On most American locomotives a selection of rerailing frogs are carried on the tender. On most European locomotives none of these frogs are carried, and instead one or more screw jacks are carried.

Why the difference? Why the different strategies for rerailing?

We do it the way we do it here because it works. I presume it's done in Europe the way it's done there, because it works.

Why do we use knuckle couplers, while the EU uses a hook and link system ??

Why do we use air brakes, while some roads in other countries use vacuum brakes ??

I imagine to some extent it is that American locomotives tended to be a bit larger and heavier than their European counterparts. Thus the jacks necessary to rerail them were too bulky and heavy for enginemen to handle. Rerailing frogs could be wrestled into most places by one or two people. I can only recall one instance during my career that we needed jacks to help rerail an errant locomotive. Otherwise, the frogs did the trick.

When I was a kid, girls played with jacks and boys with frogs, although there were outliers in both groups. Hope things have changed since then.

In either the EU or the USA, if things go really bad, you need at least one crane...

Rerailers disappeared from Class I locomotives back in the 1990s or 2000s, maybe earlier. I guess having the tools to clean up after yourself became viewed as an incentive to sweep things under the rug.

A pile of tie plates, chunks of old ties and whatever other junk you can find lying around will make a surprisingly good rerailer in a pinch.

Remember to run the wheel across the grain of the wooden sleeper (or tie), not along it, which will just cause it to split.

Be very careful using ties plates. They can squirt out from under a wheel and do a number on your shin. Stand way back!

Those rerailers didn't just vanish. We stashed some for emergencies. Not only that, but if you turned your generator field off, put that sucker in throttle 5 or so, then pop the generator field switch up, you'll discover that it doesn't take a frog to jump...

We rerailed trolleys with jacks. Needed more tools though; had to move the wheelset laterally to get it over the rail. Tie plates worked. Track jacks don't ratchet down, they drop in one swell foop; this can be useful sometimes.

Of course one time a trolley split a track frog in the street, all four wheels of a truck. It followed a previous groove in the asphalt so we backed it up; it followed the groove and climbed back on. Apparently wasn't the first car to derail there.

Phil Mulligan

This is about 1963. Air powered "Joy" mfg. co. jack. They could use the main reservoir pressure to power them, but here they had their big truck nearby with a portable air compressor on board.
Doesn't look to be a derailment, may have been torching off a seized pinion.

I've "walked down" track jacks more times than I can count. Perhaps my employer used a different style than yours.

Brian

.

Maybe I've used them in the wrong manner, but I have been able to get track jacks to lower both click by click and all at once.

The kind of "things going really bad" that I was talking about, you begin by calling EMS.