Thats alot of damage

Don't run too far with this one. I would not be surprised if turns out to be a track caused derailment, but the reason above does not seem right. The article did not give a source for this statement, but several things seem strange. Of course, if quoted from a non-railroad oriented source, it could have been stated correctly to begin with and then garbled beyond all recognition before printing. A few reasons I say this:

1. You would never add a 2.5 inch piece of rail and leave it in track. If such a piece is put in to get a train past pending a permanent fix, a slow order is required. Was that supposed to be 2.5 feet? That does not seem too likely either. Usually the minimum length you would put in for a repair is much longer than this. Therefore, this statement is so far off the normal of what I know I can not guess from it what was really done.

2. Usually an increase in temperature will cause inadequately restrained track to buckle, not one rail to roll. By buckle I mean the whole piece of track moves sideways in a short curve. If only one rail has a high compressive force, it might lift up out of the plates and buckle by itself, but that I have never seen. The tieplates and spikes system is a lot better than it looks to be to the uninitiated.

3. Given that this had to be class 4 track (allowing 80p/60f speeds), tie conditions bad enough to permit rail rolloever seem unlikely, in fact I would say unallowable. Rollover is usually a low speed track porblem. Also, it appears to have been on straight track, so rollover due to high lateral force on the curve seems unlikely.

4. Crushed rail head? Over how much length? If short enough that a 2.5 inch piece replaced it, it was probably a wheel burn. On the other hand, the location is unlikely for that, being as it is straight and level and not near a turnout. Crushed rail head normally occur on the inside rail of curves where heavily loaded trains move at much less than the balance speed for the curve. Again, not the situation here. If from "pipe", that is usually in the web, but it still results in a lowered head, but this is usually several feet in length when it occurs.

("Pipe" is internal seperation in the middle of the rail resulting from incomplete fusion of the steel in the rolling process. It is now very rare. It is called pipe because when the rail crushes down there is an internal longitudinal hole in the web or head.)

If it is illegal to mangle coins, what about all those souvenir coin crushers, where you put a quarter and a penny in, and the penny comes out oval and stamped with your choice of imprint? Surely those would be illegal too?

Last year I was at the Moffat Tunnel and saw several people placing coins on the rails. Trains rolled over at up to 40mph without any problem of course. The biggest problem is finding the coin amongst the ballast afterwards.

quote:

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Originally posted by JONATHON:
but a rock could result in a scene simuler to the one in the movie "Final Destanation"

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lol

Edit: Jonathon is correct, however, in that it is certainly dangerous to anybody standing nearby.

In early January near Donner Pass, the CZ derailed in part by riding up on ice. (Most of the train stayed on the rails and was pulled back from the derailed cars. Low speed event, no one seemed to notice anything except delay and the cars getting cold because they were detached from the engines to be pulled back.) There have been cases where run away freight cars have jumped over derails and kept going. It can actually be more difficult to derail a fast moving train than a slow one. A fast train is more likely to break through or bounce over what is put in the way and come back down on the rails.