Hi guys,

Here's a rail failure that happened this weekend. I'm curious as to what you guys think could have caused such a failure.

That's a bit of a mystery that may take more unraveling.

A couple of theories. Was there a weld at that location?
Any chance the rail had been impacted by something rather large and heavy?

The two breaks seem odd to me. Maybe it cracked on the first one, and then the resulting derailment caused the other break? Possibly the first crack stayed in alignment like a rail joint and as a result the rail moved up and down under load until the flexing on the tie created another crack? That might be possible, but clearly there's more investigation needed.

It's nothing I've ever seen and it it's definitely odd to have two breaks that close together.

The prevailing theory at the moment is... Sabotage, via explosive.

I guess whoever blew up the tracks DIDN'T first watch that famous OSS Video on the topic...

https://youtu.be/RcsorqnsbRU

At 3:20 they demonstrate blowing out a 36" chunk of rail about the same size that happened here.

Luckily the engineer saw the damage and stopped the train, so there was no derailment. It looks like the train coasted over the gap, just like in the OSS video.