I have a Trains Magazine from April 1981, that has an article about trains falling into the turntable pit. What I don’t get is, why? If there was any place on the railroad being watched closely by the railroaders, wouldn’t this be it? And yet, they still found ample photos of steamers and diesels that had taken the plunge. Surely, if you are the guy that drops one in the pit, your goose is cooked? How common of a problem was/is this? How do you get one out?
I can only think of neglect of the observer’s part, during the entire process. Most likely they will have to crane out their fallen engine. I always thought they had interlocks to keep this from happening.
Matt
No interlocks that I’m aware of around a turntable. The only thing I can think of is air bleeding off or the handbrakes not set properly and a locomotive gets enough of a jar to set it in motion…and you have a scene of several people running toward a locomotive leaving the quietly through the door and several other people running any other direction to establish that they weren’t there when it happened.
Big hook time! Plus maybe a punctured fuel tank? It’s what goes on the calendar as a “bad day”.
Murphy,
Most of the work in service areas, the moving, turning and such, was/is performed by hostlers.
Rarely did the road crew or engineer park the locomotive in a stall.
This is often by contract, and protects the road crews from just such problems.
Back in the day, road crews on a regular job with assigned duties were often assigned a particular locomotive and caboose, to use day after day, as if it was their personal locomotive and caboose.
At the end of their run or shift, the road crew would drop off their units and crummy at the ready track, and the hostlers and service crews would ready it for the next day.
With the development of the road switcher body style, the need to turn locomotives has pretty much gone away, and you would be hard pressed to find many operating turntables today.
Cabooses are gone, and most locomotives are in a pool service system now, and the need to service them daily has pretty much disappeared.
Because of the number of accidents, like those you describe, there are rules on how to secure a locomotive when left unattended.
Up to the time of the CSX #8888 runaway, the requirements on securing locomotives were left up to each railroad to develop and enforce…now the FRA has a strict mandate and set of rules to prevent this, even if the engineer is just getting down to line a switch, he/she has several things they must do before leaving the locomotive.
Something more analogous might be the personal auto.
How many times do you see on your local news where someone though they had put their car in park, only to discover they didn’t, and it runs through the front of a store…or they think they were in park, got out to put something in the mail box or to run into the 7 11 to get a soda, only to come back and find their car doing slow doughnuts in the parking lot?
Sounds silly, but there is no federal law on how to park your car, and up until recently, none on how to park a locomotive
One easy way is for someone to board a locomotive not knowing that it has had work done on it’s brake system, such as shoe replacement.
When the locomotive has it’s brakes worked on, the mechanics set the hand brake, then cut out the brakes on the truck they are working on. If the mechanics forget to cut the trucks back in, AND the engineer forgets or neglects to do a walk-around before moving his locomotive, once moving, the engineer will have no way to stop other than either tying on the handbrake, or reversing the locomotive (which I do not know even if that is still possible with the new locomotives).
It sounds like most of the locomotives in the pits were attributanble to hostlers, not engineers? Would something like that normally make the hosteler a former railroad employee?
Might get you fired for 30 days or more. But I wouldnt want to take the harrasement from my fellow employees. In regards to spinning power it still happens today,however its usually on a wye.
From a classic story Charles Minot was on his private car heading somewhere when he got message that a locomotive had fallen in to the pit and that the shop forces were using a hand derrick to get it out. Well as the story goes the next station a new telegram arrives for Mr Minot with " Derrick in pit now should we send for steam crane from another division?" Mr Minots response? Leave steam crane where it is no more room in pit!
gravity works
(and if you don’t buy that, brown smelly stuff happens)
Some years back, an acquanitance called me, and asked me to bring him his camera to work. He worked at the roundhouse in Johnson Yard [ICG then], upon arrival there was some commotion over at the turntable. On arrival, there was a locomotive all the way into the turntable pit, laying on its right side and hemorraging copious quantities of diesel fuel into the pit. Sitting atop the left side of the engine in the pit was, another locomotive, but it was almost completely covering the left side of the pitted engine, (one of the spectators remarked it looked like two GP-10’s trying to make a GP-20) it was cocked at a pretty good angle to the right, on top of the engine in the pit. the engine in the pit had had its left, or fireman’s side pretty badly abused by the second engine; as it had traveled across it to its final resting position, the third engine had not done too much damage to the back of the second engine, but it had put itself on the ground.
The story was the roundhouse laborer [or hostler] was ckecking out the three engine set prior to running it out to the ready track, for an assignment. He had placed the #1 engine in run eight, walked back to #2 and repeated his actions, as he was on the third engine, in its cab about to repeat his previous two actions, #1 and #2 engines ‘loaded’ and headed to the turn table which was not yet lined for their passage. The hostler had apparently failed to set the brakes prior to throtling up to check the engine loading process on that set.
Not sure how that one was explained to the ‘head shed folks.’ It had to be a heck of an explanation, though.
I’ve watched a few roll in , very helpless feeling and by the time they are moving a hand brake is going to do little good. Zardoz hit on one of the causes , other causes are a crew not securing the engine ( cutting the brakes in… after all it’ll only be a minute or so ) , and engine left in a power setting and then shut down (guess what happens when you start it back up and put it online ! ) .
In the round houses I worked in the tracks always sloped into the turntable pit , I think the reason was to keep them from killing workers inside the house seeing as how most work was concetrated in the front portion of the round house.
Randy
Nothing in railroading draws a crowd faster than an engine in the turn table pit!
Jousting can draw a pretty good crowd too!
Commonly there is no way to wrangle a wrecker into position to lift the errant locomotive back onto the rails. Then it becomes a laborious task of using short jacks to lift the unit a bit and build a cribbing beneath it. Then you get back with the short jacks and lift it again a little more. This goes on repeatedly over the course of a day or two until the unit can be pulled off the cribbing and back onto the rails. In the meantime all the units inside the roho are unavailable for service.
I saw one where the Asst Roho Foreman was showing his father in law how the Locotrol console worked by moving the dials around to see the display change. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to isolate the remote units which were on another turntable lead track. Yup, those SD45s take a lot of cribbing.
Remember, when a steam engine was dumped in the pit, it was only the tender that ended up in the hole (along with the hostler that dumped it) Not too many went in frontward.
I recall several stories regarding steam loco’s and the roundhouse and turntable in my home town. Most of the time the steamers drifted off by themselves because the valves in the bottom of the cylinders where not opened and leaking steam entered and caused the loco to move. On at least one occation the loco went forward, across 12’ of lawn, through the fence, across the footpath and onto the road before it stopped (or was stopped). Luckily the roundhouse didn’t have an external wall in those bays that faced the road. The other times they reversed into the pit and blocks and jacks were used to get the tender up to the correct height to re-rail them.