oscaletrains:
My gauge as to death or injury is based on the damage done (e.g. derailed engines, cabooses, passenger cars and how they are located after the wreck). It i quite subjective, but use your good judgement as to injury or death. In my previous post on this subject (see page 1), we determined the casualties by he fact that the lead engine was on the caboose, how the impact had affected the caboose (pancaked into derailed cars) and the position of second engine relative to the first and the caboose. Tom, whose layout we wee running on, got quite a ribbing for some time for commiting that goof..
This is funny, in a sick sort of way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC8VzVmNPOI
Jon
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Sob. Some idiot (who I don't want to admit to) left a box of track work supplies sitting on the tracks. And another idiot (who looked alot like the first idiot) decided to do some video of a nice long train coming through a tunnel. Unfortunately the nice long train had to be backed into the tunnel before it could come out of it. The nice long train also had a nice Challenger Imports brass C30 caboose on the end of it. The nice long train was so long the caboose backed into the box of track work supplies (sniff...) and decided to play Evel Knievel onto the concrete floor. Sob.
It's never been the same since...
Why is it alwasy the most expensive or best detailed/weathered piece of equipment that hits the floor? (like my super weathered/detailed SP 50' box car that got accidently shoved off the end of a spur track and onto the floor. Someday that boxcar will make a return to the layout laying in the undergrowth below a high bridge with a pair of legs sticking out wearing white and red striped stockings and ruby slippers...
Grumble. Grumble.
Charlie (now where did I leave my brain this time) Comstock
I was trying some different consisting sets with locos with and without sound. I set up some temporary EZ track around the dining table...harmless enough you may think...read on.
I had 2 Atlas BNSF H3 8-40CWs with a sound lead engine sitting on the outside track with about 20 cars or so. On the inside track I had a set of SD45-2 with a sound lead unit. They are from Genesis and I had way too much momentum and the lead engine broke free going nearly full speed and as it was a double loop, it rear ended itself along side the BNSFs. Suprisingly, no real damage to the rear ended cars and the SD45-2. I walked over to rerail everything. This is where fate kinda got mad as the Dash 8 escaped destruction and decided to take things into its own hands and this is where the story takes a "Final Destination" twist.
Remember when I said that the track wrapped around the dining table? Well, someone put a CD holder on the table...on top of a pile of manilla folders. Well the CD holder was one made back when CDs first came out and probably weighed 5 pounds easy. With the folders as slippery as a wet pig, I bumped the dining table on the way back to the controller and all I heard was a loud crash and no more sound from the Dash 8. I turned around to see carnage as the edge of the CD holder crushed the cab of the Dash and it flipped it and derailed almost everything else.
I held the Dash 8 in my hands like the dad from "A Christmas Story" was holding his broken leg lamp. I had to push the roof of the cab back out and the windshield still wears the crack til today. everything else kinda worked itself out with EXTREME pressure and a little cement to make it all stay put. I also cracked a tooth off of a gear in the front truck(not sure how that happened) and it had to be replaced. That loco is a keeper now it is still leading my BNSF consists.
About 17 years ago I was running on a friend's layout out near Chardon, OH. One of the operating features of his layout is running stone trains loaded with live loads. The cars get loaded with crushed stone (ballast, basically) at a stone loader at one part of the layout and get hauled to another part where they are dumped. Then the empties go back and get loaded again.
Several years ago, the layout owner restricted stone trains to a maximum of 30 cars, but back then, stone trains of 60, 70, or 80 cars were not uncommon. At the time, he used wireless throttles made from Futaba model airplane controllers (per the series of articles in MR 20-25 years ago). These throttles usually worked OK, but for some reason, the florescent lights in the basement sometimes would often interfere with them and make them do strange things.
So on this one night, I'm running a stone train. I had three units and probably around 65 or 70 loaded stone hoppers. I was easing the train down a hill on the layout known as "the gauntlet." The gauntlet was so named because the double track main would not fit through there due to a pilaster in the basement wall, so the two mains track went up the hill on a gauntlet track (some people call that a "gantlet," but I digress). It was probably a 2 or 2.5 percent grade.
I got clearance from the dispatcher to start down the hill and I probably got about 1/4 of the way down when the radio throttle decided to freak out and launch the train down the hill at full throttle. Try as I might, I could not get the throttle to respond. I tried to get to a phone to call the dispatcher to kill the power (the layout was and still is cab control, and we weren't using radios yet), but it was too late.
At the bottom of the gauntlet was a sweeping right hand curve. The locomotives made it around the curve, but everything else went straight ahead, piling up in a giant heap of stone and hopper cars. You could actually see a cloud of dust rising above the wreckage.
About ten minutes with the Shop Vac cleaned up the mess, but I caught a lot of grief over that one, especially since I was just a young kid still in high school at the time. (And it wasn't my fault! Really!)
Jerry
I was at a modular showing int he next town over. "Bob" was running his Circus Train. and "Jim" was running his Brass ABBA ATSF F7 set and a string of heavyweights. On one of the curves the units disconnected from the rolling stock. "Jim" backed up his F units to couple on, while at the sametime "Bob," distracted by onlookers, wasn't paying attention, as his BLI 4-6-4 and circus train hit5 the tail end of "Jim's" Train. The result wasn't pretty.. Both loco's hit opposite ends at about the same time at the curve. The car buckled outwards and fell the 3-4 feet to the floor, where trucks, truck pins, windowbands, roofs, and car sides proceeded to break off... Miraculously the locos were unharmed, yet I'm positive that any scale person inside would be dead by now.
Alex
My worst train accident
was i just put togethere a bowser challenger steam loco i was so happy put it on the lay out and i ran great i was so proud it was my very first. when to pick it up to put away and i t slipped out of my hands and on to the concreat floor
My worst train accident was when i returned from the Boeing Train show, which I attended with my son. and the first words out of his big mouth to my wife was "Dad spent $400.00 on train stuff"
my 2nd worst train accident was when my wife saw an unopend #6 turnout(ho) with the price tag and started counting what was on the layout-she stopped at 70 and didnt see the bag with the rest of the unopened or the box with the ones waiting to be reused.
She now calls my tarins "the other woman"
moral... children say 'everything" and dont let your wife see what stuff costs cause even the free stuff is more than she wants to pay.
I happened. It just happened. This morning my layout was attacked by my own clumsiness.
I entered to model train room, and just for fun, I thought I would operate a few trains. But wait!
What's all that flckering? One of the fluorescent lights was going bad. (I have fluorescent lights in a drop ceiling.)
It looked a bit like a thunderstorm as the train passed under the flashing light. However, I knew I had to replace the bad fluorescent tube.
The light is immediately above my coke oven complex. My coke oven complex is based on the Walthers kit, but I included extra buildings, structures, and machines that I scratch built. I have been happy with how my coke oven complex looked.
I stood on a chair to reach the light. The cover is one of those "cracked ice", translucent thingees. I lifted the cover to scoot it to the side on top of a ceiling tile.
The cover caught one of the wire hangers holding up the metal frames. That resulted in the cover bowing upward and striking into the hanging fluorescent light fixture. It was just enough force to cause the fixture to unhook itself from the chains that supported it.
So ......if you can picture this ....... I was standing on a chair holding up the "cracked ice" cover with the flourescent fixture laying on the cover. All of this time, all of that stuff was immediately above the my coke oven complex.
That was definately one of those "OH NO's" !
Disaster struck as I was in the process of juggling everything so that I could re-hook the fixture on chains. The "cracked ice" cover slipped through the metal frames and dropped onto the coke oven complex. The cover broke as did several pieces in the coke oven complex.
As it stands now, the light is back together with new fluorescent tube and new cover. The broken coke oven pieces are on the work table and they are glued together.
Model Railroading is Fun....... (Huh?!!!)
GARRY
HEARTLAND DIVISION, CB&Q RR
EVERYWHERE LOST; WE HUSTLE OUR CABOOSE FOR YOU
I witnessed another crash at the train show on January 26: On a big N scale modular layout one guy had just put about 3 coal hoppers on the track behind some diesel locos (I'm no good at spotting diesels) and sent off down the track. He didn't realize that a 20 car local freight was coming the other way. The locos met inside a tunnel (really!) and the hoppers accordianed along the track. As we say in Cache county - Bummer Dude!
These things never happened before DCC, one more bit of realism!
Phil, I'm not a rocket scientist; they are my students.
One time at K-10's, My A&S GP38-2 duo rear ended a derailed Christmas Train. Someone forgot to shut off the power on the Analog track!
Oh yeah, no 1300 scale feet drop to worry about!
steamage wrote:Had a little finder bender last Christmas day. Rule G may have been suspected.
I love that figure! I'd be scratching my head too.
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?
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.
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...
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 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.
Well, if you would of had it on tape, depending on what kind you got, it probably wouldn't have come off! LOL
Christian
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
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