A passing NS train was blamed for a fire yesterday in Aiken County,SC. This is the same county that was apart of the Graniteville train wreck in 2005. What gets me is they don’t say that a kid, or a smoker caused this. They just say a train. Only a couple of trains go through the area. I don’t really know much about SC local P22. 156 was out of town inbeteen 10and 11. In my opinon the train didn’t cause it think it was another reason.
The Fire Chief was the same one that was on the scene for Granitville. Who knows he could be still mad at NS and just blamed them for this.
The only question is who reported it? This site has only a junkyard near by no houses just a junkyard. They need to go over the 911 call and ask the person that called if they really saw a train or did it them selves and blame a train. P22 is the only train that is in Aiken around that time that I know of. 156 was probably already in Columbia. They also need to call NS and check with Greenville to see if a train at that location.
Do I smell a little whiff of paranoia here? When I was working the lower end of the Highball on the BN that ran from the Palouse Plateau down to the Clearwater River on a steady 2.2 percent grade, we had to ride the brakes all the way down (and sometimes stop to cool wheels). It was standard procedure to have a section gang follow us down the hill with water buckets from mid-summer until the first fall rains. Whenever I hear of a grass fire breaking out in an area where I know there’s a RR, my first assumption is brake sparks.
When I was living in South Dakota some time back, the local rail line (which only ran a few trains a week, IIRC) would experience several grass fires a year. When the burn starts at the railroad ballast line, runs out into an open field and never gets anywhere near a road or a building the probability of the cause being anything OTHER than hot sparks from a train becomes somewhere between zero and nonexistent.
uhhhh…isnt Zero probability the same as Nonexistent?[%-)]
reminds me of a reporter who wrote that a politician, who changed his mind, did a “complete 360” on his position…
surprisingly, it is usually fairly easy to tell if this is the case, as a previous poster noted…the worst of the fire is often so far from the starting point its easy to tell.
Could it have been started in the junk yard and blamed on the RR by the caller, to take the heat off of the junkyard? Yes. Is it likely? Unknown at this point…but it is likely that a trained investigator will be able to tell. I would imagine the RR got someone down there PDQ to find out, since structures and other “assets” were involved, the RR is likely to be sued…
Anyone else think that it’s odd that the last sentence of the story says “arson is not suspected”? If they’re so sure that a train did it, how could arson even be remotely considered.
Trains starting fires along the ROW is hardly a new phenomenon, although the advent of roller bearings cut the incidence down tremendously.
In the day of friction bearings, many was the time that a train left grass fires for miles along its trip as a hot box spread sparks.
During dry weather it doesn’t take much to set off a tremendous fire. One tiny ember. I’ve been to plenty of grass fires that were started by a single spark.
We have to be careful during dry seasons, running through the forest as we do. The problem then, believe it or not, is sparks from the engine exhaust (and we’re running an RS-3 - a Diesel).
What’s unusual about this is that BNSF does a pretty good job of creating bare space along the mainline ROW between the tracks and the property lines for the purpose of preventing spark fires. But sometimes one just gets into the brush no matter what.
I am down in Myrtle Beach visiting my Mom for a few days and read about this fire in the local paper this morning and the report only mentioned the fire being caused by sparks from the wheels (on rails) of the train.
The local regional Railroad in this part of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin and Southern Railroad, has been blamed for a number of fires in the past caused by sparks in the locomotive exaust. The SD20s they have (IC rebuilds from SD24s) are especially bad. I’ve stood trackside and watched them throw sparks in the air, although most of them go out by the time they hit the ground, and I’ve never personally seen a fire started by a errant spark.
The WSOR is starting to do something about it though, by equiping the fleet with Spark Arrestors on the exhaust stacks. So far just the SD20s and GP38s have got them I think, though I wouldn’t be suprised if their SD40s get them down the road.
The 2052 seemed to be the worst. I remember going west between Badger and Devils Lake, up hill. Looked back and saw a shower of sparks. Good thing it was winter with a snow cover on the ground.
Turbos are supposed to be somewhat of a spark arrestor themselves, so I wouldn’t expect to see SD40-2s outfitted anytime soon. The exhaust has to run forward to the turbo, then the spinning blades of the turbo are supposed to stop sparks from going out the top.
In this shot of a EMD 645 turbo’d prime mover, as used in SD40-2s, the turbo is front and center. The incoming air comes in the round hole on the front. The exhaust goes up and out the rectangular stack. The tubes running towards the sides go into the airbox of the engine. The exhaust manifolds are under the tarp, and they feed into the rear of the turbo.
