essachs@ihuxl.UUCP (Ed Sachs) (03/21/85)
I've always enjoyed living with a railroad in my backyard (our lot, in Elmhurst, IL (Chicago area), backs up on the single track Illinois Central Gulf line to Rockford and Dubuque). However, on Tuesday, 3/19, at approximately 2:30 pm, a coal train derailed behind our house (12-15 100 ton coal hoppers off the tracks, about 200 feet of track ripped up). We now have about 100 tons of coal in our backyard (I'm sure that ICG will clean it up eventually). One of the hoppers came within 15 or 20 feet of a neighbor's house two houses down from us. It was interesting watching the clean up efforts. The crew got there around dinner time with 5 small but powerful bulldozer/tractor/crane machines. Each dereailed car was overturned and dumped (hence all the coal in the yards), then righted, carried to the intact track and set on a new set of wheels. New pre-fab (like HO) sections of track were laid, and trains started moving again about 5:00 pm on 3/20 (very slowly). Unfortunately, the noise didn't let us get much sleep the night of the 19th, but it was fun to watch. -- Ed Sachs AT&T Bell Laboratories Naperville, IL ihnp4!ihuxl!essachs
msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) (03/23/85)
Ed Sachs's derailment story reminds me of April 11, 1981. I was then living in a high-rise overlooking Canadian Pacific's "Galt subdivision", the line from Toronto to London (Ont.) and beyond. During the wee hours of April 11 I heard one or two loud bangs, then silence. The next day it turned out that this had been a derailment less than half a mile away. The line had a level crossing that was on a fairly sharp curve already, and this was being replaced by an underpass, and the temporary track had an even sharper curve. Apparently a train had been backing around this and had derailed. Nothing too serious, but I got to watch the cleanup the next day. Fortunately the derailment had been away from the other track, so they could bring a crane right up beside the train. I watched as they carefully jockeyed the last car back onto the track, then tried to do the same with the engine, then they cut a damaged piece off the engine, then they carefully put IT back on the track, and by this time there were about 100 people watching, and we all applauded. Then they swung the crane boom around to stow it to go home, without first lowering the boom, and hit a power line. (Not only that, but it broke, and fell against a metal fence, while still live. Nobody hurt, though... unless there were injuries in the automobile accident that happened a couple of blocks away while the traffic lights were off!) Which, in turn, reminds me... I heard one other derailment happen on that line during the 6 years I lived there. It was on November 10, 1979, just before midnight. It sounded like "wh-whumph". Not very loud -- except it was 8 miles away and I was hearing it THROUGH the thickness of the well-built building! You see, the train was carrying propane and chlorine ... they evacuated over 200,000 people from the area, some for almost a week. Fortunately the immediate area was industrial, and the worst injury that night was to a reporter who broke his ankle climbing over a fence. (His station, CITY, interviewed him. He said his ankle hurt.) (Some firefighters inhaled chlorine a few days later, but they recovered all right.) Mark Brader