I am just curious how they can fix trains that have gotten derailed. I would love to know how they do it when the engine and cars go down a hill or something.
Also, how could they do this in the old days? It seems like a derailed train in the sticks would be a pretty big challenge in the 1800’s. What about overturned ships?
When I worked with steam engines we had a cast-iron gadget called a “rerailer” for use if the car was next to the track, i.e. hadn’t overturned or anything. It was basically a ramp you placed in front of the wheel to guide it back on the track. When we had a locomotive “split the rails” (the spikes holding the rails to the ties gave out and the engine dropped between the rails) we had to rent a crane to move the engine.
They also had cranes mounted on railcars. Here (under “hand crane”) is an 1883 hand-operated 15-ton breakdown crane. And here is a WWII-era 45-ton crane.
Depends.
Derailments come in many different flavours. They actually happen all the time, most being simple things like one axle coming off the metals at low speed. This happened on a heritage steam special near Sydney last week, and they were able to rerail the carriage involved by using the method Snakescatlady mentioned, and gradually reversing the train at very low speed under its own power.
It becomes more complex when you introduce other factors. One derailed axle on a passenger train is one thing, ten wagons of a 4000 ton iron ore train tipped over on their side in a tunnel is quite another. Cranes are used where possible, if available, and if the weights involved are not too heavy. Otherwise, multiple industrial jacks are used to gradually position the train back on the rails.
Short answer: whatever it takes. Every derailment is different.
Bear in mind that 19th century trains were relatively small and light. I was just down at a steam festival and they had a locomotive (in steam!) built in 1878. It was a mainline express locomotive in its day, but only the size of a 20th century shunter or branchline loco. Similarly, freight wagons were tiny, four-wheeler wooden things, and not the modern steel bogie wagons that weigh as much as a small house. In a derailment back in the old days, I’d wager they’d get away with muscle power to unload the cargo, and a team of horses and jacks to right the train.
Dunno about the ships though.
IAAEBNANO (I Am An Engineer But Not A Nautical One) Well, ships like to float with their c/g down so I’d imagine that you’d pull like crazy on the keel to get the c/g past the critical point and the ship will then right itself.
That’s the simplified theory, in practice you might have to seal up openings and pump a lot of water out to make it easier. For a really big ship providing enough force to tip it back upright could be a challenge - perhaps flooding ballast tanks to flip it over and then pumping them dry was how they’d do it?
Wow, for once I can actually say I AM an engineer (the train kind).
Unfortunately for me, the question has already been answered quite well. Rerailers are pretty common for a simple derailment, and then there’s the big cranes.
I can, however, give some details about low-budget rerailing. Here are a couple of different things that have happened to me personally on board our train:
Our locomotive is a 4-4-0, meaning that there are no trailing wheels. The pilot wheels up front help wrench the rigid frame of the locomotive into curves; the drivers are then much less likely to “fall off” the railhead. A few years back we were testing whether or not we could back the train into the depot from out on the line (with no pax aboard) and ended up putting the rear drivers between the rails. In that particular case, all we had to do was pull out the heavy-duty hydraulic jacks and evenly jack the frame up until the drivers cleared the rail. Once that happened, both rails snapped right back underneath the wheels and we were good to go. Time of job: 15 minutes.
More recently, we lost the lead truck on the lead coach at the exit of a very sharp curve. Being a narrow gauge train (3 ft.) means that we can have some wicked sharp turns, and for some reason the track was slightly out of gauge. In this case, the truck was straddling the outside rail. Since our rerailers were designed for standard gauge rail (rather than our smaller, 60 lb. rail) they were useless. What we ended up doing was jacking the car up about 4 inches with rail jacks, then using a bulldozer to pull the entire car, all 17,500 pounds of it, off the jacks sideways. That brought it closer to being centered. Rinse and repeat about 3 more times, because there is a limit to how high you can jack the car. Most people don’t realize it, but the car merely rests on the truck…a pin extends into the body of the railcar, but isn’t really attached; you can lift the carbody up and the wheels will stay behind on the rails. At any rate, the last time we jacked the car up we made sure the flanges were just clearing the railhead and, with fingers crossed, pulled it sideways one more time. Luckily, she hit the rails and we were back to go. Time of job: 12 hours.
Most recently we came up with something simpler. We jack up the car and use a fork attachment on our tractor to push the rails underneath the wheels. With this method, you don’t have to drive any temporary spikes, as the fork stays in contact with the rail until you pull the train out of that spot. At that point, you can back off and re-gauge and re-spike. Time of job: 2 hours.
I should say that although it sounds like we’ve derailed a lot, those have been the only 3 times in as many years. Of those, only 2 involved getting passengers off the train. We’ve been pretty lucky.
As an aside, I have a video of a narrow gauge railroad in Ecuador where they rerail the train under its own power by using ballast rocks and scrap iron as a crude rerailer. They built a ramp to rail height, then basically used a cheater bar to inch the truck into place. Seemed to work alright, though I’m not sure how much time it took.
I find Harvey comes in very handy in fixing minor derailments.
I’ve seen similar footage, I think on a Michael Palin documentary, also somewhere in S America. In this case, it was a standard-gauge railcar that was rerailed this way.