Craig Townsend said:
A lot of short lines make big money storing cars on their tracks. And not just in sidings either. If your a shortline and you have 5 miles of mainline track that doesn’t have a customer, but a leasing company contacts you to storage cars, you can sure bet that those cars are going to end up sitting on a mainline.
But for the accident up in Canada, I don’t find it anything more that SOP to stop a train on the main. I parked a many train on the main track and left the train unattended.
The very last paragraph of the article makes no sense to me… Why can’t the RR deliver cars to a customer? “On Wednesday, a rusted yellow derailer sat clamped on the siding in Nantes, with a large yellow warning sign planted in the gravel nearby. Farther back, nearly two-dozen boxcars remained in the same location on the siding where they have been since the crash. Mr. Brassard said the cars were scheduled to come to the Tafisa factory for loading but Quebec provincial police have not allowed them to be moved.”
On the storage situation, yes standard practice. Our regional shortline - Kelowna Pacific Railway (Knight Hawk), insolvent as of July 12th 2013 or thereabouts - has been storing hoppers and tankers for at least 10 years, at one time it looked like every siding was filled with tankers. Many have been picked-up since the crude oil traffic increased.
BTW will be interesting to see who claims what is still sitting around, the KPR engines are gone from the service yard in Vernon.
Which reminds me, I need to write a letter to our local rag to push for a true regional railway - the towns, districts and shippers as stake holders with a reliable operator running the show.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/13452967[/vimeo]
The all-day transfer run from Kamloops (CN Yard) to Vernon; there was a lot of time to work on my tan that day.
PS on the cars that don’t move. As is they would have to run through the accident scene and that’s out. They are talking about alternatives i.e. reactivating an old connecting track that would allow them to ship East - the long way around since most of the board traffic goes West to Montreal.
