Pictures of a derailment in Mason City, IA that happened Tuesday (09/26/17) morning.
Jeff
Jeff: derailments always look kind of painful.
Can you tell me what the car sitting upright in front of the “on its side” tanker is used for. It is in one of the other pictures too, but no clue what it hauls…
Somewhere there is an MTP, MTM and a trainmaster out with a calculator trying to keep the costs under the magic number for a reportable. When the 250T crane shows up, accounting game is over.
(The mechanical guy has already made the wheel wear gage lie)
A car department foreman whose name I don’t remember anymore always blamed derailments on wide track guage. When he measured the guage everyone present looked so closely at the tape measure around the 56" mark that nobody noticed that the tape had the first 3 inches cut off.
Probably a blood relative of the ATSF trainmaster at Pico Rivera CA that could see wide gage from his car radio 60 miles away from the derailment.
To me, the light grey car on its side and those behind it appear to be covered hoppers and if so, it could be carrying grain, (wheat or corn) sand or other types of granulated material such as potash (fertilizer).
The car on its side is a covered hopper in the AOKX 78000 series. It is twice as large as a sand car, and even about 20 percent too large for grain or fertilizer, and a good 15 percent too large for soybeans. It’s larger than most plastics cars, and the one-piece “trough” hatch (open, in this case) also rules out plastics, flour, sugar, sand, cement, or other such commodities. That leaves one possibility: dry distiller grain, used in animal feed. This is a byproduct of ethanol production (which makes sense, since the tank cars in the pictures are for handling ethanol).
Thanks for this…I had to look up the specs on these cars, and in so doing found that there were 150 newer ones that I didn’t yet have in my files.
You’re welcome…
Had an incident like this on the layout last week.
Luckily, O gauge cars are a lot easier to deal with.
So’re you, SJ!
Am I right–a one-hand crane works in that situation?
Absolutely! And for car switching I use what’s called the “Hand O’ God” method!
It’s easier that way.
Deus ex machina in reverse (the machine swoops down, picks the car up, and moves it to where it needs to be?
Some years back, on a slow news day, BNSF had a derailment in the afternoon along a busy street in town. It was covered on all 3 local TV stations and was the front page story in the next morning’s paper.
The next day, everybody and his dog tried to go look at the over-hyped train derailment. As it turned out, the big 'ol derailment was only 3 or 4 empty grain cars that had gone off the rails at a switch but were still upright. The railroad had everything cleaned up and gone before sunrise the next morning.
That’s it buddy! Deus ex machina, now that’s a phrase I haven’t thought about in a long time.
Like using an 0-5-0 switcher…