I remember when an engineer ran through the closed vertical door. Stopped everything as they couldn't ventilate the tunnel. Old timer remembered they had ordered two doors..and there it was, behind the old roundhouse in Everett, buried in weeds. Good friend of mine..his company was contracted to install the electrics for the horizontal door and new ventilation. We went up and toured it all while the refit was going on. Supposedly the doors alternate to keep them functioning...and if one gets splatted, the other is still there. To the left of the tunnel portal, around the side, is a metal door off a tin can (Destroyer) with a peekhole at eye level. Open it, make sure the room behind is vented, open the door (away from you), close it behind you, close the peephole vent, open the one in the next door and wait for your room to pressurize, open the next door (away from you), and with the main tunnel door closed and fans on full, you step right onto the tracks. Scary, as you realize if they remotely opened the tunnel door, the pressure would probably blow you right under the door and across the bridge or into the creek. Rapid reversal of process.
That sounds like it would be vaguely reminiscent of Navy days......or a sci-fi flick involving airlocks!
Yeah...but with fans on "high" it involves a LOT of pressure...hence the vents and the inward-opening doors.
Wow! It's amazing what a little alchohol or chemical will do to a person! Had a lady nearly get hit in Miles City last year, same thing stumbling near the tracks. Was one in Livingston years ago, even crawled over the spiky fence, just to get smacked by the train. People, we're nuts!
Even when sober, folks still believe they can't be hurt by thousands of tons of hurtling steel. Pure insanity.
Yeah I've seen it up close. Guy actually lived. Found out later he cleaned up his life. Got sober, got a job, went to school. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free
Amtrak Train 822 (Ft. Worth => Oklahoma City?) collided with an auto-hauling truck and trailer stuck on a crossing on 10/16/21 and it was caught on video. The train was led by locomotive 197 Big Game Train. The incident occurred at Thackerville, OK near the Texas border. This is a frightening video; thankfully no one was seriously injured. It appears there was no derailment, though you can see the nose of the locomotive rise on impact.
Here's a classic. Grimy D&RGW power, after taking a traction motor cooling break at Tolland, CO, restarts its train on the 2% grade. The hogger pulls 5 notches before the train starts to move!
Yep, you're right. I found a news story that confirmed it. These signs appear everywhere it seems. You'd think drivers would think to check.
Holy Moly!! That lead loco looked like it raised up about a foot at impact! Two issues that bother me-there is a sign on every crossing with the 1-800 number for the railroad and the crossing I.D., and why didn't the truck driver call 911 atleast to report it?! Two critical steps that could of saved even seconds off of the impact. The sooner all know, the sooner that engineer could dump the air and slow it down.
The likelier option. People sometimes fail to project their actions into the future by any more than the immediate moment. I just hope the guys in the loco are unhurt. That impact reduced the trailer to confetti and threw those SUVs around like Dinky toys... That's awesome! The sound of those engines revving up, with the turbos whining with an increasing tone, is something that gets me goosebumps.
I was called on a PVODEN years ago, and was clicking along at max train speed (50mph) in this case between Clifton CO and Palisade CO, When all of a sudden, the GJ Yard Monster came on the radio telling the us, the Eastbound BNSF train there was a truck stuck (high centered) on the Xing just west of the west SW Palisade. He told us in enough time that I was able to set a gob of air and stop just before the xing, I remember seeing that truck driver trying to jerk that lowboy over the xing, only it wasnt moving. A few minutes later, a MW guy showed up and was able to help this guy get free. One thing about MW guys, they dont say much to the public, that does this stuff, they let law enforcement talk for them. After he inspected the track, he gave us the highball, no speed restrictions, being as the signal (CTC) was about 150' from me, I went to work on them, those C44-9's loaded up, as best they could, we were smoking across that xing while the driver was getting a very expensive ticket. I will never forget that.
Tolland as a station for WB traffic, where as long as you pull close to the west most Xing it levels up a bit and makes starting a train a little easier. It is not at all uncommon to go to 5th to get a train moving here or anywhere on the Moffat Sub. The one thing you dont want to do is let your train roll backwards a fraction of an inch. Some times you cannot recover a reverse event, so its the last thing you want to do. I also note the trailing SD45 is DIC, with a bunch of hood doors open. That Hoghead was doing his best with a couple Geeps and a tunnel motor to get a heavy train moving, he did a great job, throttling back a bit after a short hard hard throttle app was common, but after you get them rolling, you can give them the "bone". Good old EMD's, man, they dont make'em like that anymore.
If my eyes are not deceiving me, I think I can see a crew member standing inside one set of doors, doing some sort of work. Perhaps trying to get it back on line again?
