Originally Posted by
Coal Dragger
Fewer rail miles now? Yes.
Easier to disable? No.
Derailments happen, probably far far more often than the public ever knows about. On average for a major derailment that takes out a single or multiple main tracks, a Class 1 RR will have the line opened up and running in 24 hours or less. That’s in an instance where the track itself is totally destroyed.
The derailments I have worked usually go something like this:
1.) Train details and puts cars on the ground, rips up the rail, smashes up the ties and generally messes stuff up. Could be a couple miles of track damaged if something was dragging before popping off the rail. At any rate the balloon goes up that there is a service interruption.
2.) Within the hour phones start ringing with Maintenance of Way, Mechanical, and Operations (train crews/dispatch etc) departments. Also a company called R.J. Corman gets a call, they have a lot of equipment to clean up derailments.
3.) About hour 2, the RR departments listed above start calling in crews, and getting materials headed to the site. Every division will have cars in a siding somewhere loaded with track panels (rails on concrete ties already attached), and other stuff for repairing a bunch of track. Also somewhere there’s going to be a bunch of dump cars full of ballast. Those are going to very shortly be having locomotives with a crew assigned to go snatch them out of the siding and head to the derailment site. Mechanical inspectors will head out to make a decision on what can be saved or moved.
R.J. Corman will fire up a fleet of low boy flatbeds with dozers and cranes and all manner of toys, and head that way.
4.) Depending on how far everyone has to go heavy equipment will be on site and getting after it within 4-5 hours, at least on my division.
All the broken shit gets bull dozed off to the side. Cars, locomotives (moved one way or another), the rail, ties, ballast, cargo, whatever... pushed out of the way into a pile.
Anything standing on solid rail that isn’t damaged will be moved via rail out of the area.
Then the track guys get to work laying new track, and dumping ballast on it, tamping it, and making sure the track is passable. If multiple mains are wiped out all effort goes into getting one main open. I don’t think I have ever seen this take more than 24 hours to be running again. Usually less than 12 for a single main to get opened up.
5.) Simultaneously to the first few hours the folks responsible for routing traffic start re-routing everything they can or stopping what they cannot so things stay moving or at least don’t pile up.
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