveling on their own wheels.
Was at Rochelle on 6/24/2005, and saw an eatbound BNSF train with TOFC and containers go through with 4 Amtrak cars at the rear of the consist. The cars had damage, including glass.
In talking with others, we were thinking that these may have been in a recent wreck in the Pacific Northwest and were on their way back to Amtrak’s Beech Grove repair shops.
I have pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/85729295@N00/sets/419880/- the first four show the damage done to the engines when a UP autorack rear-ended a coal train near Blairstown, IA back in April. The engines were sitting on a siding in Blairstown after being re-railed and chained together.