He's On The Ground !

[FCIN]

Ed, what kind of trestle was that? An industrial spur? I don't see enough support there to hold an engine. The trestle looks amazingly spindly and weak to start with.

Gary;

That trestle was on the F&C main line. That photo makes the trestle look "spindly" because the load of corn had taken out the first two bents and almost the third.

Here are a couple more photos of the accident that give you a better idea of the trestle and the area where it happened - the Indian Hills subdivision, Frankfort, KY, where I now live.     Looking at the End of the trestle. Not visible in the background is a major 4 lane highway crossing that we crossed before coming on to the trestle. That's my little wife in the top of the photo surveying the damage. Or she may have been preparing to supervise the clean up! She's good at that.     Looking toward east end of trestle. As you can see in this photo, houses were constructed pretty close to the ROW all the way though this area. The trestle was no more than 25ft high at its highest point. Rail is 70 pound.

If you look closely, you can see the trestle passed over a street at the east end. At least once a year, a motorist would hit the trestle bent in the middle of the road and knock the trestle out of alignment. The track gang could would just use jacks and push it back into alignment.

This accident happened around 9pm on a nice 20 degree Monday night in January 1982. We were in route to Old Grandad Distillery with two empty box cars and two loads of corn. SCL 243551 was the last car on the train. The engine was just passing the red house you see in the photo when the train went in to emergency. Didn't feel a thing and couldn't see what had happened. So I climbed down off the engine, walked to the east end of the trestle and then back along the trestle and there it was!

As I was walking along, I could hear all these sirens and was wondering what else was going on, but then realized that the people had called the fire department. Three fire trucks, two ambulance's and every police officer on the force where quickly on the scene!

Clean up took about one week. A salvage contractor pumped all the corn out of the car and they used a D9 Cat with side booms to pull the car up the incline and put it back on its trucks. The F&C had an L&N B&B gang come in and rebuild that part of the trestle. By the following Monday, we were able to start switching Old Grandad again.

Reason for the collapse was determined to be soft ground. It had rained a lot over the weekend before and the first bent in the trestle simply slipped out from under the weight of the passing train. One thing that has always stuck in my mind - besides the fact that it could have just as easily been the engine that took the nose dive (an ALCo S2 running cab first) was the lady that kept wanting to know what happened to the men in the caboose. There was of course no caboose, but she'd obviously noticed our trains with one engine pulling and one pushing very often and thought that the pusher was a caboose!

Didn't mean to steal this thread. That video was really great. Right place at the right time! And yes, cars will roll over like those in the video, even moving at speeds less than 10 mph. Have seen it first hand myself.