The easy way, pre-made....  Disclaimer: buy used and never remove from tracks.  

Those are cool though I'm not sure what I'd use them for. Still. Agreed, NEVER pick up stuff along the rail road! 

Frosty The Lucky.

  I kind of posted it as a joke. But you know, Modify.... Adapt.....  Nevermind.... 

Looks like some lock out tag out to keep someone from doing something while maintenance was working. 

Pretty cool. 

Oh, if I'd come across them for reasonable I'd have a pair or two. 

Frosty The Lucky.

I gather the ones they use now basically use gravity to hold themselves in place.

  Positive re-enforcement. 

Anything all blue on the rails is maintenance and not allowed to be removed by anyone but maintenance. "If it's blue, it ain't you". They also use blue lights when occupying a track. You see it on flags, lights, and derails, many of which are portable.

Good tip though I don't mess with anything on or near the rails. Unless it's an emergency, I did help a lady push her car farther from the crossing once but I think she was clear anyway. 

The derail above really has me curious. Why would you derail a wheel, truck, car, TRAIN!!!?

Frosty The Lucky.

Jerry, I think the purpose of deraillers is damage mitigation.  I believe they are placed in locations where derailling a car, usually at low speed, would cause less damage than letting it run on, likely into something more valuable e.g.  a building or a work crew and equipment.  I have generally seen them is switching yards and similar locations where if they are encountered they would probably just lift the leading truck of a car off the tracks.  They serve the same pupose as jersey barriers for highway work crews.

G 

Because putting it in the dirt usually saves damage to equipment and people. Imagine for example, some yahoo gets a switch wrong from the mainline into an industry (say Norfolk Southern in Graniteville). Still tear things up fiercely, but at least a 12,000 ton train doesn't hit a building full of workers at 40 mph. Most incidents though involve derailing an engine or a few cars, as George said, often at low speeds.

It's annoying and expensive, but if the car doesn't come off the truck, or the truck off the axles, then a lot of the time you can just kinda pull it over a re-railing device or wooden blocks back onto the track. Let them roll out a long ways and a cut of cars can pick up speed and do real damage, like that cut of 40 or so cars from a bomb train that rolled out up in Le Magentic and burned down half a town. Some of them prevent cars from rolling out of industries, running through a switch the wrong way, and onto the main line.

An emergency stop was the only thing I could think of but thought there might be other reasons.

Looked up Lac Magentic disaster, a train with 70 tankers carrying crude oil was parked without hand brakes or a properly functioning engine and rolled away while the crew was . . . ?

It derailed in the heart of the town of Lac Magentic, ground zero was burned to the ground and 47 died.

Derailing it in the countryside would've been referrable though I doubt there would've been time to get a derailer bolted in place. 

Thanks.  

Frosty The Lucky.

So, yeah, you can leave one on the main line, but you have to tie it down (i.e. put on a number of hand brakes and test it with nothing but before locking it up and leaving). The Canada rail industry and that line in particular were going through insane cost cutting measures and the rail and engine were in crap shape, plus they'd gone down to one-man crews, something which was supposed to be illegal but they got done under "emergency" provisions. They changed a lot of this being allowed after the fact.

I've heard that the engineer was somebody shifted over from management as a replacement for short manpower, but I don't know if it's true. What is true is that he supposedly called in the problem with the engine and a manager (s?) claimed to have signed off on it but didn't or didn't know what he was doing. He also only left the engine brakes on and two cars worth then flubbed the brake check badly, maybe on purpose. Problem with leaving one on the main line is that if anything happens, there's no derail. They had a siding with a derail and chose not to put it there, possibly because of time. There's more, but it just gets worse the more you know.

Graniteville is about as bad but killed less people. An NS crew left the main line switched into an industry, derails off when they went on the law (couldn't legally work longer) and left but reported it as good in dark (unsignaled) territory. A train went into the industry at 40 mph with loaded chlorine gas cars right behind the engine and hit three or four more in the industry track. Busted three of them open (about 60,000 gallons of gas) and killed 11 people, put about 10 or 11 hundred in the hospital, about 120 or so with what became chronic issues. Two of the dead were the engineer and conductor - the conductor made it to the highway and coughed his lungs up on the dash of the car that picked him up.

When you find out what goes through your major cities and towns on iffy trains and tracks, much less where you live on a daily basis, it gets scary in a hurry. Imagine a Graniteville had happened in Chicago, or downtown Atlanta. The only reason it didn't kill half the factory workers in Graniteville was because it was a weekend.

This has become a major issue with transporting nuclear waste.  Statistically, there are fewer accidents per ton/mile on railroads but because of how cities and towns developed around the railroads most main lines go through population centers while it is often possible to bypass towns and cities when transporting by truck, at least in the interstates.

When we lived in Ft. Morgan, CO we were a short block and a half from the Burlinton Northern-Santa Fe main line and if something bad had happened it would have affected us before any evacuation order could be gotten out.  Here in Laramie we are 3+ miles from the Union Pacific main line.

GNM

On 4/11/2024 at 8:59 PM, Frosty said:

I could think of but thought there might be other reasons.

  Actually, there is another use for them.  They keep idiot's, new personel and people with no depth perception from setting a car or car string too close to the mainline on sidings for the railroad to pick up.  The RR usually doesn't like to go in any farther in than necessary to pick them up.  Some places paint the rails to mean "no farther" but the derail eliminates the possibilty of setting them too close and having a sideswipe or worse.

Makes sense Scott. I can imagine trains rubbing sounds pretty gnarly.

Frosty The Lucky.

Derails are also supposed to be locked in locked in place. Portable derails are controlled usually by maintence of way folks to protect workers. Other derails are controlled by train crews using a switch stand arrangement and are used to protect sidings. They are highly regulated by rules.

On 8/5/2024 at 7:14 PM, seldom (dick renker) said:

 They are highly regulated by rules.

As opposed to the rest of the railroad, which is so whimsical and carefree...

I wish it was care free but times have changed a great deal from when I first started in the mid nineties. 

WOW Dick, I retired  in the mid 90s, you're a young pup! Not saying my career had near the responsibility, it was considerably less stressful. I just thought you and I were closer in age. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Just turned 83 my friend in early july

Well darn, that's what I get for figuring things out, especially based on an assumption. You have 11 years on me. I tend to think of working for the RR as a career and the early 90s as pretty recent. 

I started shopping for a retirement job before I retired and started one within a couple weeks. I'd still be at it if I weren't so busted up. I miss a regular job. <sigh> 

Oh well, it gives more time to hang out with my friends here so it's all good. 

Frosty The Lucky.

  Gone are the days of the wheel tapper.

Bummer, laid off with no more clue than why he was hired to tap wheels 30 years ago. 

Makes me wonder what the conductor would say if I walked down the train tapping the wheels? Of course I'll have to search out what a wheel tapper's hammer looks like. Does he walk both sides of the train or reach under to the far trucks? I'm thinking a 3'-4' handle would reach down from the platform but not across the gauge so well. Or would it? Of course a tapper couldn't check the bearing temperature from the platform so he'd be on the grade.

I wonder if he'd take his hammer car shopping?

Thanks, another set of rabbit holes!

Frosty The Lucky.

 

Gone is the Gandy dancer