I finished working on the layout yesterday a bit early and decided to watch some TV…National Geographic had a show on last night called "Two Minutes Before Disaster. …it was about the train wreck of the Amtrak Sunset Limited that went off the bridge over a swamp near Mobile Alabama in the early 90’s…it was very interesting how the NTSB went about investigating the wreck…a barge lost it’s way in a fog and hit the bridge causing the deck girder to move 3 ft from it’s original location…3 minutes later the train crossed the bridge at 72MPH and the lead engine hit the misaligned girder right in the middle and sent it flying through the air and into the swamp…two more locomotives, the baggage car, and two passenger cars also hit the bridge so hard that they all went into the swamp along with the remainding section of the girder bridge…it was a terrible tragedy which took the lives of 47 people; some drowned, some burned to death in the insuing fire…the NTSB found that the deck girder was not bolted to the concrete supports which caused the bridge to move when the barge hit it…they also found that there are many other bridges across America’s railways that are not bolted down, but the cost of bolting them all in place outweighed the cost of paying off future lawsuits filed by victims of future accidents of this nature…something to think about next time you board a passenger train …Chuck
Downright scary as all of Amtrak’s long distance routes cross different types of bridges.
As an incentive I wonder if states or the federal government give the railroads tax credits for expensive safety related repairs or upgrades?
Wow, what a mess to investigate. I wish I could have seen the show.
I wonder if our Govt. an G.W.would classify these types of lawsuits as “frivolous”.
When I lived in Mobile back in the ‘70’s & ‘80’s, I was (and still am) an avid bass fisherman. I used to fish around this bridge over Big Bayou Canot, (pronounced Ka-no), and given the layout of the river at that point, I can really see how the wreck possibly occurred. At times it was so foggy that even in my boat, which is 17’ long, I had a hard time seeing where I was in the river.
The entrance to Big Bayou Canot is, (more or less), even with the top end of 12-Mile Island which , if a towboat went up the right side of the island, instead of the main channel, had to make a hard left turn (90) back toward the river. Because there is also a 90 turn to the left in the river less than 1/4 mile north of Big Bayou Canot, I think the pilot thought he was there at the proper turn instead of at Big Bayou Canot. Contributing to this was the radar image, according to the pilot’s statement to the NTSB, that looked like another tow across the river and he headed toward it. The radar image I saw on TV looked like a bridge with a large object on the right side attached to it, which at night, could be viewed as a barge tow, but turned out to be the approach bents of the trestle at the bridge. The CXS tracks crossed the river right after the turn in the main river and he could have thought the image was also that bridge.
I also cannot see how the water on the other side of the bridge over the Bayou could be considered navigable, (and on most Mobile delta maps of the period, including the one I still own, this area was labled non-navigable, hence no need for lights on the bridge), as less than 50 yds the far side of the bridge, the water depth went from aprox 50’ to 4’ , and the Bayou itself fizzled out into a small creek about 10’ wide. As to the bridge not being “bolted down”, this was orignally designed as a swing bridge and as such there was not a method for bolting it down. Its enormous weight kept it in place, but the center bearing was there.
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the TV show did mention that the bridge was originally supposed to be a swing bridge but they never completely built it to do so…my point is that we are not as safe as we think when we depend on the railroads?/ government? to make our transportation systems as safe as possible…the show also mentioned that every year, bridges in the US get hit by waterway equipment and vessels on an average of 26 times a year…my concern is not some bridge off in the boonies where there is light to no waterway traffic at all, but the bridges that are vulnerable to collisions like those in high waterway traffic areas…the new bridges they are building today are taking safety in mind (like the ones with barriers built around the bridge piers that ships will collide with instead of hitting the actual bridge structure itself…I believe the railroads should take measures to increase more protection of the older bridges in this country…any amount of money won in a law suit doesn’t bring back the people you love who have parished through tragic events like this because they say “it costs too much to fix this problem”. …Chuck