This morning a train derailed in the Wind River Canyon after hitting a truck sized boulder. The locomotive is sitting in the river, the 2nd one on the embankment. This occurred roughly 5 miles south of Thermopolis at the “Wedding of the Waters” where the Wind River turns into the Big Horn.
http://trib.com/article_b3a41ac8-5e08-11df-8a7d-001cc4c002e0.html
Paul
Super coverage, thanks so much for posting it!
Hugs,
LF
Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, sooner or later it will.
Finnigan’s Law: Murphy is a optimist about this “Sooner or Later Stuff”.
Trains derail, Airplanes fall from the sky, Ships sink at sea, Cars and Truck crash on roadways. Stuff Happens!
It takes a train a couple of miles to stop, because of all the weight of the locomotives, the train cars and what they are carrying. A assembly of cars and the locomotives can weight hundred if not thousands of tons. If the train assembly was traveling on the rails at 30 mph (44 feet per second) and the total combined weight of the train assembly was 1000 tons (ton = 2,000 pounds) that would be (1000 tons x 2000 pounds/ton) x 44 feet/sec = 88,000,000 foot pounds-pounds/sec. That is a lot of energy.
I hope that there is nothing leaking out into the river. I hope the train crew is alright…
Wow that sucks. Freak of nature that a big rock fell, I guess we can call it erosion of the hillside this happens all the time in the canyon of the Crooked river but never the size of a car.
Luckily the train was only carrying freight. However the diesel fuel from the two locomotives got into the river. Haven’t had any fish kills yet, but quite a bit of their food has been killed off it seems. No idea how that will affect things.
Oddly enough, the same train derailed again in Cheyenne while switching tracks. Not a good week for that train!