Bad day to be riding the rails
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On various FB pages the speculation is that it "picked a switch."
IOW, a wheel on one of the cars engaged a switch point when it shouldn't have, causing it to veer off the track. If it was one of the lead cars in the consist, everything behind it would be affected.
"Picked the switch", a legitimate railroad term which essentially means that the flange didn't track through the switch as intended, either finding a gap in the points and tracking through the gap or, more likely, riding up on top of the rail and then off the rail.
Picking a switch is the term used when a sharp wheel flange wedges itself into the switch point and opens/gaps the switch instead of following the lined route…the result is a derailment, sometimes if it is the rear truck that picks the switch, that truck and most of the following trucks will follow the diverging route, not fun in yards as the longer cars are capable of running with one set of trucks on one track, and another set following the adjacent track..did that once, scared my helpers half to death.
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Some interesting video of the site immediately after the derailment and also of the cleanup.
Link to video"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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What a nightmare.
They could not have picked a more perfect passenger to interview.
Condolences to the family of the people who lost their lives.
So happy that you were not riding this one, George.
@mark said in Bad day to be riding the rails:
So happy that you were not riding this one, George.
Train travel is the third safest method of transportation, following airlines and buses. I'm not worried.
NTSB had a press conference yesterday. They expect to have a preliminary report in 30 days explaining what happened, but not why it happened - that'll take a lot longer.
What we do know, so far:
The train has a black box, with forward facing camera.
It was traveling at about 75 mph (speed limit is 79 there).
Looks like it did NOT "pick a switch".People are speculating that there was an issue with the track work, however, a freight that passed by about an hour beforehand had no issue. They're looking at that "black box" and camera footage as well.
Some are thinking it was a "sun kink" where the rail buckles due to heat - a relatively common occurrence. But, I can't see that being an issue in 80 degree weather, and the fact that the first 3 cars of the train didn't derail.
It's pretty remote out there, and reading the accounts of the responders is pretty amazing. Some of them were 80 miles away.
This is my pic of the general area:
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We had a major industrial rail line that ran through my town where I grew up. We were in the Monongahela Valley with a number of factories that were supplied with coal and ore from the River barges and the trains. The trains ran parallel with the river about 1/4 mile off. The train tracks were kind of an informal dividing line. Heavy duty industrial broken up by the occasional park for river access and one shopping center on the inside of the track, and old fashioned factory town going up the side of the hill on the other with a nice downtown shopping area built right up to the tracks on the other side..
We lived about a mile away from the tracks and up the hill. Due to the elevation, we could clearly hear every train that came through (see it, too) and there were anywhere from 8-12 a day when I was a kid. You learned to sleep through the sound and the whistles.
When I was 12, we were waken up by a horrible sound of metal shrieking and tearing. It is a very unique sound that is really difficult to describe. While this metallic screaming was on top, at the bottom were these tremendous booms. Think of the sound from the firework cannons when they fire a shell, but 5 times louder and coming 3 per second. It seemed to go on for minutes but was probably only 30 seconds or so.
My Dad and I walked downtown to try and see what happened, but you couldn’t get within a 1/4 mile because of the coal dust in the air. We did see the fire department and ambulance personnel coming out looking an awful lot like the first responders from 9/11. We were able to find out it was a train derailment that had hit some of the buildings in the downtown shopping district.
In the end there were 30 cars off the track, 7 turned over, and 2 that wiped out an entire block of buildings. It took two days before you could drive to the factories and shopping center (my dad had to walk to work and climb over the couplers to get to work. The downed coal cars weren’t removed for about a month and the cleanup took about a year. They wound up renovating the downtown. The tracks were down for about 6 months…
The sheer power of that much mass traveling at 40-50MPH is just unbelievable.
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Joplin quilters help train derailment victims
For the passengers displaced in Saturday’s tragic Amtrak derailment, Montana’s Hi-Line might have felt like the middle of nowhere. But as they quickly found out, sometimes the best people in the world come from the middle of nowhere.
Look no further than the Quilting Ladies of Joplin, which formed in 1967. They range in age from 72 to 92 and meet every Tuesday at the Bethel Lutheran church for friendship, fellowship and quilting.
“Sometimes we don’t get a lot of quilting done, we just do a lot of visiting,” said 79-year old member Jean Johnson.
The group works for hours making quilts of all shapes, colors, and sizes, and then stockpiles them in the basement of the church.
“I was in Choteau and my daughter called about getting quilts because they needed some and I said absolutely,” Betty said. “There’s a whole pile, sitting on a table downstairs, just go get them.”
Betty’s daughter Julie Erickson grabbed the quilts and distributed them to passengers at the Liberty County Community Center.
“You know it just gave you a good feeling,” said 86-year old Fern Wolery. “When you get older, you don’t accomplish a lot but this way, you accomplished something.”
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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Joplin quilters help train derailment victims
For the passengers displaced in Saturday’s tragic Amtrak derailment, Montana’s Hi-Line might have felt like the middle of nowhere. But as they quickly found out, sometimes the best people in the world come from the middle of nowhere.
Look no further than the Quilting Ladies of Joplin, which formed in 1967. They range in age from 72 to 92 and meet every Tuesday at the Bethel Lutheran church for friendship, fellowship and quilting.
“Sometimes we don’t get a lot of quilting done, we just do a lot of visiting,” said 79-year old member Jean Johnson.
The group works for hours making quilts of all shapes, colors, and sizes, and then stockpiles them in the basement of the church.
“I was in Choteau and my daughter called about getting quilts because they needed some and I said absolutely,” Betty said. “There’s a whole pile, sitting on a table downstairs, just go get them.”
Betty’s daughter Julie Erickson grabbed the quilts and distributed them to passengers at the Liberty County Community Center.
“You know it just gave you a good feeling,” said 86-year old Fern Wolery. “When you get older, you don’t accomplish a lot but this way, you accomplished something.”
@george-k said in Bad day to be riding the rails:
Joplin quilters help train derailment victims
For the passengers displaced in Saturday’s tragic Amtrak derailment, Montana’s Hi-Line might have felt like the middle of nowhere. But as they quickly found out, sometimes the best people in the world come from the middle of nowhere.
Look no further than the Quilting Ladies of Joplin, which formed in 1967. They range in age from 72 to 92 and meet every Tuesday at the Bethel Lutheran church for friendship, fellowship and quilting.
“Sometimes we don’t get a lot of quilting done, we just do a lot of visiting,” said 79-year old member Jean Johnson.
The group works for hours making quilts of all shapes, colors, and sizes, and then stockpiles them in the basement of the church.
“I was in Choteau and my daughter called about getting quilts because they needed some and I said absolutely,” Betty said. “There’s a whole pile, sitting on a table downstairs, just go get them.”
Betty’s daughter Julie Erickson grabbed the quilts and distributed them to passengers at the Liberty County Community Center.
“You know it just gave you a good feeling,” said 86-year old Fern Wolery. “When you get older, you don’t accomplish a lot but this way, you accomplished something.”
Damn Christians...
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@george-k said in Bad day to be riding the rails:
Joplin, MT:
Does anyone else out there just spent an oddly large amount of time surfing around the world zoomed in (like this picture) at various remote locations? Sometimes with streetview, but normally not. I enjoy it... maybe I should work for a satellite imagery company.
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@george-k said in Bad day to be riding the rails:
Joplin, MT:
Does anyone else out there just spent an oddly large amount of time surfing around the world zoomed in (like this picture) at various remote locations? Sometimes with streetview, but normally not. I enjoy it... maybe I should work for a satellite imagery company.
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Some interesting video of the site immediately after the derailment and also of the cleanup.
Link to video@george-k said in Bad day to be riding the rails:
Some interesting video of the site immediately after the derailment and also of the cleanup.
Link to videoWow, what an amazing post-disaster interview - the guy is so eloquent and clearly very observant.
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Damaged Tracks Caused Train Derailment That Killed 3
Worn and poorly-maintained train tracks that should have been replaced caused the 2021 derailment of an Amtrak train in Montana that killed three people and injured 49 others, federal investigators said Thursday.
The derailment occurred on Sept. 25, 2021, near Joplin, about 150 miles northeast of Helena, Mont. The accident sent the train’s eight passenger cars careening off the BNSF Railway, with four toppling onto their sides, forcing rescuers to extricate passengers.
The crash could have been avoided if federal regulations that required replacing the rail — which was worn down, misaligned and would move up and down with the train’s weight — had been followed and if a rail inspector had not been so overworked that he had had time to properly assess the track, according to a report by the National Transportation Safety Board.
“The track inspector’s workload likely prevented him from performing a timely walking inspection of the track in the area of the derailment,” investigators said in the report, noting that BNSF Railway Company, the freight railroad that owned and maintained the tracks, had not properly managed employee workloads.
According to the report, the inspector tasked with checking that particular piece of track had regularly been working more than 13 hours a day in the two weeks leading up to the crash; in the four days before, he had worked more than 57 hours.
The inspector had also raised concerns about the portion of track in question, and just two days before the crash, he had driven past the site but did not get out of his vehicle to view it on foot, the report said. “The most likely reason that the track inspector did not perform a walking inspection of the derailment curve in about a year is that he did not have time,” federal investigators said, noting that the site had last been inspected on foot in the fall of 2020.
