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I'll second that, Alex! On one Accurail boxcar of mine, I replaced both of them with screws after one of them snapped, dropping...oh wait. This would sound better as a story...*Ahem*On one dark and stormy night, an Eastbound work train was heading up a steep mountain grade. The engineer was having trouble with wheelslip, as his train was hauling two hoppers filled with heavy gravel with only an under-weighted GP35 for power. One Accurail boxcar had the shell literally filled with metal weight (it weighed several pounds!) for reasons unknown... (It wasn't me!) As he finally reached the summit, his train was late, and risked delaying the hotshot. He headed downgrade faster than he should, attempting to beat the hotshot to the West end of double track at Dooley, where the hotshot would have to stop if the work train wasn't clear.Suddenly, the GP35 lurched, derailing. The heavy freightcars surged forward, propelled by the heavy hoppers and the over-weighted boxcar. The locomotive was pushed aside by the snowplow behind it, and the rest of the train surged downgrade.The dispatcher and engineer of the Westbound hotshot was alerted by the work train engineer, uninjured in a ditch beside the track in the GP35, and were able to route the hotshot onto the diverging track, giving the runaway work train a straight path - except for the sharp curve in Dooley!The runaway train took the curve, and seemed as if it would make it unscathed, to roll to a stop on the long siding. Then the heavy boxcar's weight snapped one of the Accurail truck pins, derailing the car and jamming one end under the roof of an Atlas Station. The other end was hit by the gravel hoppers, which proceeded to derail and spill gravel all over the lumberyard and residential house's yard and pool nearby. They kept going, bowling over a tree and ending up in the pool in a strange parody of the Pink Panther... The plow, ahead of the boxcar, kept rolling on the rails. The crew survived. The rest of the cars, behind the gravel hoppers, created a massive pile-up in the lumberyard. Damage: The Atlas station had it's roof almost ripped off, and took several days to repair. The boxcar was repaired (with 2-56 screws!), put back into service (without the weights!), and later sold to a friend. Both hoppers survived and are awaiting a repaint, and the rest of the cars are still in work train service. The GP35 survived in perfect shape, and is soon to be sold for an unrelated reason, and the engineer was fired immediately. (I won't say who that was to protect <strike>myself</strike> the guilty...[:-^])Here's a photo of the scene a few months before The Atlas station is barely visible above the roof of the boxcar. That pine tree is the one the hoppers hit. It's still there, but it's never been glued back down... [IMG]http://i233.photobucket.com/albums/ee261/TrainManTy/P1020224.jpg[/IMG]Nowadays all those buildings by the backdrop are gone, replaced by an open lot. There's just been too many runaways that have derailed there... I removed them to protect the cars that derail there. Now they just derail onto dirt, gound foam, and lichen, no hard plastic buildings... Nothing is quite heavy enough to destroy the buildings anymore...And THAT's the story of the snapped truck pins! That was one of the worst operating sessions (well, not really a whole session, I only had one other operator) ever, second only to the time the Zephyr fried in the middle of it... And it was the same operator too... Neither time was his fault of course... Anyway, now I'm off to go solder a couple hundred rail joints...
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