Unwisely, I put a short engine parking track right next to the top of a bluff. Granted, there wasn't a better place to put it... Aside from moving or doing away with it, how might the prototype prevent a derailled engine from going over the cliff? I've already installed guide rails, but those don't always work. Model-wise, the far end of the track is unpowered, so I can't drive it into the bumper and possibly over the edge.One idea I had was to bury some I-beams vertically and lay others horizontally across, creating a great big guide rail. I could actually do away with the engine parking, and just send a switcher out when work needed to be done at the customer siding. Or get a small switcher like a Plymouth and leave it at the far end of the working siding. It doesn't need to move more than three cars, a low powered loco would do the job.
What would the "real" railroads do?
Genesee Terminal, freelanced HO in Upstate NY ...hosting Loon Bay Transit Authority and CSX Intermodal. Interchange with CSX (CR)(NYC).
CP/D&H, N scale, somewhere on the Canadian Shield
There isn't too much real railroads CAN do; by the time things like guard rails have failed and the engine is far enough off the line or off balance to take a plunge the kinetic energy would snap most cost-effective approaches to 'railings'. And the ones that would stop the train cold in the required number of feet would cause massive damage to engines and cars all by themselves.
I have never quite understood why people with brass engines and superdetailed masterpieces so seldom put relatively cheap elastomer kitchen mats or the equivalent on at least the areas of their cold, hard, distant concrete floors that are likely impact zones from derailments or missing duckunder bridges. Let alone actual 'catchers' - say, boxes full of styrofoam peanuts in Baggies? - under known feline-encounter zones and the like. Put handles on the boxes to slide them around easily ... or deploy rapidly in case 'brass precipitation' needs a rain-barrel alternative quick.
BTW there's just as much benefit from those 'foot-saver' mats in long operating sessions as there is in the kitchen...
A real railroad with a situation like that would definitely put the best bumper they could afford at the end of the track. You say you already have a bumper, so that's done.
I don't think a real railroad would do anything at all about the sideways problem you seem to be describing. Locomotives rarely go sideways when moving VERY SLOWLY on straight level track that has been anywhere near properly maintained. So the I-beam structure wouldn't happen.
For the model, I would do the same as the real railroads, as described above. I'd also go a step further, and see what I could do about arranging a "soft landing" should the unlikely happen.
You might plant some tree stumps as a sideways block. Or something else that doesn't LOOK like it was put there to stop a sideways tipping loco.
Ed
Don't put the tracks so close to cliffs/bluffs that the inevitable is invited. If you really want that look, where the tracks are within 1 scale inch of vertical scenery, at least have the slope below begin to get more gradual and place some good sized scale trees there. The idea is, you get your cake and can swipe at the icing as well. With, say, two or three real inches of cliff above the treetops, and the trees towering from well below, you have essentially the effect you are looking for and will prevent your locomotives from rolling or dropping more than about six real inches before they come up against the tree trunks.
It's a thought.