Here’s a picture of the Kent Ohio train crash that was this past Thursday.
Looks like they filled that gap under the bridge pretty well. Fortunately nobody was hurt from what I’ve heard.
Kevin
Great pic. Here is another posted by that photographer.
At least when trucks get wedged under overpasses sometimes its a simple matter of letting the air out of the tires to get them unstuck. In the case of a train there is probably a dispatcher looking for a new job.
Al - in - Stockton
The sign on the bridge is rather amusing, given the circumstances…
I’ve always wondered why there’s no tell-tale type bar set up in advance of a low railroad or highway bridge. On I-90, close to town, there is a somewhat lower than average highway overpass. This thing gets whacked by a tall truck every 3 or 4 years, and requires expensive repairs. Couldn’t there be a horizontal metal bar, about a quarter mile before the bridge, that matches the low bridge height? A tall truck could whack the reletively inexpensive bar, and save the wear and tear on the expensive overpass. Surely, the same could be done for a rail line.
Or a train crew, or a corridor manager, or a yardmaster, or a ramp manager, or a trainmaster, or somone at a clearance desk. There’s more than one possible culprit, and the train dispatcher is one of the least likely. What has happened more than once is someone forgets that a line is only cleared for ordinary double-stacks, or an ordinary and one high-cube, not two high-cubes, and loads a well car improperly.
RWM
I don’t know what happened to the company officer on our railroad who ordered the crew of a stack train (who knew better) to proceed on the route for which they were lined, resulting in a mess that made it to the pages of Trains soon afterwards. At this time the UP or CNW had specific tracks that had been lowered to clear a couple of overpasses along their route. Prior to that, CNW had a light-beam height detector east of Proviso that would set special signals to warn eastbound crews not to proceed. These bridges have all since been taken care of in one way or another–there are no restrictions due to height in that area.
That second bridge (under which the stack train was wedged) looks 'way too modern for something like that to happen–it was undoubtedly built (or rebuilt) after the start of the stack-train era, and the problem should never have existed. I couldn’t read the sign, Larry, but that rather stinks as a “solution”, whatever it says.
[:O]
There you go–thinking again. If you keep spouting such logical solutions to a problem, you’ll never make it in management. [:-,]
You guys are talking about the jangling dingle bars that on my Lionel set would cause the giraffe to duck his head back in the stock car.
Never heard them described that way, but yes…
Telltales fell out of favor when brakemen no longer had to walk the rooftops to set brakes, and definitely when the use of roofwalks was banned. At the time, cars rarely exceeded the height of a box car. Of course, hi-cube boxcars became a factor, but they are a fixed commodity - they’re always the same height. They also often run the same routes on a regular basis (ie, auto parts trains) so the environment they run in can be controlled.
It seems that the railroads again have a raison d’etre for “telltales”, albeit in a higher tech version. The recent incident in the Detroit River tunnel was likely caused by the same mixing of domestic and international containers as well.
As for the coal hoppers, that could have been a lot of places.
It would have to be more hi tech than that…a bar hitting a container 20 cars back isn’t going to make enough noise for the crew to hear. Now if something like a high/wide detector was installed, we’d be talking high/wide detectors [:P]
I thought the idea was that the crew in the cupola caboose would see the telltales bounce. Is Fred at the back end of every train, and can he do more than just flash?
No tell tails because: 1) no one rides (or is supposed to ride) tops of cars anymore and 2) most cars are so high they don’t even have ladders up to roof but only to hand brake wheel.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=148631
Joe May said
Dispatcher is only in trouble IF - he knew the train had a restriction on the specified track and routed the train there anyway. More likely there is a Train Documentation error (paperwork mistake) that doesn’t alert either the train crew or the Dispatcher to the existance of restricted cars in the train. As a Dispatcher, you cannot protect what you have not been informed needs protection. Train Crews rely on the Train Documents to know what their 9000 foot trains contain - both Hazmat and any of the other types of restrictions that the train may contain.
The tell tales were so the brakeman riding on top of the car would feel them and drop to the ground to avoid having his head (or more) taken off by the tunnel/bridge/etc…
A FRED is at the rear of every train unless there is a locomotive or caboose there, although they still ride on some. Switching moves don’t need FREDs, and in the daytime some local runs just use a red flag stuck in the coupler. A FRED (Flashing Rear End Device) just flashes, but an EOT (End Of Train device) can relay the brake pipe pressure, speed, and other data up to the engineer via a tail-end box located on top of the control stand in a locomotive.