On Sunday in Mer Rouge, LA a truck hauling a large crane on a lowboy trailer got hung up on the railroad crossing. A Union Pacific freight train slammed into it and derailed. Some folks waiting in their car caught it on video:
The leaking gas was argon --not toxic but definitely a suffocation hazard. The driver of the truck got out and was unhurt. The engineer had minor injuries, the conductor had serious but non-life-threatening injuries.
An Argon tank might expode! Obviously failed chemistry and the possibilty of suffocation is only if the gas seeped into your basement (at 39 gm/mole it is heavier than air – about 29 gm/mole). The atmosphere is already about 1% argon and hardly explosive nor dangerous.
On Sunday in Mer Rouge, LA a truck hauling a large crane on a lowboy trailer got hung up on the railroad crossing. A Union Pacific freight train slammed into it and derailed. Some folks waiting in their car caught it on video:
Only one very long term solution. Start eliminating highway grade crossings. Should be part of trnsportation funds supported by higher road use taxes. NCDOT seems to be farther ahead than any other state on a percentage basis.
There’s another solution, but the rubber tired bubbas would like it about as well as the railroads do with their NIMBY/BANANA raging paranoids:
(1) Truckers must post their lading and proposed route to every government entity on their route.
(2) Ban Lowboys - Tell the rubber tired haulers to come up with a new design less prone to high center (at their expense, a la the DOT 111 cars)
(3) PTC type system for every commercial vehicle.
(4) Trucking industry must inspect their routes weekly (the road agencies aren’t doing that yet)
and on and on and on with knee jerk reactionary ideas.
(sorry Randy and Switch7; Rhetorical response.[:-,]; STREAK : What about all the taxes the railroads paid into fuel and HTF tax coffers over the years? [that were not spent on rail/hwy safety improvements])
Here’s something the rubber-tire bubbas could do, and it’s already part of their job. Either a) fix the grade crossing right, or b) put up enough warning signs that even a truck driver could figure out not to cross the tracks there.
The problem is that over the years of adding ballast, rails rise. When roads are redone they take the road down to gravel and redo the entire concrete or ashphalt. The road doesn’t rise (neighbors complain if they have to redo driveways). but the rails do. We will experience more high centerring with time.
I like your ideas. Especially number 2, I can just hear them screaming now!!!. . The PTC system would not work for truckers unless you have it set so if a truck with a low boy approaches a grade corssing where the could get stuck, they are disabled and cannot move. Number 4 would not work, because it is impossible to do. Fixing grade crossing to eliminate low boys hanging up MUST be at the truckers expense. The railroads would do the work, since the crossings are on railroad property. Signs do not work. In Chambersburg, Pennsylvania there were huge signs and flashing lights warning truckers of the low overhead and the exact clearance available. Many times they under the former PRR high line and got stuck or tore the top off of their trailer… They CANNOT READ, so forget thst idea.
Any inert gas in high enough concentrations will suffocate you. Those thick clouds of argon drifting around the tank car are probably 100% argon, or close to it.
My thoughts go out to the crew for a quick recovery.
Let me ask this question as the current issue of Trains discusses PTC. Once active, are the designed PTC allow for interaction with crossings? Seems if a gate or a beam (think garage doors) is stuck up or the beam is broken, it would signal a full service brake application before making visual contact with the stuck truck?
And let me put this out there, if the PTC set off an emergency application can the train crew jump off before impact?
In my years driving a truck there was little talk about railroad grade crossings and trucks. Even after accidents. Operation Lifesaver or someone would do an outreach program to the trucking community. When a train hits an automobile it is usual a case of too bad for the car and occupants. Hitting a truck depends on where the truck gets hit and the type of truck. The simplest is for a train to hit a dry van with say toilet paper(saw that in NC once) the train hit the trailer and the trucks cargo went everywhere in the wind. One of the worst is what happened here a low beam trailer with an overweight load. In this case the cargo went flying and the trailer beam detailed the train. I don’t think I have mention tank trucks with chemicals. A truck can and will cause a derailment if it gets hit wrong or is a beam trailer (heavy haul trailer like this, a low boy or a flatbed) like happened some years ago in Bourbonais(?), Il. Rgds IGN
A bad one was several decades on the RDG where a commuter train hit a flatbed carrying coiled steel. The coils more or less stayed in place and the commuter train ran under them, causing the coil to travel down the center of the car like a bullet down a rifle barrel. The only thing that limited fatalities was it was a late evening run and there were only a handful of people on the car.
Looks like the “safety cab” saved a couple of lives in this instance. Prior to the safety cab one can understand why some railroads like Southern, N&W, and CN preferred to run their locomotives long hood forward… makes alot of sense.
Running longhood forward probably lessened the need for the safety cab, and N&W and Southern liked the bi directional capability of their units.
CN developed the safey cab way back in 1973 and was the only road (aside from a couple of Provdence and Worchester M420s) to use it until 1989… 16 years later! I wonder how many lives would have been saved had all roads adopted th safety cab in the early 70s. a question for the ages: why did no other road purchase the safety cab in all that time? Was it simply a cost consideration? The safety cab was built to withstand a one million pounds of force verses the 300 thousand of a standard spartan cab.