Protip: Make sure that one person, and one person only is in charge or rerailing/movement. Ideally, that person knows what they are doing (read as: "been there, done that, bought that t-shirt").

Everyone has their own idea of what works... and rerailing/derailment cleanup is hardly a time for "Hey, lets all form a consensus opinion on how to do this WHILE we are crawling around under a derailed locomotive".

Having watched it again, I'm having flashbacks the the later days of Penn Central and early days of Conrail, when cars and locos would almost routinely derail on local branch lines, and were handled with this exact approach, with whatever wood could be scrounged from the nearby feed mill, lumber yard, or even woods.

In one case, I remember a poor crew derailing one of two GP9's on a feed mill siding, re-railing the offending truck, and trying to crawl back out again, only to derail the second GP9. They then called it a day, all piled into the one still on the rails, and headed back to the yard to leave it for the next day for the guys whose job it was supposed to be to rerail the loco in the first place. (Come to think of it, you could do that with the old five-man crews back then. I would hate to see a two- or three-man crew today have to do what these guys had to do.)

The October 1982 issue of Trains has a nice memoir by the inimitable Lloyd Arkinstall called "Wreckmaster's Moon," describing what happens when this absolute authority of a wreckmaster was breached by someone presuming higher authority at a minor incident on the PRR in New Jersey.