I have never heard of this kind of thing before:
I have - there are accounts of this kind of thing in A Treasury of Railroad Folklore (Harlow & Botkin ?), among others. I believe it’s because the tumbleweeds - when crushed - exude or release an oily kind of juice, with effects about what you would anticipate. I seem to recall also reading stories about creosote bushes and swarming grasshoppers or locusts having the same effect in the western US. Here in the eastern US, in the fall we also have a vegetative impediment to good traction - crushed leaves have much the same result, so much so that most of the commuter railroads have equipment to hose or blow them or the “juice” off the rails, etc.
- Paul North.
Wet leaves on the rail is roughly equivalent to greasing the rails. Very slippery, and a real problem for us in the fall. We run through the woods to start with, and we have some grades in the 1% range. Not a good combination, up hill or down.
What’s really bad is for the railroad itself to make the rails slippery–as when spraying an oil-based weedkiller along the right of way. I don’t think that I will ever forget ascending Saluda Hill on Southern #27 right after the weed-killer train came down in August of 1964. Sad to say, #27’s engine’s sander was not working well that day, and it took, as I recall, about an hour to go up the hill.
Johnny
Oughta try going through a cut in a hi-rail filled 15-20 ft. tall full of tumbleweeds - weird experience…
Well mother nature has gotten us again. Goes to show that evan the most powerfull man made things can’t beat mother nature. Wow. I’ve never seen anything like this. Well I guess there was a “What the” section in TRAINS a while back. Weird…
Mom Nature won’t be denied!
One of my first thoughts after seeing the tumbleweeds photos…was thinking of all it might take would be a spark {possibly from slipping wheels}, and ignite all that stuff jammed in under and along the locomotives…{and fuel tanks}…to make a rather bad situation.
Those things burn like mad once they get started. Fortunately, it takes some doing to get them to ignite. In the 1980s the town of Mobridge, South Dakota got buried in tumbleweeds. Mobridge is along the Missouri River and there was a drought, with the river quite low. Tumbleweeds were growing in the river bed and one morning the wind blew hard enough to dislodge them and the town was buried to the point where some people couldn’t get out of their houses.
[(-D] Oh, wow - I’m sure. “Things they never taught you” dept., right ? I can only imagine the view from the inside - kind of like one of the insect movies [“A Bug’s Life” ?]. Would’ve made an interesting photo from the outside - the hi-rail approaching the pile of tumbleweeds. Was it able to push them aside enough to keep traction and not get stuck up on top of them, or wedged into them ? Otherwise, we’d need to invent a tumbleweed plow, eh ?
- PDN.
Approached them at 10 MPH and then get swallowed-up in the pile. Little scratching noises around the cab an the view was akin to looking at a sponge from the inside. Eventually you came out the other side with a bed full of russian thistle. The branch this happened on saw maybe a train a week and is now completely abandoned…ATSF AV District, Bristol - Wilson Jcn. in SE Colorado
Track supervisor would plow through them just to keep the cut somewhat clear from silt…
Fusee & snow did better than plows…
A little off subject, but I still laugh at the newspaper article that was published sometime in the 60’s. As I remember it, a motorist was driving across a bridge somewhere in Wisconsin and got stuck in a huge pile of dead flies. It appears that a very large swarm of may flies congegated there, casing a pile 3’ deep, and when he drove into it…well…he got stuck!
I can’t imagine getting stuck in a pile of flies, but on the other hand, it really happened…or my mind is all mush…which could be the case. As for tumbleweeds…they can be a big problem when the blow up against a fence or a standing train.
Just imagine the fun on a suburban train during the fall, making station stops from 70mph and having to stop within 20’ of the spot each time. It’s even more fun if the train before you did not stop at the station, instead went through at 70 redistributing a fresh batch of leaves onto the rail.
It’s amazing how much smoke is generated by all those sliding wheels as they burn off the leaves.
’ Makes me think of the movie Throw Mama from the train. Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito go plunging off a mountain road in a car. As they’re driving down the steep slope at a high speed through the forest, all they can see is branches and leaves flying past the windows. One of them says : “Hey look! It’s just like the carwash!”[(-D]