Derailment at Melvindale yard

[DBFanatic]

Well guys, this is a first for me. Got to see a switch get thrown under a train car as a switcher was pushing a string back from the diamond near John Riel Park. Went over and got to talk to the engineer, mentioning that in over thirty years of railfanning I had never seen a derailment. In retrospect I'm betting he would have preferred I kept my mouth shut. It reminds me of when on our HO scale modular layout people would come over to 'check it out' whenever there was a derailment. Anyway, the incident occurred about 6:30 pm, not much has changed last time I checked about a half hour ago. Looks like one truck of the last (first?) boxcar derailed and made it about 100 feet before the train was stopped. The switcher was being remotely operated and the operator was pretty far away. I guess I was expecting a big crew to suddenly appear to quickly get the boxcar back on the track ala a Formula One pit stop, but it seems like this is going to be a long, long night for the yard crew...

- Carsten

[DBFanatic]

Update: Maybe not a big surprise, but everything looked cleared away and fine this morning at around 6:30. Not sure how they got the car back on the tracks, but I was too tired to stay out there and watch...

- Carsten

[Doktor No]

Car department came out and more then likely rerailed it with blocks and a rearail frog. No big deal. At CSX an engineer has to run the loco to rerail, don't know about NS so perhaps they had to call and engineer also. Crewman had to go make a bottle deposit due to the derail too...and the bottle girl may take some time to arrive. Ours came up from Vicksburg.
Been there done all that. Oppps.

[hoborich]

Simple derailments are usually easy to rerail with blocks, if it's just one truck and the car is upright. We used to have occasional derailments on the lead back to the Ford plant, at rush hour, usually after a new trainmaster announced an end to overtime.

[DBFanatic]

Thanks for the information, guys. I really felt bad for the engineer. I'm glad to know that it wasn't that big a deal to get the truck back on the tracks.

- Carsten

[M.D.Bentley]

Simple derailments are usually easy to rerail with blocks, if it's just one truck and the car is upright. We used to have occasional derailments on the lead back to the Ford plant, at rush hour, usually after a new trainmaster announced an end to overtime.

Been there ,dun that
Derailments happen everyday. No one hears about it when its in the middle of a yard or a customers siding or no one sees it, "out of site, out of mind". UNLESS it involves hazardous materials ,blocks a crossing or does some major damage. It wont sell news papers . Except on a slow news day.