OK, I will be the stick in the mud on this one, and I certainly do not fault Zardoz for posting it, but I think the wording of these and taking amusement in someone’s death is somewhere between extremely wrong to extremely impolite.
I will be the first to admit that I have done some stupid things that, were fate not kind to me, could have resulted in death or serious bodily injury. We all do this, because we are human. I don’t think it is kind to make fun of those who are not here to defend themselves.
While I’ll be the first to agree with gabe and have often felt similarly, I realize that there is a certain morbid contempt among many members here, against anyone who fails to properly “respect” the railroads. And that people who try to beat crossing gates and the sort are seen by these people as villains, deserving to be punished.
Thanks. But those were all of the railroad ones I could find.
And to those of you who are ‘bothered’ by the ‘callousness’ of the language used, and are feeling all “politically correct” today, might I remind you that the reason that these are called “Darwin” awards is that the activities are so incredibly stupid. But I bet you already knew this.
I feel the same way towards the dolts that skateboard down a long railing and land on their boy-parts, or worse, their heads. Or the lame-brains that read or take notes while driving (except in this case they also put others at risk).
If I place a 2x4 between the roof of my house and the one next door, and while attempting to walk across this plank I fall on my head, do I deserve your sympathy? Heck no: I did something incredibly stupid.
If death was not an efficient way for species to rid themselves of stupidity, I doubt we would have survived our half-million year evolutionary journey; we proba
Railroading is a very, very unforgiving world. Mistakes of any kind, honestly intended of stupidly formented, are punished by at the least blood shed and more probably death. Employees in railroad operations know this all too well, as most that have any meaningful experience in the industry, either have had their own near death experience or know fellow employees that have. To operations employees death or serious maiming are just the next move away at all times. Darwin Awards are a gallows humor method of coping with shuddering finality of a mistake.
In Z’s defense, he relates that these were just the railroad related incidents. It is apparent that the writer (who was not Z) took a lot of glee in reporting them as he did. I’m sure the non-railroad related incidents were reported in much the same tone.
I was especially fond of the two gate-runner incident…
This is my favorite, although it is about a city bus.
(2 November 2004, Portland, Oregon) Dianne, a 56-year-old bus driver with 22 years of experience, pulled into the Sunset Transit Center shortly before noon. She was running six minutes late, and was eager to use the bathroom.
After waiting impatiently for her passengers to disembark, Dianne hurried off the bus, leaving the engine in gear and running, with no parking brake engaged. She walked around the front of the bus and reached in the driver’s window to pull the lever that closed the door.
The bus is equipped with automatic brakes that keep it from moving as long as the doors are open. Once the doors shut, the brakes release after a one-and-a-half-second delay.
As Dianne passed in front of the bus on her way to the toilet, she suddenly found the 15-ton bus creeping slowly towards her. She could have jumped out of the way. In fact, she could have ambled out of the way. Instead, witnesses watched her push against the bus with her arms outstretched, in an effort to stop it.
The mass of a bus is more than 200 times the mass of an adult woman. You do the math. The bus did indeed stop, eventually, due to circumstances other than Dianne’s efforts.
Paramedics arrived within minutes, to find Dianne dead beneath the bus.
An investigation blamed the accident on “operator error.”
As I read it, I pictured the Ammonia car at the end, following the lumber cars and the engine. They were to cut loose the ammonia car, then deliver the wood, come back and spot the ammonia car. SO, he was between the wood and ammonia. I assumed he was trying to stop the ammonia car on a flat spot of the track, so it wouldnt “drift” away, and when he kicked off the stopcock to get the brakes to set, he was suprised when the car reacted so quickly. I envisioned him being between teh cars, stepping down to open the valve with his foot. When the car began to abrubtly slow dow, he fell onto the track between the cars, in front of the ammonia car which was still moving fast enough to run him over.
As I read it, the engineer was proposing to drop the ammonia car on the ‘main’, without pushing it back into the siding, which he apparently didn’t feel he could get back out of.
That places the ammonia car at the tail end of the train. After switching the lumber cars, the crew would come back and spot the ammonia car. Hence the extra work.
<<ENGINE_LUMBER_LUMBER_etc_LUMBER_AMMONIA
The crew member decided to drop the car on the fly, and was riding between the last lumber car and the ammonia car. In theory, the trick would have worked just fine (wouldn’t the crew be surprised!), especially if he had used a handbrake instead of bottling up the air on the car and expecting to do a nice, easy brake pipe reduction. Instead the car went into emergency, throwing him off balance and onto the tracks.
Such flying drops used to be a common practice in this country, especially for a facing point spot, where a crewmember had to throw the switch between the locomotive (or last car) and the car to be switched to the siding.
I’m still a little confused, I will admit. If the train is moving forward, then the ammonia car isn’t being spotted, right? So how did the crew member expect to save some time by uncoupling it?
Unless perhaps the train was running through the siding that the ammonia car was to be left at, but the engineer wasn’t willing to stop and uncouple at that point because it was on an upgrade.
While my initial comment may seem a bit callous in nature, I think there is something that one can learn from these Darwin Award stories, and it is that trespassing on railroad property or just plain messing around with a train can be a very costly mistake. I think this kind of material is worth passing on to others, not just those of us in the railfan community, if it will serve the purpose of making p
Notice that I didn’t go whining to Bergie asking him to make the awful imagery “go away” to protect my innocence, or the sort.
I certainly bear no ill will against Zardoz for posting it. More over it struck me as the type of thing that, had I been the one who posted it, all the PC obsessed crowd would be exploding in angst over my lack of sensitivity, etc etc.
Not sure I can answer that. Perhaps he figured to roll the car back into the siding while the rest of the crew delivered the lumber cars. Or, he would have to break the car of the train, set the brake, then couple up and actually drop it on the return trip - more work than simply backing into the siding and spotting the car.
Again, as I read it, what normally would have happened was that they would have backed the entire train into the siding, dropped the ammonia car, then pulled on out to deliver the rest of the cars (ie, the lumber cars). Apparently the engineer didn’t think he could make it back out of the siding with all of the lumber cars, so decided to drop the ammonia car on a level section of the main track where he could restart his train, then come back and deal with the ammonia car later, when, presumably, the engine would otherwise be running light and could make it back up the hill from the siding.
…______Siding / Main <---- Direction of travel of train
