At the risk of repeating myself here goes the story of the great 1979
Rochelle,IL wreck. Of course the date makes this a BN incident.
We were on #97 and shorlty after coming around the corner at Steward Jct and
getting the entire train back on straight rail we went into emergency. We
were now approx 10 hours or so on duty as it had been snowing a good part of
the
night and all that morning. There was somewhere around 6-8 inches on the
ground or more as the air hoses were leaving nice trails in the snow between
the
rails. We were delayed for lack of power and w/c in Cicero and then on the
road due to traffic slowed by switches that wouldn't throw,etc,etc,
Zab and I struggled up the train to find a pinlifter had been mangled and
hanging too low on an insulated box about 20 or so up from the rear end.
We made the trip back to the w/c for wire,hammer and chisel and "fixed" the
problem by wiring the lifter up. We again walked back to the w/c and told the
head end to highball.
At this point we decided since we were on straight and level track that it
was time to pull the nice warm soup from the stove and have a quick lunch. As
we gained speed heading into Rochelle we sat at the table with two bowls of
soup and just after taking the first couple spoons full we went into emergency
again. But this time we came to a very hard stop as if the train had hit a
wall stronger than the loco's. The soup went flying all over Zab. He ended up
dumped into the aisle and I ended up sprawled across the table. The jolt
knocked out all electricity and therefore communication. After determining
that
Zab was OK. I again loaded on the layers of outerwear and headed up along the
train. While I doubted that our wiring job had failed I took the
hammer,chisel,wire,air hose and a wrench. As I plodded along in the deepening
snow looking
ahead along the train it seemed as if some cars were taking the curve at the
coal chute a little too sharply.
Sure enough when I got closer and inspected the situation I found that one
of the frogs at the coal chute x/o had disintegrated under the train. West of
it were 26 or 27 derailed cars and everything east was fine. The frog was
laying there in pieces. The derailed cars blocked both mains and the pass. The
code line poles were knocked over and numerous cars that had been on the pass
were now intermingled with ours.
The insulated box with the bad pinlifter was just fine.
But the best part of the story is that traffic could get by using the
storage track(at high risk of another derailment) so 185 went around us that
way.
Grannie and crew on the Rochelle road switcher set our rear end over to main
two, we took the head end up to Flag Center and came lite down two and doubled
the two pieces back together at which point we about dead on the law. So it
was decided we would be dead headed on #85 to Savanna as we were needed there
to work back east. Next day we deadheaded home.
Leo
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