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Derailment
Aug. 10th, 2023 02:30 pmA couple of hours after we got home on Tuesday, I heard some railroad cars being switched on the Fernley House tracks. I ignored it because I was working on getting the house back into sufficient working order to allow us to get some rest. But a while later, Lisa noticed that there had been some workers around the cars spotted on the yard tracks, and after they left, she pointed out something was amiss.
( Off the Rails )
You may ask why you would have a switch that deliberately derails a train. This is a safety feature. In places where cars might otherwise roll onto the main line and collide with a passing train, railroads put in derails (either switches like this or devices strapped to the rail) that deliberately derail the runaway car and direct it away from the through track. This prevents the car from fouling the through track and causing a worse accident. The UK term for this sort of device appears to be "catch points."
I speculate that the BNSF train that was switching cars into the Fernley House tracks pushed these cars too far and thus pushed them through the derail and into the gravel. There was no danger here; these cars haul plastic pellets used as an input product for one of the industries in the Fernley Industrial Park. It did cause work to come to a halt until the next morning, though.
( Cleaning Up )
It does not appear that there was any harm done by the derailment, and BNSF has since come and moved cars in and out of the area. I'm relieved that it was a relatively harmless product like plastic pellets and not something more dangerous like unodorized natural gas, that went off the rails.
( Off the Rails )
You may ask why you would have a switch that deliberately derails a train. This is a safety feature. In places where cars might otherwise roll onto the main line and collide with a passing train, railroads put in derails (either switches like this or devices strapped to the rail) that deliberately derail the runaway car and direct it away from the through track. This prevents the car from fouling the through track and causing a worse accident. The UK term for this sort of device appears to be "catch points."
I speculate that the BNSF train that was switching cars into the Fernley House tracks pushed these cars too far and thus pushed them through the derail and into the gravel. There was no danger here; these cars haul plastic pellets used as an input product for one of the industries in the Fernley Industrial Park. It did cause work to come to a halt until the next morning, though.
( Cleaning Up )
It does not appear that there was any harm done by the derailment, and BNSF has since come and moved cars in and out of the area. I'm relieved that it was a relatively harmless product like plastic pellets and not something more dangerous like unodorized natural gas, that went off the rails.
