The article today about the small derailment on the V&T got me thinking about other accidents and incidents which have occured in the preservation world and tourist railroads in general. Luckly I've never heard of any major occurance which ended in the death of a passenger however, I'm curious as to what occurences have happened out there.

Mind you I DO NOT intend for this post to turn into a muckraking post about whose fault was what. I'm merely interested in stories involving tourist railroading when things go somewhat wrong.

Episodes which come to my mind include:

-The infamous blow out of a fuse plug on a steamer at Gettysburg Railroad.

-The collision between a Nevada Northern passenger run and a runaway flatcar of ties. Which luckily was averted from being a real tragedy when the flatcar was slowed down considerably by smacking against the walls of a tunnel.

-A collision at Texas State Railroad when the rear car of one train meeting a second train split a switch causing the rear of the car to drift into the front of one of their steamers.

-The incident at the Tarantula Train when they were having their operator woes and a collision between a passenger train and some parked tank cars occured. From my understanding this was caused by someone pulling the train with an F-Unit facing backwards and missing a mislined switch.

-Then theres a little known but local one to me when the train ride at Tombstone Junction Amusement Park (Kentucky) was being scrapped. A mistake by a scrap worker ended with four homebuilt passenger cars running away down a steep grade (also on fire mind you) which ended up crashing when they hit a taken up rail.

Any other interesting stories out there???

For the record, the incident at the Gettysburg Railroad was NOT a fusible plug blowing out, but the outright failure of the crownsheet--but one step below an outright boiler explosion. I'm sure those with the reports saved on their hard drives will be happy to refer you to reports and/or photos thereof.

Didn't a steamer at Steamtown running tender first run over an ATV? I vaguely remember that. What about the Great Dismal Swamp incident on NS?

I know of a few incidents, but I'm not sure a public forum is the place to dig up old skeletons. You never know who is reading these forums. I'd hate to see a railroad manager shy away from allowing an excursion to run because of something he ran across on a forum! Let's keep in mind that when humans operate heavy machinery there are risks of injury and there is always the potential for human error. Things happen and there have been some near misses, but when you consider that the recreational railroading insustry has been around for 40+ years, run mainly by volunteers with little to no railroading experience using antiquated equipment I'd say the track record is excellent. I can't recall a single fatality to a member of the public other than possibly a few grade crossing/trespassing incidents which have nothing to do with operation itself.

Don't forget anything said here ends up in Google searches so I'd be wary of discussion of recent incidents becoming fodder for a lawyer to use in a civil suit.

I think the track record in the preservation world is pretty good, really, I think the people care more what they are doing with the equipment, despite some of the bumps and grinds that have happenned. Not unlike the old story I know of an engineer on a railroad somewhere long ago got tired of hearing the pop valve going off and tied it down. tick tock KABOOM! dumb de dumb dumb.

I don't frill and thrill on accidents but there are a few books on railroad accidents, and despite whatever, they occur.

I recall riding a 7 1/2 inch gauge ride at Hesston years ago, leaned out out a little too far and the car derailed, train stopped, engineer rerailed the car and we were back riding... "You can't sit on the cars like a sack of potatoes" he scorned... heh

The heritage rr business in the US has a very respectable safety record, in a great part due to participants on this forum. Rather than dig through the muck, I prefer to think of the untold stories where dedication, foresight and experience *avoided* am issue.

Rob

CNR 6167 hit a car in March 1963 and incurred $50 worth of damage. There wasn't much left of the car.

On the other hand....

By not discussing accidents we also cannot learn from them. Coming from Class 1's I can tell you that during safety briefings trainmasters and RFE's will bring up recent accidents, why they occurred and how they could have been prevented. These ranged from the massive pileups that make news to a yardmaster falling out of his chair. I believed this was a good practice as it did keep everyone alert to the dangers of the job.

Yes, but the Class Ones don't post said discussions on a publicly-visible forum that Google, Yahoo, etc. can search.

So what! Every rail accident worthy of discussion will already have an FRA accident report on file, so it is extremely unlikely that anything discussed here will reveal new evidence not stated in the report.

But basically from what I am reading, the fear of lawsuits is going to deprive us of learning from past accidents. I would consider that to be negligence, as there was an opportunity to learn about prior unsafe practices but people decided they would rather remain ignorant. Some of the participants in this forum are rather new to the preservation scene and may not be privy to the details of tourist railway related accidents, and may doomed to repeat them. By not discussing these incidents you are not even going to allow the seed to be planted in their minds so that they could search for more info.

Could the knowlege learned from the Nevada Northern flatcar incident lead a tourist railway operator to pay more attention to the dangers of MOW crews working o nthe mainline while trains are running? Would knowing about the Steamtown ATV incident help a volunteer roadmaster in deciding to batter barricade the right of way against illegal ATV operation? Would knowing about certain mechanical failures lead a tourist railway CMO to better inspect those components on their equipment?

The answer to those questions is YES, but if the more experienced and knowlegeable people here won't even discuss those incidents, then we as an industry will repeat those mistakes again and again.

I simply do not understand this fear of imparting knowledge to others. What is the purpose of this forum then?

There was also the infamous Steamtown Railfan Magazine excursion, when after making the passengers sit on the train for an hour in 100+ degree weather so the magazine could get their cover shot, the train was rear ended by diesels while stpped at Cresco station. They called it a "hard coupling", but people were hert. My wife needed back surgery & the litigation was settled very quickly.

Here's what's behind the "fear of imparting knowledge to others":

Have you, or the officers of your organization, ever been on the receiving end of a lawsuit?

Several I know or deal with have. In some cases, a couple times.

Imagine being sued because the manager works in an office on the second floor of the historic railroad station--not accessible to someone in a wheelchair. Imagine being sued because the vestibule steps didn't have rubberized anti-skid material, and someone who shouldn't have been climbing on the steps in the first place slipped and broke his nose, "permanently disfiguring" him.

Take the ATV incident you describe. The ATV driver can be trespassing to high Hades in violation of every safety and "NO TRESPASSING" sign, and the jury is still going to fixate on the fact that you didn't, say, have a visibility view camera in the cab of the steam engine to watch your blind spots.

Then, two years later, a similar incident happens in California, and some lawyer says, "They publicized this danger from lack of an obstructed-view camera on a tourist-railroad industry forum, and you did NOTHING about it?!?! Explain yourselves to the jury!!"

Discussion and analysis of "bad" events is a subject matter for a symposium at a TRAIN or ARM convention. It's NOT for public dissemination, only because litigation has replaced baseball as the national pastime. Kill off all the lawyers, and then we'll talk.

In the one Class One railroad office I still go into now and then, they post the weekly or as-reported safety bulletins in the office on the crew bulletin board. They don't leave the office and get passed around on the Internet. I'm sure they get shredded after a period of time.

Wasn't one of the first to garner publicity years ago on an interurban excursion and had fatalities? My memory is dim and I think it happenend in the '40s or early '50s. I remember reading about it in an old Trains magazine.

A head-on collision of the National Model Railroad Association charter car and the service car on The Milwaukee Rapid Transit & Speedrail, successor to The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Co. system. Happened in 1952, and was responsible for the demise of "Speedrail" within a year or so.