Is there any overturned train content available?

[JonMyrlennBailey]

I want to have some overturned cars on the side of my pike to have a derailment recovery scene. There will be a couple MOW trucks, some RR workers, flagmen and a Puma heavy-lift helicopter to recover the train wreck.

Do real American railroads use helicopters in train wreck recovery ever or are they too cheap to pay for the aviation fuel?



I am looking for some train cars lying on their sides. Train vehicles can only be positioned upright on track.

 

[Saieditor]

One suggestion - I used to put wagons on invisible track and then lower it so that it looks like it has sunk into the ground, aka derailment.

Another trick I tried (a long time ago, I dunno if this would work today) was to remove the bogies off a traincar and save it as something else, and then place it on the baseboard where I wanted it. Makes stock look derelict.

BTW, "derelict" is a good search term on the DLS. Turns up all sorts of interesting objects.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

Thanks. I will try 'derelict' and see what I can fish up.

 

[cascaderailroad]

RR's either use heavy equipment truck cranes, and rarely use rail cranes anymore, and roll the wrecked railcars into the clear, and oftentimes cut them up for scrap on the spot.

There are 2 derelict hoppers on the DLS that have roll capabilities, but they are low quality

RR's never use helicopters ... that is just silly, costing millions in contracting a helicopter company to recover a $500,000 railcar would not be economical !

They usually call Herzog, a European entrepreneur that started his own wreck reclamation/ballasting company

To actually overturn a railcar, clone it, change the config file tag to "scenery", add roll tags

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

I was able to convert a train vehicle into a scenery object but the object was faulty until I removed the bogie tags and a few other tags like enginesound. Under errors and warnings I was told bogies, and a few other tags, were not allowed on Scenery. Now I have a 180-degree, -180 degree rollable train car body, a GN cylindrical hopper, with no wheels and axles. I was hoping for a complete overturned rail car. I also had to delete "script" and "class" tags. The radical roll parameters in degrees allow me to place the car even upside down on the ground.

 

[simulatortrain]

A complete overturned railcar is not realistic. The only thing that keeps freight cars on their trucks is gravity. If they roll, the trucks will not go along.

You'd also need a fleet of Pumas to lift a single empty car.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

Well, if I could find some detached bogies to place near my train derailment scene. The helicopter does look cute. Like Hollywood on my pike. The big bird, blades turning, engine on, lights flashing, is hovering up over an up-righted hopper which is levitated off the ground on invisible track. I cleverly used "track no ballast for bridges" (rails only) to make the heavy-duty "cables" that the heli is supposedly lifting the rail car up in the air by. Trainz is a lot about creating special effects. It is something of Hollywood in itself. I probably just should have a bogie-less car body suspended by the heli since the bogies would probably not be attached anyway during a train car hoist operation. I suppose real railroads would load wrecked rolling stock onto flat cars and train them away. The Eel River in Northern California is still polluted to this day by rusty train vehicles that tumbled down the embankment back in the 1950's and environmentalists hate railroads that don't clean up their own messes.

 

[mjolnir]

An empty freight car in the US has so much mass (typically about 60,000 pounds or 27,000 kg) that to lift a single empty car would require three Sikorsky S-64 skycranes, except that they could not fly near enough to each other in a formation that could perform the lift.

Large excavators, pipelayers, and wheeled and tracked endloaders are what is commonly used to pick up derailments.

ns

 

[MeowRailroad]

I have to admit that does look pretty awesome.

 

[jeffmorris]

Many photos of train accidents show wheelsets separate from trucks/bogies.

 

[cascaderailroad]

Conrail started a program of bolting 16 roller bearing axle retaining clips on the truck sideframes, but the cost of all the bolts/nuts/clips were astronomical, and the program could not equip all the millions of railcars in decades nationwide, by an army of carmen workers. The trucks are only sitting on a large long steel pin, and railcars fall off easily

In the 1969 "Nightmare in Laurel, Mississippi" in a LPG train explosion, in the wee hours of the night, the train derailed, and several tankers were punctured, and immediately exploded, one set skyward upwards like a rocket @ 1000', still carrying at least one it's trucks ... withing seconds most of the town was engulfed in flames, with dozens of houses on fire ... one family had a wheelset crash though their roof and bedroom floor, right at the foot of the bed, missing them by a few feet, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the house, ending up in the basement 3 stories below

http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=21105

 

[JCitron]

Bogies can be made in scenery items too. I have done that for some touristy stuffed trains I have on one of my routes, which sit at the end of a rail trail. I placed the scenery-type bogies down on a piece of track first then placed the static locomotive, passenger car, and box car on top of the various matching bogies.

In most cases, the bogies remain on the track or upright with the freight cars flopped and twisted all over. You might want to try that with the detached scenery bogies.

John