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Derailments Caused By Emergency Braking?

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Ed and Jeff, Thanks for your explanations and information on this.  What I did not realize until asking here is that a kicker is triggered by a service application.  I had the impression that they were just a spontaneous event that would occur when running with brakes released. Part of my curiosity about this stems from a short anecdote in Trains back in the 1990s called “God Is Not the Engineer.”  I can’t recall all the details, but a trainmaster accused an engineer of bad train handling, and he told the trainmaster that it was an act of God because there was a kicker in the train.  So he told the trainmaster that the problems with train handling was an act of God and God was not the engineer.  The engineer even told the trainmaster which car was the kicker. So I asked an engineer if there was any way to determine which car in a train was the kicker if there was one in the train.  He told me that the only way he knew of would be if it were daytime, if there was fresh snow, and you were looking back along the train standing still, it might be possible to see a puff of snow at the kicker when it kicks. But if a kicker will kick in reaction to a service reduction, then I can see how you could actually track it down if there was time by making the kicker kick and listening to the sound as Ed mentioned. Another part of my curiosity was that article in Trains where a wreck inspector discovered the cause of a derailment to have been a kicker.  But in that case, the wreck inspector made the discovery by digging into the heap of cars and discovering a kicker.  Unless I am missing something, that would be absolutely impossible.
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