Waht would happen if one of these,
http://www.users.qwest.net/~choice157565252/pictures/bnsf6831.jpg
were to say, hit one of these…
in theory of course.
If it was the engine itself, and going say 50 MPH, the engine would move the truck and the truck would be damaged but the engine would be much more damaged.
Now say you had 4 of those engines and a 100 car coal train goining 50mph… The engine wouldnt be in to good of shape but neither would that truck…
Me thinks they would both lose. The locos would certainly be destroyed, but if it were a loaded coal or steel train moving at a good clip, the momentum would be so tremendous. The truck would get moved and maybe rolled, but it not destroyed like a typical car. Maybe OLS should try this one out!
…I think the condition will rarely have a chance to happen. Those trucks are not going to be operated on highways…They are simply too large to fit. They almost always are used off road at construction or mining.
If it was possible…and the truck was loaded it might be somewhat of a draw…They can carry 100 plus tons of load…so together it would have a good chance to outweigh the locomotive.
Could always do a small expeirment with a HO trainset and a Tonka Truck.
Well, not my trains or my Tonka truck.
That gives me an idea for my Lionel train layout. With a little work some Tonka Toy trucks are big enough to look like one of those hue trucks. Modify the cab, add steps and a big radiator.
You do not need a huge truck for the train to lose. Remember the Amtrak that struck the truck carrying rebar in Bourbonnais, IL back in 1999? Not that the truck won, but neither did the train.
As mentioned in a prior post, the truck in question does not venture beyond the confines of an open-pit mine. I remember taking the tour at Minntac about 25 years ago and it was mentioned by the guide that one of those trucks backed over a conventional pick-up truck that was parked in the wrong place. The pick-up was flattened and the driver of the dump truck wasn’t even aware of it until after the fact.
As an aside, mining trucks of this size are diesel-electrics, you’d burn out a lot of clutches and destroy a lot of gearboxes with a straight mechanical drive.
So Boyd’s real name is Gomez Addams?
[:D]
…A few comments beyond my post above…Did a little checking and payloads for some of these monsters = 400 tons…!!!
Perhaps they are almost a third higher then RR locomotives…and they are probably 3 times wider. So, in checking…If it was an outright crash at a crossing…{which we’ll not see}, I now believe it would be the RR engine laying on it’s side…not the truck after the meet.
Years ago on the Niagara Peninsula a CN freight with three SD40s hit a lowboy that had got hung up on a croosing with a D8 cat. The cat got tossed into a field and and the three diesels were heavily damaged and derailed along with about thirty cars. Fortunately no one was seriously injured. The D8 cat was started and drove out of the field to another waiting lowboy trailer. The lead SD40 was scrapped.
Al - in - Stockton
Because of the numerous open pit copper mines in Arizona and Mexico, I see those trucks, or at least parts of them, being moved through here quite frequently.
The bed alone is wider than a 2 lane highway and requires closure of the road while they are being moved. The route has to be carefully selected because of bridge clearances and weight restrictions. The tires are 8 feet in diameter and are moved on a separate flatbed. The main chassis requires quadruple trailers with 24 or more wheels under each one to bear the load, and they are so tall that they will not clear any Interstate overpasses or traffic signals.
A pedestrian overpass was recently removed in Tombstone, Arizona, so some of these trucks and other oversize items could be moved through town. The bridge is going to be put back into place in one month after several loads are moved through the area.
The possibility of a train hitting one of those trucks is extremely unlikely since they would never be close to a railroad except when they are being shipped to a mine in parts. They are even too big to ship by rail.
Using a Lionel or any other model train and a Tonka truck would not come close to replicating a collision between these two because of the difference in weight and bulk between the real thing and the models.
Right, I said in theory.
A train of even moderate length is going to weigh more than the truck, but the truck is heavy enough to pose enough resistance to turn the whole works into scrap iron. It would be like a train hitting another train.
One way or another, a lawyer would make money . . .
It seems to me that, at least in the case of the largest mining trucks (360-400 ton capacity like the CAT 797 in the picture) the passage of the truck over the RR right of way would do serious damage to the track structure so the train would not have to actually collide to derail, hypothetically of course…
…Most highway crossings have the track imbeded with material along side the rail at roughly the same heigh,so I believe the track would be ok.
It would be an unfortunate connection having a RR engine and one of these max. capacity off road trucks meet. I believe the truck would have a better chance of moving after the wreck happened.
Some of the trucks carry tires over 12’ tall…! Some when fully loaded = gross wt. 560 tons…!!! That size and weight starts to equalize itself to a railroad engine.
It’s not something I’d like to be watching happen!
In my opinion this sums it up pretty well. Yes it is unlikely it would ever happen but it wouldn’t be pretty. If anyone ever read about these trucks, they basically ARE a locomotive, at least operationally. They have a large sized diesel engine connected to a generator,dynamo,what have you and they are powered by electric motors. The largest one ever, the Titan, had a 3300 hp EMD 645 in it.
The book Train wrecks by Robert C. Reed (1968 Superior Publishing) has some photos of what happens when a train collides with a truck and derails.
On Page 158 (this is all based on the 1st Edition, I am not sure if later editions are any different) there is a photo of a C&O freight train that was derailed after hitting a truck with so much force that the rails were ripped up badly.
Page 160 has a pair of photos of derailed trains caused by trucks that stayed on the tracks, one of them was a CB&Q passeneger train that hit dump truck that was carrying stone, one of the locos is on it’s side with it’s front end smashed in.
A pretty good book, just a bit dated, but still informative.