Here is an excellent quality video of a coal train breaking in two as seen by a drone camera. It is something that a person rarely sees unless they are at the right place at the right time. This captures the event quite well.
Ouch.
Looks to me like there’s going to be some plenty PO’d people at that blocked grade crossing as well.
Railroading happens!
This is a litley used crossing at a small town
Oh yeah, but the bystanders don’t expect it to happen to them!
Breakdowns and derailments can be excused for blocking crossings since they are unpredictable and unintentional. Parking a train over a public crossing for 4 hours is inexcusable.
This happens to be my own site for train watching. I rarely get there, perhaps once a year when we visit wife’s mom. It’s a great vantage point because, at lower left in the distance is a nice bridge across which the ‘competition’ crosses the South Thompson. There is a nice backwater, or ‘slough’, as we used to call it, at sharp lower left, in which we would swim and soak up the sun in large inner tubes when I was…umm…much younger.
Here are two images that I have taken in the same location, within about 200 meters of where the video camera was initially working.
You can make out the CPR tracks in the cut high on the opposite bank, and the curve around which we see the locomotive coming at first is just outside both photos’ fields of view, at right.
People may get pissed off at being blocked at the crossing, BUT this was an accidental incident where a coupler broke. It was not a planned blocking of the crossing by a stoped train.
How many people whose passage is blocked by such an occuraence will realize that the blockage came about because of a broken part.
By the way, how do you brake a coupler?[:)]
Johnny, you move the brake levers, at which point the coupler brakes with the rest of the train.
As for how you break a coupler, I’m sure there are a number of engineers here who will tell you how other engineers do it. [;)]
P.S. There’s a lot of shiny metal on the coupler on the hind segment of the train…I suspect that it was the knuckle that was broken. A railfan would have politely turned the anglecock on the front segment. An emergency application requires notification of dispatcher and any nearby trains (not that that seems to be a problem here), but nobody will move again until pressure is built up. And a conductor just might apperciate the ability to move the train to carry him and a knuckle (E, not F) back to the site, instead of having to make the walk. (And if you’re equipped as I am while in the field, write a note saying, “You’re welcome!”)
Unless the Conductor inspects the train and finds the break how does he know what the problem was and what is needed to fix it. Railfans are ‘not supposed’ to be transmitting on railroad radio channels.
Once the Conductor finds the problem, he will radio the Engineer to drop off a knuckle from the engines. Conductor will close the anglecock and have the engineer pull the train ahead until the knuckle comes into the view of the Conductor riding the rear car of the moveable cut. If the knuckle is actual broken on the rear car of that cut, the Conductor will change the knuckle and then radio the Engineer to reverse the trains direction as they proceed back to couple to the rear of the train. After
As a mechanic/machinist friend of mine once said “It’s metal, it could last for 1,000 years or break tomorrow, you just never know.”
When the air goes and won’t come back, start walking. Take a wrench and a air hose and hope that’s all you need. If really lucky, you’re carrying that stuff for nothing and just have to recouple the cars and/or the air hoses.
If you’re really unlucky, you’re going to have to deal with a broken drawbar. If really, really unlucky - a wrong end drawbar.
Jeff