From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
R. T. POTEET wrote:My worst Model train accident was when I bought my first copies of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman way back in 1962. This hobby has been twisting my arm ever since and I've spent thousands of dollars trying to recover from that horrible accident!
B:
Respect the scram switch. Did you ever see MODEL RAILROADING UNLIMITED?
Back on my last layout when it was 4 x 20 feet, the mainline ran along the long edges of the layout (not sure what my dad was thinking when he did that) about an inch from the edges. One day my brother was running trains with me. However, back then, he only ran trains at one speed: the speed of sound. I kept telling him to slow the train down, but he never listened to me back then and kept the train cruising. Well, as the train came out of the one 180-degree curve, the engine (an Atlas SD24) flipped off the track and went airborne. The cars had uncoupled and stayed on the track. I remember the engine doing a nice slow arc off at a slight upward angle and back down and landing on the carpetted floor. Amazingly, there was no damage, and the engine continues to run to this day.
At the model railroad club I used to belong to, we had some rather spectacular wrecks. In one case, we had a train gaining on another train that was going into a storage siding. As the caboose cleared the points for the switch to the siding, one of the club members threw the switch for the mainline, forgetting that it also killed the power for the siding. As a result, the second train, now without the first train sharing the power from the transformer, surged ahead, plowing into the caboose, which went sideways along with a couple cars ahead of it and the locomotives of the second train. The main source of crashes on our layout was a six-foot scratchbuilt wooden trestle where our three mainline tracks narrowed to two with the inside two tracks running on a gauntlet track. We often had the trains spaced apart on those two tracks so that they wouldn't get to the bridge at the same time, but that didn't always work. About once a day, there would be a loud crash, and we'd have to stop everything and clean up the mess.
Of course, my new layout has had its share of derailments, like this one the first day I began running trains after completing my mainline.
Kevin
http://chatanuga.org/WLMR.html
http://chatanuga.org/RailPage.html
I went to a MRR club once a few years back, they had a kid who ran his Thomas real fast, while I was using a borrowed Frisco Geep and went fairly slow.
No one thought that the coupler on the thomas could connect with a kadee, but it did. Turns out that when he rammed the rear of my train, he knocked several of the coupler springs lose. I was left with 4 cars out of a 20+ car train....
Vincent
Wants: 1. high-quality, sound equipped, SD40-2s, C636s, C30-7s, and F-units in BN. As for ones that don't cost an arm and a leg, that's out of the question....
2. An end to the limited-production and other crap that makes models harder to get and more expensive.
But were any of your accidents caught on tape like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PweRsxbN3c
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5eCPWpEAPw
That is a $4,000 Aster (live steam) USRA Light Mikado locomotive.
Semper Vaporo
Pkgs.
At the club at the top of the helix (6 turns) while pulling 30 hoppers the first coupler (Athearn metal clip failure) of the first car came loose. The locos surged forward as the hoppers and caboose whent backwards near the speed of light out of the helix down the long grade (2% 40 feet long) into the tunnel and hidden track. Im still missing a hopper from that wreck. The hack was in pieces and 1 hopper wrecked beond repair. I woder what the conducter and rear brakeman where thinking while running a scale thousand MPH. When are we gonna get HO scale air brakes? Wouldnt that be fun to hook up?
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
Dr. Frankendiesel aka Scott Running BearSpace Mouse for president!15 year veteran fire fighterCollector of Apple //e'sRunning Bear EnterprisesHistory Channel Club life member.beatus homo qui invenit sapientiam
On my old layout, I was running a Bachmann 0-6-0. The track was only 'bout 1/2 inch from the edge. So I was runnin my switcher (0-6-0) at about 60 scale mph, I flew off the edge, & bye-bye! IT WAS MY ONLY STEAM ENGINE AT THE TIME!
- Luke
Modeling the Southern Pacific in the 1960's-1980's
I was running trains at a friends house. He had a DCC layout. One of the other engineers stopped his train for a red signal. The owner of the layout was not watching and ran through a red signal and into the rear of the other train. The caboose and 5 cars derailed as well as both of the engines. It was decided that the engineer and fireman, as well as the conductor and brakeman in the caboose were killed, due to he nature of the wreck. What a mess and quite a few laughts as well.
I'm having a heck of a time explaining to my 5 year old the difference between the steamers at the Colorado Railroad Museum ( which we visited in October ) and Dad's "little engines" in the basement!
"Why can't we get a big one?" is all I hear!
I paid a premium price for 12 Intermountain KCS grain hopper kits. A friend in my model railroad club agreed to assemble the kits for me because I am not too skilled in this area. When the kits were completed I assembled them into a unit train and sent them on the layout. There were only two places on the layout where the scenery was unfinished and open to the floor. One area was a 1.5% grade on a curve, very slow speed but one of the grain car trucks failed.....and four of the new cars went into the canyon!!! (42" drop to a concrete floor)
JIM
Jim, Modeling the Kansas City Southern Lines in HO scale.
Back during the days of the old Division 6 Railroad Clubhouse...begot by Central Ohio N-Trak for several years after....
I was running my "Gateway Limited" Cincinnati Central Passenger train. Going at club layout speed (rare for me, loved to highball in those days), a Union Pacific Intermodal was right behind.
I got near the Coshocton, Ohio modeled yard....The UP Highball was right behind, a switch was missed.
Bam, right behind my observation car. Crash, containers and trailers all over the floor.
That was when the Division 6 ran things down there. The yardmaster was so mad!
The worst I've seen was at a train show. On a big DCC modular layout. Two engineers miscommunicated and the result was a head-on collision of 2 trains, about 15 cars each. There wasn't a lot of damage, fortunately. Mostly, bruised egos and broken couplers.
Phil, I'm not a rocket scientist; they are my students.
A somewhat funny accident happened on a club layout we were thinking of converting to DCC. One of the members (who shall remain nameless) brought his DCC system in, hooked it up and proceeded to run a train. All of a sudden we heard "please stop". Each time the words were spoken the voice got a little higher. Next sound was "crunch" as his locomotive ran a turnout and hit a stopped freight. Several catcalls of "get the bottle" were heard. He had programmed in a LOT of momentum. Needles to say he was ribbed about it for a long while.
Charles Sanchez
PRR-Perfect Rail Road
The Santa Fe Ry. Historical & Modeling Soc. Convention in 2005 was in Pasadena. So I volunteered to have my N-Scale layout on the layout tour at the end of the convention. And it was, of course, my first open house. Everything ran like a top during the morning shakedown run. About 1:pm some fellows began arriving. I got two trains running (one in each direction) from the staging tracks on the lower level. About ten minutes later I heard a crash. A lead switch to the one set of staging tracks had failed, sending the 30-car freight (man, I like N-Scale!) train down an occupied track. Derailing cars of both trains knocked over cars of trains on adjacent tracks. Meantime, the other train, a twelve-car mail train descending into the other set of staging tracks on the turnback curve, chose to take a lurch, and the trailing cars bunched up and derailed. End of operations! I spent the rest of the time that my visitors were there answering questions. And, of course, I just had to have an audience - no sense doing things halfway; if you're gonna fail, might as well do it up big! They were all very nice and sympathetic - even told their own horror stories. But it was over two weeks before I could muster the nerve to open the access hatch and clean up the mess. Two months later the layout was dismantled for a move out of Calif. back into "the States". A new railroad is now taking shape . . . with redesigned circuitry to prevent errant trains from entering occupied tracks!
Ardenastationmaster
Well, if you would of had it on tape, depending on what kind you got, it probably wouldn't have come off! LOL
Christian
I havent wrecked many trains, but one memorable exsperinces is when i was at my uncles house playing with an E-Z track figure-8 and we decided to play 90 degree, OF DEATH. two DCC locos, one track, 3 cars each, and one E-Z command DCC. you know it wasent going to end well. one loco set at 3/4 speed, the other at my control, tom be nimble, tom be quick, tom cross over before, OH CRAP, never mind. the tail box fliped, and the ft unit at 3/4 speed sat on top of the center flat, not horible but still a wreck.
is there a gauge telling when scale lives are lost? or is it just geuss work? if there is one i would like one for my club.
I had gotten a train speedometer for the club layout, and was doing some testing with it on my own layout to see how well it worked for high speed trains. Although my home layout had 12" curves (it was N scale), my shinkansen never had a problem staying on the tracks at realistic speeds.
At a realistic 185 mph, everything was going fine. But with even higher speed prototypes coming out in the next few years, I wanted to find out the limits of the speedometer, and slowly ran my train faster and faster.
It turns out that at about 240 mph, my 100-series shinkansen jumps the track on 12" curves. And plummets to the floor. Luckily, although several cars came apart and pieces flew everywhere, nothing was actually broken. It was a simple matter of finding all the pieces, figuring out which cars they went to, and putting them back together.
I recall reading an old RMC and in the submitted photos section, someone literally modeled a steam lokie boiler explosion. flues spewing out the front, no cab maybe...what a sight...
This happened some 30 odd years ago so it's a little hazy. My father and I had started a layout in a room we built above the garage. To make more room for the layout we punched holes through the wall and had a shelf the outside of the wall for the return loop. All the tracks went into tunnel portals before exiting the room. For my birthday I got a brand new Athern diesel switcher. I couldn't wait to try it out. It was on the third or fouth trip around the layout that the engine didn't come out the north portal. I went out of the room down the stairs to the landing and the stairs to the storeroom where the return track was and found no engine. I was worried at this point because there was about six feet of shelf that was about fifteen feet above the garage floor. Come to find out, there was a bad joint in the rail just after it exited the room and started along the shelf. My brand new switcher free fell a scale 1300 feet and smashed into more pieces than it was made with.
20 years later when I helping my mom move out of the house, I was sweeping under the stairs and found a coupler, some steps and and a piece of railing from that, my brand new switcher that I got for my birthday.
mrjimbone wrote: My brand new switcher free fell a scale 1300 feet
My brand new switcher free fell a scale 1300 feet
WOW imagine that in real life!
anyway i plan on having a really big wreck when i get my track layed out to finish off these 2 locomotives i have because they are the worst at running.
i will put them on the same track as far apart as i can get them with 4 or 5 cars behind them loaded with anything heavy (old batteries etc.) and put them both at full speed on a collision course with each other head on and see what happens!
i will take a video and see if i can put it on photobucket
what do you think?