I remember the broad outlines of something that happened a few years ago, in someplace like Maryland or West Virginia, I think.......

Sold out excursion train, broke down in nowhere. bad weather, uncomfortable cars, maybe no toilets or water or food.........passengers forced to wait in uncomfortable cars, not permitted to get off for fresh air, railroad provided nothing for them. After hours of delay, some form of rescue....and the railroad would not refund ticket price, much less make any meaningful amends.

This is truly a disaster - it affects us all, because none of the people who were forced to live through than then insulted when asking for a refund will ever darken any of our doors again, and will tell everybody they know to avoid excursion trains.

Breakdown will happen - how we deal with them is what creates goodwill or eliminates it. What our visitors experience is, in the final analysis, all that matters in everything we do.

dave

Sounds an awful lot like an excursion that was run out of Knoxville Tennessee a few years back. Interestingly, the promoter and proceeds quickly disappeared right after the trip. I bet there are some others on here that could tell us more.

ETA

Re: Speedrail 1950 Labor Day Weekend Crash - The crash occured on Saturday, September 2, 1950, and killed 10 people - 8 instantly and two the next day. Jay Maeder, Speedrail president and owner, was indeed at the controls of lightweight duplex 39-40 - and shouldn't have been. The exact details of what factors led to the crash are not clear, but one thing is certain. Maeder was haunted by the grisly results of his error in judgement until the day he died of cancer in 1975. That incident and others led to the demise of the last remnants of Milwaukee's once-far-reaching Rapid Transit system, popularly known as Milwaukee Electric Lines. The last car, ex-Cincinnati Curved-Sider #63, pulled into the Public Service Building in downtown Milwaukee just before midnight on June 30, 1951. Efforts were made by citizens to resurrect service, but the lines and rolling stock were purchased by Hyman-Michaels, a Chicago scrap dealer and the cars were burned and sold for scrap in 1952. It was loudly hinted at the time that the lines had been sabotaged by a multi-pronged attack from the City of Milwaukee, who coveted the right-of-way for their planned expressway system; from the local power company, who wanted to sell off that portion adjacent to their transmission lines; and Northland Greyhound, who wanted to pick up the passenger traffic displaced by the end of Rapid Transit service. It will be left to history to decipher as much of the truth as can be gleaned from transcripts and other historical records. It was just a sad end to what had started as a burgeoning master plan by the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company for a sophisticated network of dependable electric rail lines in southeastern Wisconsin nearly half a century before.

Does the UP 4014 6 car pile up count in this case?

https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archi ... ugh-beryl/

Well, if you're of the ilk that presumes that someone that died of a heart attack watching the train go by was "killed by the train," or that someone dying of a heart attack in a protest crowd was "killed by the mob"................... probably.

As for me, no way does this count. It's as absurd as blaming a protest crowd for impregnating the woman that gave birth in that crowd.

There were numerous accidents, including one person struck by a car, during the "final steam run" of the Sierra RR in 1979-80(?), and I personally know of one railfan (a fellow NRHS member) who was fatally struck by a car during an "everyday" train-chasing trip in NY State some years ago.

I see no reports of fatalities in this incident, nor any attempt to blame the accident on Union Pacific or the locomotive here..............

Let's talk about one where there was a serious problem but responsible people made the right decisions and things proceeded as planned.

This was a trip on the original NYS&W with two GP18's and a string of DL&W MU trailers. The MU trailers were still in commuter service for EL or NJDOT and each had an assigned powered car from which it had been uncoupled for the weekend. They had AAR couplers at both ends and a cab at one end. None of the functions in the cab worked without a live powered car. The truck at the cab end had a boiler tube pilot attached to the truck. All of the MU trailers had conventional bearings.

The excursion ran well until we got into an industrial area in Oakland (NJ, that is). My seat was the rear seat over the truck at the cab end of the car, near the rear of the train. There were several asphalt crossings where the track had settled and the truck rode "funny" over them until one was followed by a "bang, thump, thump, thump." The train stopped; I went to the vestibule/cab to look and the truck was at a 30 to 45 degree angle to the track with two nice furrows plowed. One axle derailed to the right; the other to the left. I went in the car to announce what I had seen and then the train started again.

They had stopped to flag a crossing and did not look back. The car hosts were pulling every cord they could find, which were the conductors' signal line and did not work. The emergency cord was on a bulkhead at the cab end and a passenger pulled it with a satisfying rush of air. We stopped.

I'm sure the crew looked back saying #@$% railfans until they saw one car out of line and down at the stern. That called for a different expletive.

The RR sent a rescue train with rerailing frogs, blocking, tools and a crew that knew what they were doing.

There were no cracked brasses so we all got back on the train and continued the trip, with a nice movie run at a deck bridge. We got back to Little Falls in daylight.

Phil Mulligan