If anybody bothered to look at the 2 dimensional maps or the 3D views on internet you would see that the tracks East of the lake have too many curves.
It might be fun for a Steam Powered passenger train.
That is a poor design for a modern freight railroad.
They underreacted by not rebuilding the tracks straight East to West, just like the paved road grid.
The tracks head South in a twisting manner, then cross the Quebec-Maine border, and then head back up North. There are no visible business demanding these dramatic curves. River would not have blocked the path of the tracks if they had kept the tracks futher North and straight East to West.
They had chosen to follow the Moose River to get water for Steam Locomotives. If they are going to keep using tracks on a path built for Steam Locomotives, the owners of the rail line would be best going back to Steam Locomotives.
Freight car weight ratings increased decades ago, but they were still following a path for freight and passenger trains from 100 years ago.
It is a scenic rail line, but they are not in the business to haul people to view the scenery.
Most all railroads that were surveyed and contstructed during the 19th Century are still following those alignments today. To steal a line from ‘Field of Dreams’ - “Build it and they will come!” - they built the railroads and the population built around the railroads on the properties that the railroads did own or have leaseholding interest in.
What the OP is missing are GRADES! (You know, the reason why the train started rolling…) A straight line would contend with nasty grades in excess of 6% and/or some heavy earthwork.
Besides the early UP, nobody builds a line longer than neccesary by putting curves in it. They add train resistance and track wear. Take a good look at the topography.
If you look at a topographic map, you will see that the rail line follows countour lines to minimize grades in this rocky hilly area. The straight roads got up and down hills. At the following link, click on Canada, and enter “Lac Megantic, QC” in the search box.
The fault was not in the alignment – no terrible tragedies before this that anybody remembers today – but in the oddball operation. For this reason, it’s tough to generalize from Lac Megantic – altho the anti-fossil fuel people will seize on anything to bolster their case.
But none of this matters unless you have a GE locomotive that has had major failures (disintegration of damaged cast power assembly components “repaired” with polyurethane filler) with the net result that the locomotive catches fire while idling.
That problem wouldn’t have occurred had an over-age EMD locomotive been leading the train, but some other failure could have been badly mis-repaired with the same result.
However, having seen an EMD G8 in Cairo Egypt in 2001 looking like it hadn’t been washed since 1956, let alone maintained, (it was black in colour but underneath was the original red and white) running around with a single coach with a driving cab which had been hard wired into the MU control through the hole in the headstock where the MU socket should be… some EMDs must be indestructible.
But you can’t treat an old GE that badly and not expect some trouble, and fire is always an option with Alcos and old GEs.
A lot of oil was moved in trains during WWII because costal shipping was subject to attack by German submarines. Yes, there were accidents but most didn’t make the news.
I have seen some documentation and reference to the oil trains of the WWII era. I am guessing that these were made up of 10,000 gallon tank cars in train lengths of perhaps 100 cars. I have heard that there were also similar trains carrying gasoline in that era.
I wonder how that phase of “oil trains” statistically compares with oil trains of the current era in terms of fireball derailments. Has anyone ever seen such a comparison published?
Maybe so. I have never understood to what extent mainline derailments and collisions are investigated, and by who, and where that information actually resides. Perhaps the news media was forbidden to cover derailments in the WWII era.
But with the sensitity of security during the WWII period, I would think than all railroad accidents received exceptionally exhaustive scrutiny.
The original poster makes absolutely no sense. Topography forced the curved alignment. Railroads generally followed rivers in mountainous terrain because that is the only route that permitted feasible grades at affordable costs. Where the rivers run in the wrong direction, it becomes necessary to follow tributaries up and over into the next watershed.
Railroads do not build curves just for fun. They restrict speed, accelerate rail wear, increase drag, and so on. But they are unavoidable. In a few places modern machinery has made some curve reduction economically feasible, but such features as Horseshoe Curve, Tehachapi Loops, Donner Pass will never see a straight line like a road grid. And perhaps he has not noticed that even roads often are forced off a straight grid pattern.
The reason for continuing to use “a path for freight and passenger trains from 100 years ago” is that it is still the best available. They did not “follow the Moose River to get water for Steam Locomotives”. Water was readily available from any number of lakes and streams, and in any case steam locomotives would get water at a tank, not directly out of a trackside river. The tank may have been supplied by pumping it out of the river but there were advantages to having gravity feed the tank from an uphill source.
I suggest that the I-75 designers in Kentucky liked the straight line idea as it goes up and down hills with lots of cuts and fills and while it has some curves, it is pretty much straight except in the stretch coming out of the Ohio River valley. The CNO&TP (Southern, now NS) winds its way through the hills and through tunnels and long high bridges as does the L&N (CSX) to get from Cincinnati to Tennessee.
A comparison between an interstate highway and a U.S. highway can be found between Asheville, N.C., and Johnson City, Tenn. Two years ago, I drove south from Bristol, Va. to Savannah, Ga., using insterstate highways as much as I could. The route through the gap (Sam’s Gap) at the state line was almost unnoticeable as to curves. About two months later, I drove from Asheville to Roanoke, using the old highway to cross the gap. Even though I had been on that highway many times when I was in college, I had forgotten just how winding it is; I certainly rehoned my mountain driving skills on that trip.
Last year, I drove east from Asheville to Charlotte and was reminded of how winding the highway across Hickory Nut Gap is. On one trip way back when, I was picked up by a man from New York State, who told me that in New York a tunnel would have been bored through the ridge.
Does anyone have any suggestion as to how to bypass the loops near Old Fort on the line between Salisbury and Asheville? or bypass the steep grade up/down Saluda Grade? Certainly the civil engineers did the best they could without boring long tunnels.
If you’ve seen the movie “Cars,” there is an interlude where one of the characters laments the coming of the Interstate. It may be a cartoon, but in fact that allowed it to “time lapse” how the old route (66) wound through the landscape while the Interstate just plowed right on through.
Roadways and the vehicles that use them can function with much more severe grades that can a railroad. Double digit grades are easily traversed with automotive vehicles - RR’s no way, besides maybe a cog railway.