MC6853 wrote:Oneida took at least a week to straighten up fully... With the exception of Amtrak trains, movements terminating at Frontier Yard, coal trains that wye off at Ashtabula, and local freights, I won't see much up here in Rochester for a bit... Simply put, that cans any railfanning plans I had this weekend... Way to go CSX...
>>MC
Well if you think that's bad...looks like
I am gonna have a week or so with no work or pay! This after a night of playing clean-up on trains that had to duck into Collinwood...or pulled back into Collinwood...
I have something of the inside skinny on what caused the accident. It may or may not have been "broken rail" - but my sources tell me the train was on approach from QD 155; with a stop indication at QD 154...and standing orders not to block Newell Street, which is halfway through that one-mile block.
It's something of a trap...the signal at 158 does NOT display an Advanced Approach; the engineer has to get on the brakes the SECOND he sees an Approach at QD 155. And for some reason it's a hard signal to see in daylight.
My educated guess was that the young engineer saw the approach and tried to stop the consist in the CSX-approved way - with dynamic brakes. The train may have buckled in the middle and piled up and touched off.
If the engineer did this...well, if he had more experience he'd have gotten on the air immediately, and Train Handling Standards be damned. The result of that "violation" would have been a phone call and possibly an entry in his work record.
Instead...he's got to sweat blood for the next few days or weeks.