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UP derailment forces ‘Coast Starlight’ bus bridge
I second you
expect the Goosemeister to honk about how hope superior the busses are compared to the passenger train. Typical Goose nonsense!
Did they close I-5?
Too bad for passengers who would have had to spend the night on a bus. Superliner coach seats are far superior to most bus seats for sleeping. This is especially unfortunate for those who paid extra for roomettes or bedrooms. I hope the extra charges were refunded.
Any one with railroad knowledge can tell you when it gets this cold for this long the rail pops like popcorn. Its not a rail problem as much as its a weather problem. So much for globle warming.
This section of ex-SP main winds and twists along the Sacramento river and it isn’t surprising that another train bites it. Heavy grade up that canyon… unknown if DPUs in use but it was a stringline issue that caused the Cantara Loop (northern part of the same Canyon) eco-disaster in 1991. From the one pic available it seems UP dodged a bullet on this one. Too bad for Amtrak, but not the biggest of concerns here.
Seems, to me, that there have been a lot of ‘derailments’ lately. I wonder if the AAR, and others, have done a study on the causes (“being investigated”, they say, but we never see the results). Could be the widespread use of inferior rail, imported from China/Japan/Korea be a factor? We appear to have more “broken rails” on the BNSF Northern Lines each winter.
So, what caused the derailment?
It surprises me that the Coast Starlight was not detoured over the BNSF from Klamath Falls to Keddie, California and the former Western Pacific through the Feather River Canyon to Sacramento and back on to the UP for the rest of the trip to Los Angeles. I guess nobody thought of it!
We had to ride a bus from Denver to Osceola, Iowa (700 miles) a number of years ago when a bridge washed out and prevented the Zephyr from running its route. As a result of the increased time to get to Chicago, missed our connection from Chicago to New York City. We had a bedroom booked on that train. We did get reimbursed for the price of that bedroom since the train they booked us on after the missed connection had no bedroom available. I would expect Amtrak will reimburse those passengers that had bedrooms; however, not sure about the meals that would be missed during the bus ride since meals on Amtrak are included in the bedroom cost. That was not how Amtrak operated when our trip was disrupted so no meals were reimbursed as the price was not included in the price of the bedroom we missed out on.
As for the suggestion to use the UP connection thru the Feather River Canyon, UP may not have given Amtrak permission to detour over that route or might have wanted to charge too much for that.
Reading about many of the interruptions to service that Amtrak has endured over the years, it seems as though their first backup is chartered busses. It seems odd to me that they terminated the Zephyr at Denver instead of Omaha which would have reduced the distance we rode the busses by about 500 miles.
It goes to prove that the railroads and Amtrak are more serious about bridge safety than our highway departments and even homeland security for that matter. Oh, we CAN’T CLOSE THE ROAD, it will take an eternity to get around this BEFORE it can even be inspected to make sure its still safe to use. They will take care of the problem AFTER it happens and lives are lost. How many calls for damage reports and bomb threats go unanswered or worse yet, being ignored?