What’s the longest time you’ve seen cars standing (or laying) around after a wreck before they are removed?
Have you seen wrecked cars put to other uses?
(We had a string of high-sided gons fall (or rather bounce) off near where i used to be. They fell into a field (into soft mud). A HUGE crane (road) lifted them onto low loader trucks (figures… they are railway wagons, next to a railway). One of them, completely inverted, mysteriously lost all it’s trucks and major under gear but stayed where it was. After about a year a big square hole appeared at one end of one side… sometime later it gained a nice door…)
If they are in the publics view they are removed very fast, if in the middle of nowhere, as soon as possible. By any means a Railroad gets back to operations as normal as fast as possible and that includes getting rid of the wrecked cars.
Back in mid 2003 a bunch of empty cement hoppers derailred out here. UP quickly took them to the nearest yard, via lowboy trucks (rubber tire type). There, some immediately had repairs done so that they could move on their trucks to some other place, presumably to have the rest of the repairs done. Others sat for months and some even for over a year before they were finally loaded onto flatcars and taken away. Then about four were scrapped at that yard a little over a year after the derailment.
On May 5th, at 4:50 AM, there was a derailment of a freight train hauling coal at the 16th Street Junction in Chicago. The freight train was on Canadian National track, in the process of being interchanged from the BNSF railway to the Norfolk Southern. The 16th Street Junction is where CN’s St. Charles Air Line and CN’s route to Iowa cross the Rock Islandf line. The derailment caused all passenger traffic on Metra (which uses the fromere Rock Island track) to be cancelled that day forcing thousands of workers to find alternative transportation into and out of downtowm Chicago. As a result of the derailment, five or six gondolas hauling coal fell off the tracks, dumping coal all over the junction. While most of the derailed cars were uprighted and removed within a few days, the remains of one car remains at the site, in all of its wheel-less crumpled glory, for all passersby on Metra to see.
There was once a coal branch line that ran in W Va that several hoppers left the rails. They went down an embankment maybe thirty ft deep to a river. They layed there maybe ten years that I know of. That track has been pulled up and no longer exists. The hoppers as far as I know were cut up and removed as scrap. Ken
Generally, wrecked cars in way of operation or in public view disappear rapidly. As do lightly damaged or loaded cars. However, there are some badly damaged cars, that have sat around my yard, for 6 years waiting to be scrapped.