lightning

[Mookie]

Maybe I am missing something obvious, but how does lightning affect a train?

[wabash1]

no. at least not that im aware of. the lightning is a killer on track circuts and singnals but its never stopped a train. and im still alive. also about a 2 years ago a car hit a power pole of high power lines that went across the tracks when they hit the rails they shorted out every road crossing signal and block signal for 4 1/2 miles. are trains were stopped short of this accident. nobody was hurt and the trains were fine.

[Anonymous]

generally not at all as far as the train itself is concerned, but like the other guy said, it will sometimes play heck with signals and track ciruits, which causes all the trains to have to run slower(in some cases much, much slower or stop). I have heard of a few instances where lightning hit the engines directly, which both times i've heard about it, the engines tripped their ground relay breakers, and they all shut down. nobody hurt or anything, the elect. would be conducted around the shell of the engine to ground, and don't worry about whether it's obvious or not, when i first went to work with the railroad, I asked the very same question of the old heads! never hurts to ask!

[Anonymous]

I can recall back in the summer of 1993 when a strong thunderstorm moved in over one night while I was staying at my grandma's house. It dumped about four inches of rain. I can remember two or three bolts of lightning that were not more than a half mile away. all three set off the railroad crossing arms at a nearby crossing. One even set off a hotbox detector which was roughly six miles from my location of course it said "integrity failure". The next morning the railroad (CNW) had a slow order out due to standing water on the tracks under a nearby bridge. I'm sure there was also a number of signals which were affected by the storms.

[cprted]

In the live steam world, we recently found out that lightning can have a huge effect on our ride on models. A few months ago a track florida suffered a lightning strike. Their was a small crater where the lightning struck the track and all the signalling circitry was reduced to ash along with all the LEDs in the signals themselves.