http://onlineathens.com/national-news/2 ... river-ided

http://www.theintermountain.com/page/co ... l?nav=5014

http://www.wchstv.com/newsroom/eyewitne ... 9899.shtml

Those link say it better than I could.

I'll take exception to the crossing comments. There are warnings nearly 1/4 mile or further on both sides. Not to mention that the DGVR has been operating trains over the Rt. 250 crossing for well over 10 years. I am not sure the railroad was shut down that long. Most of the truck driver crossed that crossing regularly so I doubt knowing it's existance was a factor.

As for 201 and 202......Thank God for heavy weight coaches. They disapated a tremendous amount of energy and protected those inside. They are repairable, but a decision is yet to be made.


There is a lot of work to be done yet

Ben True

DGVR

I'll echo Ben's statements about the DL&W cars. If these were modern style lightweight aluminum cars, I believe the human suffering could have been much greater.

Dave

Did attempt a search by name (H&H Fisher, as reported in the media), but couldn't find anything. That doesn't mean there isn't anything there, just that I couldn't find anything.

It could also mean, though, that this wasn't a registered carrier as such. Maybe it was a truck owned by a logging outfit, which may be exempt from certain Federal registration standards. I can't say anything certain or sure on this, as I don't know what registrations or regulations apply to such industrial vehicles, even if they are licensed for public road operation. If there is such an exemption, then the carrier may not be listed Federally at all, because it isn't one legally speaking.

If it is an industrial vehicle, that opens up another possibility. Another reader here commented that many truckers in this sort of work operate "on the margins of safety." Like many of their railroading counterparts, they may also operate on the margins of profitability. If that's the case, could that have had a bearing on the condition of the truck, including the braking system?

http://www.wdtv.com/wdtv.cfm?func=view& ... unity12274



Having said that, I will say the tires on the rear axles looked to be in good condition, judging from the one photo that was available showing them, so there may have been something else. We really don't know anything yet--and the investigators may not really know yet, either.

For now, all we can do is hope everyone recovers well, that the railroad recovers well, and wait for the investigators to do their job and file at least a preliminary report.

It is overreaching for law enforcement to say that no braking occurred if they are basing that conclusion solely on the lack of skid marks. All that a lack of skid marks proves is that the wheels did not lock up. In one of the articles, a person commented that if the truck was loaded (which it was), there would be no skid marks from braking. I assume that means that the weight of the loaded truck would be so high that the maximum braking effort would be incapable of locking the wheels. I do not know if that is true. I also do not see that applying to the front wheels.

Wow! Just got back from vacation and saw this. My family rode the New Tygart Flyer on Wednesday and had a great time. We decided after the ride Wednesday to book this excursion next year. I had just turned on the computer to check their website and saw this. Hopefully the passengers and crew recover. I also hope the railroad is able to recover, as it was a very well run operation and the excursion was an enjoyable experience.

wasn't a trailer involved in this..............

Tandem Axle Picker Truck, with a tag axle by the last bunk............
Maximum gross weight in WV for 4 axle combo
70,000 lbs (+ 10%) (73,280 in PA)
that load he had on will be weighed...... God forbid if he was over his 10%

If the brakes were even half way adjusted up on that tag axle, Yes it would have locked up.......... Most of us that hauled logs usually didn't keep the max pressure on the tag (air suspension) because it put all the weight forward to the steer axle

Added thought..........
Did any one else here catch the part where, the other company Log Truck was parked up against the rail car to keep it from falling on over, while Rescue Efforts were under way.....??

What does a DL&W commuter coach weigh?

ETA

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.p ... 78&nseq=30

Photo of the cars after being rerailed.

just went to this force calculator site to see just what the impact force would have been for this truck
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/carcr.html#cc3

figured 70,000 lbs.......... 35 mph........... stopped in less than 5 feet.....
Impact force on those 2 cars..............

286.85 ton........
its a wonder there weren't more dead.

DL&W Boonton's weigh about 108,000 lbs...these should be right about the same.

The damage to 201, and seeing that it took the brunt of the impact from the logs themselves, wow. Thank God the truck hit the vestibules, and that the crossing was at an angle to the ROW... so many luck factors play into this.

A direct impact, in the middle of one of those cars may have seen more significant injuries.

The good thing to hear is that the D&GBV operated their other trips, the Tygart Flyer and Durbin Rocket as advertised for this weekend. Kudos to the staff and management for doing so while dealing with a major physical and emotional set back.

Anyone familiar with ancient sieges would have been impressed. It was, in effect, a battering ram in the classical sense, just got up to speed with a large diesel engine.
I work auto liability claims for a major insurance carrier, and I know that the police place great stock on skid marks in their investigations. We generally don't put quite the same emphasis unless someone is saying they were going slowly but laid down a crazy-long skid mark instead. You don't have to be going very fast or have a heavy load to lay down some marks. But as some have already said, lack of skid marks in itself is not iron-clad proof that the driver didn't brake at all. You have to take road and weather conditions into affect when trying to figure that out.
I won't jump onto the "driver must have been texting or tweeking" bandwagon, as that's a pretty silly assumption without any facts.
That said, I would assume their insurance carrier will do everything they can to try to get out of it. In 11 years of claims, I have only seen three times where the carrier for a trucking company (or the company itself, as many are self-insured) accept liability for any losses. My all-time favorite was the one I once called, asking if they had a claim opened. The guy right away yelling at me, saying that their driver couldn't be at fault for the loss and that our driver clearly was at fault...
Then, he asked me which accident I was calling about!
Their driver had rear-ended a car stopped in traffic at a red light, and later on, they denied liability, even once they knew what had happened.

It's kind of a moot point here, but I've read on several news posts that due to the shutdown there was no consideration of an NTSB investigation.

It might take them a year or more, but they are one group that certainly turns over every rock in an investigation (braking systems, phone records, sleep-rest cycles of everybody) and puts down a lot of speculation.

In the absence of such an investigation, I'm not sure what the state/local groups can muster other than just a single fatality accident with a whole lot of odd damage.

Around here we have a refinery, and the tractor drivers deal with a lot of 'live loads' of gasoline. I've known two that deliberately chose to dump the entire truck - one into a ditch and the other over an embankment - rather than rear-end collide with an occupied vehicle when they knew they couldn't stop in a winter downhill situation. They lived to tell about it, were fired nonetheless, but risked themselves before they'd impact a vehicle in front. We'll never know if he possibly aimed for the only spot he could have hit without killing somebody in the seats.

There was a dump truck driver in Akron about a year ago that deliberately sacrificed himself in a runaway accident down into the Cuyahoga Valley, near the CVSR, to avoid massacring several innocent automobile drivers/passengers at the intersection at the bottom of the hill, so there are truck drivers who would do that (for those familiar with the CVSR, it is the intersection just North of the grade crossing with the statue of the Indian carrying the canoe). It is entirely possible that the truck involved in the WV wreck was equipped with anti-lock brakes, which were originally developed for large trucks, hence the lack of skid marks.

Big Joe and the Phantom 309.......

dave

Well in this day and age, my first kneejerk is distracted driving.

It's like what we have learned from years of cockpit automation, much study of cell phone usage in cars... Chatsworth.


Cockpit automation works because with autothrottle, autoland, autospoilers etc. the pilots are able to put their attention on other safety related tasks they could not attend to before. A plane on autoland is far more likely to see and evade another airplane making a wrong turn onto their runway.

Of course, electronic devices could be a great boon to auto safety in the same ways, but in fact they are dragging us in the wrong direction. Recently the NTSB has said that all electronic devices should be banned from highway vehicles except those which assist the driving task.

All this points to the same thing: the fundamental essence of safety is attention.