UP derailed in Southeast Nebraska early this morning, Thursday. Eastbound UP derailed and westbound ran into it! Around Carleton NE. Anyone have more details?
Mook
Here’s a link.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_np=0&u_pg=1638&u_sid=1167526
Apparently no serious injuries.
Well what do we have here? Where have we heard THIS before?
UP is just so anxious to get more business they are running over themselves?[%-)]
Back in the mid-seventies the CNW had a similar oops. A drag freight was running eastbound on track 2 (the center track) and a Falcon (stack train) was running eastbound on track 3. The drag went into emergency, called the Falcon to advise him, but was too late. The drag had already started to derail, and the Falcon ran into the original derailment, causing it to also derail. I do not remember what town this happened in, but I do know it was between West Chicago and Oak Park. The photos of the double wreck showed locomotives that had landed in the adjacent street, as well as numerous freight cars. It was a real mess, and it took quite a while to clean up.
I work that area…it was near Alliance, NE…then a second one about 12 hrs later at Wamsutter, WY…blocked both directions…Last year we had an identical derail at the same WY location, same senario…comming out of siding about 10 mph or so…20 plus cars go over…no idea what is happening until you lose your air…in both cases air took a bit to break and put power into emergency.
Zardoz,
That was the infamous Glen Ellyn wreck. As a resident of Glen Ellyn at the time, I remember it well. You can still see where a brick entryway along the street has been repaired, and the plants between the road and the tracks just never came back right…
One correction to your story, Jim: the Falcon was the train on the center track, with the drag (380, I think) on the outside. It was the drag’s locomotives that wound up in the street. You’re correct in that it was the train on the center track that first derailed. This was the first eastbound Falcon that had been permitted to run at higher speeds, and this was the result…it hit the curve at too fast a speed, and turned the rail over.
Fortunately, it was early on a Sunday morning when this happened, so the street was relatively unoccupied. Two hours after the wreck, we were already showing carloads of ballast in the computer system destined for Glen Ellyn. After I put my day in at work, we drove over as close to it as we were allowed (the ammonia leak had been stopped by then), and got some fairly good views of the Falcon side of the wreck from the bike path that parallels the track there.