Do you think those cars were empties?
According to the linked NWS report, the tornado was at EF2 when it struck the train. That’s winds between 111 and 135 MPH, possibly gusts to 161. If the train was eastbound, it appears the tornado came in behind the train, so unless the crew happened to see it as they approached the area and recognized it for what it was, they didn’t have a clue until their train stared coming apart.
The train was actually heading northwest here. The “North Lake” mentioned in the newspaper article is Northlake, Illinois, one of the communities surrounding Proviso (and the mailing address of the administration building). The tornado would have hit the train at right angles, coming from right to left in the photograph. I doubt that the crew even knew that there was anything beyond a rainstorm hitting them–it was January, after all!
I believe that is the first time I have ever seen a derailment actually happen live as it were. That was amazing.
South of Calgary is a location on the Crowsnest Sub. called Pincher, or as the rest of the world knows it Pincher Creek. It is downwind from a slot between two mountains south of the Crowsnest Pass where the winds blow in a straight line at a very high speed quite often. At one time derailments during those winds were almost common. It is described almost exactly like what happened here, the cars start to lean over, then straighten up and lean over again further, until KA-Boom.
As mentioned on another thread, now that railways work with weather forecasting agencies, things like this can now be avoided. It has been a number of years since I have heard of a wreck down there.
AgentKid
I am surprised that the locomotive would be pulling the first car and it even looks like several stayed coulped for a time. Does the coulper or drawbar twist? They shouldn’t. They should break, right? How does it hang on like that?
I don’t know where the breaking point is, but they can twist without breaking. There is clearance and “slop” in the coupler engagement as well as the draft gear. It looks like that car went over 60 degrees or more. It would be interesting to see exactly how the couplers and draft gear handled that amount of twist.
As the engine pulled out onto that deck girder bridge, the lead car rode up onto the plate girder alongside of the bridge deck. You can see the far end of the car rise up a few feet when it rides up onto the girder. This support would have taken a little stress off of the coupler twist. Then the tank car wedged into the bottom of the hopper, breaking the coupling, and rolling the hopper upside-down and into the ditch. W
I suspect one reason the microphone was put outside the cab was to let crews know they were not being recorded.
I did find a You Tube video of the cleanup but no doubt it was a couple or more days after the wreck because of the tank car cargo.
Rich
[quote user=“Bucyrus”]
I don’t know where the breaking point is, but they can twist without breaking. There is clearance and “slop” in the coupler engagement as well as the draft gear. It looks like that car went over 60 degrees or more. It would be interesting to see exactly how the couplers and draft gear handled that amount of twist.
As the engine pulled out onto that deck girder bridge, the lead car rode up onto the plate girder alongside of the bridge deck. You can see the far end of the car rise up a few feet when it rides up onto the girder. This support would have taken a little stress off of the coupler twist. Then the tank car wedged into the bottom of the hopper, breaking the coupling, and rolling the hopper upside-down and into the ditch.
I’ve seen a picture of two locomotives coupled together. One is still on its wheels, but the other is leaning at about a 45 degree angle, apparently supported only by the couplers. Talk about some stress…
Metal will bend before ultimate failure by breaking. How much the metal will bend is a function of the metalurgical properties of the particular metal.
This applies to coupler shanks and draft gear was well as any other thing that is made of metal including the car frames and superstructures.
Concurning coupler behavior. Until some time in the 1970’s they were plain knuckle couplers. Then there were a series of accidents in which couplers “by-passed”, that is one slid out over the other, and punctured a tank car. At that point the NTSB/FRA decided that the solution was double shelf couplers on hazmat tank cars. With the double shelf the adjacent coupler can not bypass or override. That was the theory and it proved to be mostly true, entirely so in my personal experience. After a few year’s of experience the railroads found that the bottom shelf had the happy side benefit of preventing the extricated drawbar of the adjacent car from falling between the ties which reduced the probablity of derailment. Many railroads put bottom shelf couplers on their car as an alternate standard. As I recall Union Pacific was one of the early adopters of bottom shelf couplers for their own equipment. Bottom shelf couplers may be required on all new cars now but I do not know that for a fact.
Of course there is no free lunch. Soon after the double shelf changeover kicked in I got called to a derailment in Pennsylvania. One or two cars had derailed in the usual manner. The following five tank cars of caustic soda had all derailed the same axle the same way as twisting forces transmitted by the shelf couplers managed to shove the flange over the rail at low speed.
For a couple of years I made it a point to photograph the behavior of shelf couplers in derailments. I found that in a high speed derailment that stacks the cars in the middle like cordwood, an action seen at the end of this tape, the most likely result was that one or the other coupler shank would break right behind the head with no other obvious effect.
My personal opinion in this case is that the first car to derail was four or five back. You can hear the air go before you see anything. The first four cars were all covered hoppers and I suspect
We have had some discussion here in the past about the pros and cons of track guard rails. The bridge in this wreck had track guard rails that terminated straight rather than curving inward to join each other at the end, as had been more or less standard practice for a long time.
I can’t see how the lead truck of the tank car reacts to encountering the track guard rails. The appearance of sparks on the left side of the truck leads me to believe that it was derailed during the approach. It also appears that the tank is slightly off center to the left of the track when it first becomes recognizable during the approach. The purpose of track guard rails is to keep a derailed car on the bridge deck as it crosses. I don’t know if the track guard rails would have accomplished that, since the truck was running true (although likely derailed) during the entire approach sequence, and may have just kept running true even if the bridge had no track guard rails.
My wife wants to know if what the crew heard sounded like a freight train when the tornado hit?
Help! I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe! [(-D]
Another forum I participate in posed the question that if a Tornado sounds like a freight train, then correspondingly a freight train must sound like a tornado…if that is the case then…do the noises cancel each other out? Pondering that could make you head explode…
One thing sure is for sure, someone from a higher power was watching over that train that day. If that hopper wasn’t in the way, I think the outcome would have been much worse. It seems to me that the couplers would have broken beetween the -8 and that 1st hopper. I wonder why? Also depending on how much train you are pulling, the weight, and track conditions, just because the EOTD said the train was in emergancy doesn’t mean it was stopped. Right?
If ‘someone’ was truly watching over the train, wouldn’t ‘they’ have caused the tornado to go away, or cause the train be delayed so as to not have been there at all during the tornado, or perhaps had the train going faster so it would pass the area before the tornado, or perhaps …etc…
And to answer your railroad question: correct. The EOT will indicate both air pressure as well as motion (or lack thereof).
You hear the air dump in the engine. The train was not going that fast. Why didn’t the brakes on the cars lockup. I seen the sparks under the tank. It looked like debris across the rails from the dropped cars.
As for the camers. The South Shore placed one in every cab on the fireman’s side. They video what is ahead and behind.On the old cars that is two cameras per car and married pair of the new cars.
I’m confused…the horn that was heard, was that the train or the tornado sounding its horn for the collision with the train?
Track speed in that area was 30-40 mph. Even dumping the air, it will take a half mile or more to stop at that speed. The engines by themselves stopped quicker, even if the hogger bailed off, as the PCS cuts the power when the air goes.