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probably not@@milepost71nodefects92

I worked on a Southern Railway Derrick crew in NC until they (NS by then) got rid of their derricks. In NS’s case, once they used the services of a couple sidewinder contractors and Kershaw style hi-rail cranes, they couldn’t get rid of the big hooks fast enough! Honestly, it was incredibly heavy, hard and dangerous work, and injuries were frequent. Fighting slings, some made of cable as big as 2-1/2” and 30’ long, adorned with hooks that weighed 100lbs + or -, and crawling under piles of derailed cars to make a hook was full of exposures and danger. The Railroads liability was huge! I remember an incident where, among the many cars involved in a mainline derailment, an empty wood hip car was sitting in soft dirt beside the track and leaning heavily with no trucks under it. A crewman had stepped back beside that car to get in the clear of the lifting of an adjacent car that was several feet from the chip car. The chip car had been slowly sinking into the mud on the heavier bottom side, and just as the guy stepped beside of it, the car became overbalanced from sinking and rolled right side up, killing the Carman. And in another incident we had a Carman that got smashed between the Derrick and a derailed car due to a misinterpretation. That gentleman survived, but just barely, and after his long recovery, returned to work as the last person to ever receive a guaranteed job as part of the accident settlement with Southern Ry. He sadly passed right before Christmas at 84. Ours was a 250 ton Industrial Brownhoist, and what a beast it was! This country probably doesn’t have a manufacturing company that could produce anything like that now! I remember always being amazed by things like the top deck plate on that machine. It was a massive piece of plate the size of the Derrick, and the very center 12’ or so was 3” thick plate that was stair step machined down every so many feet toward the ends. Being conceived long before joystick development, these things had a bewildering array of valves, levers, gauges, foot pedals etc, and the operators, being very protective of their jobs, flatly refused to label the controls for fear more people would figure out how to run them and endanger their job at the keyboard! In defense of them, there was a massive skill set to operating the derricks due to nuances like if this lever is in this position and that one is set this way, then when you move this lever this way the house will rotate to the right……. Unless this pedal is engaged, the red knob is pulled out, and the moon is in the waxing gibbous stage. Then you need to move lever #1 to neutral and stick your right foot out of the cab! Seriously, they were bears to operate!

After reading the reply to my last post, it sure does seem like these Industrial Brownhoist cranes demanded a great deal of respect from the operators and the crew.

Great elaboration on those mammoth machines. Thanks for the feedback

it's a labor and investment thing. less manpower used today, no capital tied up in equipment.

@jamesbarrett918 I think these contractors pretty much stack equipment up on these wrecks because there’s a separate charge for each piece of equipment deployed! The class 1’s were hell bent to go to contractors and ditch the derricks 30 years ago. Now the class 1’s are prisoners to them! And as a related side note, in 2020 at the height of PSR fever, NS said Carmen (the few that they didn’t dump) would no longer perform tasks like rerailing minor derailments or line of road wheel set changes (from defect detector set outs), it was all going to contractors. In 2024, they’re wanting Carmen to resume doing those jobs! But due to large numbers of Carmen turning down the call to return to work for the tyrants, and very limited experience, if any at all, by the ones actually still working, they’ve got theirselves in another hole! Supposedly financially weak right now, NS has forbidden mechanical department surpervision from calling contractors to clear derailments! They have to take pictures and submit them to a (questionable) panel of experts to make the decision! At the rate they’re going, we could have another Penn Central before long! Lol

Awesome, thank you!

Glad you enjoyed it

www.railfan.net/lists/erielack-digest/200112/msg00053.html This is the account of it.

Had it been a revenue train, however, it probably would not have been held at Newburgh Jct. to be overtaken by a freight. That's not intended to diminish the seriousness of a red signal violation, but it probably explains why the red caught the passenger crew by surprise.

Crew didn’t even see the signal, they only realized where they were because of passing over a bridge that they knew wasn’t on the mainline but on the Graham line in front of the 99

Sliders?

@@milepost71nodefects92 Comet I coaches….nicknamed ‘Sliders’ en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(railcar)

This is Erie Lackawanna era. NJT acquired the sliders at its inception in 1983, ran them for a short time with EL livery and then revamped them