LOCAL NEWS Sounds like fluidity of the system has dropped down a couple notches for Norfolk Southern?
Wonder if any of the cars involved were on anyone’s running meter?
I sure hope it doesn’t contain any of those containers that the gangs keeping tearing into, otherwise this could get serious.
Appears that there are two road crossings ‘in town’ about 200 or 300 yards apart. Are BOTH crossings blocked?
One of those crossings was grade separated (Canal St). Must have been on the east side of town where the single track main is. Siding + additional two tracks (spurs) on the west side. (15-17 trains a day and this is blocking a single main track? something is missing IMHO…more than just an issue over crews on a single train well over a mile long)
Facts missing, bad reporting and emotions getting in the way. Why couldn’t the train in question just gone in the hole and tied-up? Something is not being said.
Video in the link shows the train sitting on (what I assume to be the siding track), blocking Davis St.
Even shows the blue sign: crossing ID 478292W.
Watching the news video clip, the crossing had 3 tracks.
I’ve noticed that lately, if a train is going to be held for more than a few hours, they’ve been instructing crews to cut crossings again.
Jeff
(Sorry - video does not pass the smell test with the firewall here. Can’t view}
Davis Street is in the Siding … Canal Street is less than a quarter mile east in the single track. (going under an open- deck deck girder bridge with abutments for two tracks)
Wonder if the two blocked private farm crossings between the siding switches has anything to do with the complaint?
The story mentions that NS’s alibi was “western congestion”. I interpret that to mean Peru Indiana, the crew base, and logical place to tie up.
SO, I’m guessing this train, waiting in a passing siding, got dumped for lack of any better place to put it.
Why it sat there a week…appears to be the weak link?
.There was (also) a derailment just recently in Roanoke In, several miles east of that location. Blocked the entire main
A couple of years ago when I made my Snowbird trip to Jacksonville, when I crossed over the FEC on Baymeadows road there was a empty ballast train parked underneath the overpass. That was just after Christmas, when I made my trip back North in March - the train was still there.
There are a multitude of reasons why railroads do what they do - some make sense, some don’t.
Here is a “full frontal” of the grade separated crossing at Canal street. If you peer between the piers under the main line, you can see abandoned concrete piers remaining from the old Wabash ValleyTraction company, the interurban
There is a passing siding on this same line, all the way through Fort Wayne.
Roughly 10 years ago, an east bound freight was stopped at an untypical location on the siding…say around 4 PM. Then I noticed the very same train still in the same location around 8 PM. No sign of any repair crew, just sitting there dead.
9 AM the next morning, train still sitting there…hadn’t flinched.
But, by 4 PM it was finally gone. Almost wonder if the train died on hours, and they just told the crew to go find a motel?
In any event, it’s not unheard of for NS to park trains on the passing sidings here, for more than just a passing notion
I’ll bet for the owner of that Marathon station at the corner of Davis and the Blue Star, that week seemed like an eternity?
Just curious, but would breaking the train in two for crossings, require the crew to set more handbrakes (rule compliance) than just allowing the train to remain whole and block the crossing? Just looking for reasons that a person not sitting on rubber tires might see leaving the train whole, to be to their advantage. (and if it matters, I’m thinking particularly in context with this train, where those in control knew before they walked away that the train was gonna sit for an extended time)
Who says they knew?
I’m thinking when they cut away the engines, they knew the train had nowhere to go.
Likely no one knew the train would sit as long as it ultimately did. But I suspect they knew they were leaving behind ‘distress for the natives’.
But, I’m seriously curious about the braking requirement…my gut tells me that more handbrakes would have to be set for a split train…but I’m no railroader
If the working crew is taken off a train and will be leaving it without a crew onboard, it is the crew’s responsibility to secure the train by applying the necessary number of hand brakes - that responsibility also applies to every segment of the train that gets created by cutting road crossings. When a crew is removed from a train there is no real knowledge of when another crew will be returned to the train - there may be a plan, but as in the real world - plans change. Lak Magentic defines what happens when a train is not properly secured, even when there is a plan in place.
Norfolk Southern: Contented natives cannot be distributed to shareholders, therefore they are not our priority
P.S. Is this an example of the “cranky old man” syndrome you were talking about? Rather than address my curiosity, much more fun to fault my reasoning? [:o)]
Sometimes when you tie down a train, the dispatcher/trainmaster may say who they are planning to re-crew it, sometimes they don’t (sometiems they don’t know yet). And sometimes they change their minds, too.
I’ve even went home and came out to re-crew the train I left out there.
Must have just squeezed it in there, that crossing is only 600 feet from the east end of the siding.