Edit. Text removed.
Was sent to me as a very recent news story. My apologies.
Photos worth a look for those who haven’t seen them before.
Brent
The good news, I assume was that no member of the crew or those fighting the fire were hurt in this disaster, I assume???
The bad news is that somebody, either on crew or higher up or both will have a big headache very soon if not now.
The good news is that the higher ups who authorized the stoppage will have to rebuild the trestle.
The bad news is that someone expecting their coal will miss out, apparently for awhile until the new bridge is built.
The good news is that the carrier had insurance???
The bad news is will the insurance pay out since it seems the higher-ups did not do what they could to mitigate the damage???
It looks like one of those excercises in futility that those WHO ARE ON THE JOB know MORE than those who are HIGHER-UP and think they know everything!!!
Sigh - how many times is this nonsense thing going to be posted?
Crew was not prohibited by rules from moving train. They were walking back to find out what had happened, and by the time they got close enough to see that a trestle was on fire, it was too late to get those six cars (of a 100-car train) off the bridge.
The car that derailed was the 57th car of a 100 car train. Not sure whether it would have been such a hot idea to try to drag the rear and of the train across a trestle on fire with a derailed car in the middle of the train …
So the crew uncoupled the front of the train from the cars on the trestle and pulled the front part of the train away from the bridge.
Incidentally - it wasn’t “just a few miles into the trip” either. The train was en route from Denver, Colorado to Chicago. This happened at Turkey Creek bridge near Sharon Springs in Kansas (about 200 miles east of Denver), on 12 april 2002 (ie 8 years ago …).
Stein, not a great fan of urban legends passed on without any attempts of fact checking …
Correct. Facts are easy to find.
This is the first time I’d seen/heard about that particular mishap.
Was the bridge on fire before the train arrived, or was the fire started by sparks from the derailed car? If the latter, the crew did about the only thing they could do.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
As I remember it was started by the derailed car.
It was sent to me as what appeared to be a very legitimate, very recent news article. I had no idea it was an urban legend. So to avoid “The Wrath Of Steinjr” I yield to his knowledge of the incident and once again apologize for posting the story that accompanied the photos.[:)] I have no idea what really happened. I hope the photos are at least real.
Brent
It was started by a “hotbox” at about the middle of the train. The crew uncoupled the closest cars they could reach and moved the front half of the train away so the fire wouldn’t spread to the rest of the train.
I wonder if the railroad will replace the wooden trestle with a concrete or steel unit.
This happened 8 years ago, around 3 pm on a Friday afternoon in April 2002.
According to an article published on April 18th 2002 in the local newspaper, the first span of new replacement bridge was up by the following Monday (the 15th), and new bridge was expected to be completed by Wednesday or Thursday, less than a week after the accident. New bridge was made of steel and concrete.
The Arizona Rails website has a copy (used by permission of the original author) of the original newspaper article by Julie K Samuelson of The Western Times (Sharon Springs, KS):
http://www.arizonarails.com/bad_day.html
A couple of things worth noting here from a model railroading point of view is:
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barrels of water on (longer) old wooden trestles were there for a reason, fire was an ever present hazard, especially in the steam engine era
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there often is a dirt access road along the tracks. See e.g. Pelle Soeborg’s trackside scenes - he models that kind of stuff, and his layouts looks very realistic.
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On a model railroad, you can model the effects of such events by pretty minimal efforts - by e.g.
a) introducing speed restrictions across a bridge “that just has been replaced” on your railroad,
b) by detouring trains from another railroad across your tracks because a bridge on their railroad has been demolished in an accident,
c) by putting a train into a siding you normally use as a passing siding and declaring that the dispatcher has stashed it there due to a bridge being out “further up the line”, so that siding is not available to your crews for this operating session, or
d) You can suddenly tell a train crew that a tracks