Can't they stop and check and clear the flangeways with a pick?
This appears to be something to expect and to be totally preventable.
Robert Gift Denver wrote: Can't they stop and check and clear the flangeways with a pick?This appears to be something to expect and to be totally preventable.
Hindsight is usually 20-20.
Not even my hindsight is 20/20
With all the storms, one each weekend for the last four weeks, and all the ice and near zero temperatures, they should have crawled through the crossing or stopped and looked and picked ice out of the flangeways.
There are not that many grade crossings there. (Great Western Sugar. Engine and two cars.)
Though I don't even work for the railroad, I would have known to do that.
Lazy incompetents?
Here's one for your record, pardner!
A D&RGW passenger train derailed somewhere between the Continental Divide and Royal Gorge, because of ice in the flangeways of a road crossing at an extremely acute angle. Not only did the locomotive and all cars remain upright; they remained coupled, and proceeded down the (dirt, heavily rutted) road for a distance of more than a mile. The engineer stopped the train when an expected signal failed to appear out of the blizzard.
Later, one of the crew remarked that the ride had smoothed out just before the stop!
Sorry I can't provide more info about the date or exact location, but I first heard this story back when the Grande was still pulling passengers with steam locomotives.
Chuck
Chuck, is that really true?
Not embellished or exaggerated?
That is fantastic. I presume the dirt roadway alongside the track was frozen, otherwise
the engine would have immediately bogged down.
I've actually dreamt of such things, but never expected it to really have happened.
But I can see it happening if the engine keeps pulling and the rolling resistance of the cars
keeps the train taught and straight.
Would love to learn the details.
You made my day.
Thank you,