From the North Platte Bulletin.
2 Engines and 29 cars involved. It happened early Thursday morning and blocked all 3 main tracks. Highway 30 was closed for 2 1/2 hours because of a natural gas leak caused by the derailment. Sounds like a switch heater at a crossover. No cause released and one of the mains expected to be opened by Thursday night.
Trains destined for some place in Arkansas.
Jeff
Scroll about half way down the page for the story. Some pics included. As of this afternoon, UP Customer Service was reporting the same basic details as Jeff notes above.
By pure dumb luck, we happened to be railfanning the UP along US-30. The closer we got to Kearney, the more trains we saw stopped and cut for grade crossings. About 20 miles west of Kearney, we ran across the problem. It is a real mess, all three tracks were taken out. The UP crews were working hard to put track panels in place after moving all the coal along with hoppers. We saw two of the engines being rerailed and they didn’t look much worse for the wear. Hopefully, they can get it back up and running soon. Love the triple track through Nebraska!
[#welcome], dtamos! St. Paul, eh? I’m a transplanted former Minnesotan, my folks still reside in Prior Lake. I’m sure you’ve noted some of the other MNers on the forum.[:)]
Click on the link in my signature & then click on the rearender gallery & you will see one almost 1 year ago just west of Fremont. In that one the locos were going to become history according to a crew that was there. [:D]
I haven’t heard anything official yet, but I know that a defect with a frog was found and the train was supposed to be in a crossover when the derailment occured. #2 track was opened early this morning. Lots of Armadillo vans at the Grand Island depot for dog catch crews today.
Which explains why there are no unit coal trains in the yard at Parsons today…
But when the first ones show up, it will be interesting to see what UP maintenance has conjured up to get them rolling [ in the past have seen skinned up, damaged engines, jumpered around with wiring and air hoses zip tied to the handrails, very curious!].
Sam
Yet another example of why dispersed redundancy is light years better than consolidated redundancy aka triple tracks in close physical approximation to each other.
One derailment incident on one track takes out all the tracks of a consolidated track arrangement. A similar derailment occuring in a dispersed track arrangement would only result in that one track being taken out of service.
Now, why on earth would anyone think that just triple tracking the Orin line in the PRB is going to provide the solution to underdelivery of coal to the nation’s power plants? Heck, put in four, five tracks and you’re still going to have all five taken out when the next derailment occurs. Duh!
Those are some real smart capacity planners we have in our nation’s rail industry (insert sarcastic smilie here).
The PRB basin problem according to Trains magazine is the coal dust is somehow fouling the ballast.
Have tracks say 100/200 feet from each other means using more land + realigning the tracks + constructing new X-overs from track to track. I would guess if you spoke to a MOW person or a VP in the ivory towers of the RR you will find the cost probably is much greater then the return which is the reason that they are spaced so close to each other. Also while I do not have the stats I bet derailments are a very small % of all the class 1 trains run in the USA. Just compare tracks to interstate hwys basically both types of transportation are built alike. [:p]