Railworks America

Wow! Now that sucks :/. Hope the crew is alright.

Here comes the pipeline train!

Yeah.
Let's face it, there's just no safe way to transport oïl.

Come on let's be logical here. Anyone with a bit of common sense knows that hauling aromatics by pipeline is way safer than by rail.

One of the strangest comments about this that I heard today on the Internet, was that they should build the refineries at the oil fields.
I thought, no way, that would mean hauling even more flammable substances like gasoline by rail to the end users.

Ericmopar wrote:One of the strangest comments about this that I heard today on the Internet, was that they should build the refineries at the oil fields.
I thought, no way, that would mean hauling even more flammable substances like gasoline by rail to the end users.

Typical of the lack of critical thinking abounding nowadays.

buzz456 wrote:Come on let's be logical here. Anyone with a bit of common sense knows that hauling aromatics by pipeline is way safer than by rail.

Shhhhhh......quiet. That makes too much sense! Environmentalists want to block the XL pipeline even though there are thousands of miles of existing pipelines carrying oil in the USA as we speak. Has been for decades. Accidents involving them including spills, are few and far between. They just hate anything that involves fossil fuels. And they hate nuclear power too.

So they claim to love "green power". Well.... not so fast. They say they love wind power, but hate them when the turbines kill birds. They also don't want them in their backyard. The late democratic senator Ted Kennedy was all for wind power. But when it was proposed to install wind turbines off the coast of his home state of Massachusetts cuz of it's ideal constant winds, he opposed it cuz it would ruin the view from his coastal beach house.

Then there is solar farms. They built a huge one in the California desert recently. Now the environmentalists are complaining they are burning birds to death mid-flight and disturbing the habitat of some desert tortoise.

You can't have a rational conversation with these people.... so I don't.

I live near the solar plants in question. It is so stupid it's mind blowing.
No one thought of the obvious, that these tower style solar plants superheat the air around them to the point of glowing bluish white. It's truly spooky to look at.
They also built them right on the path of migratory birds. The fish and wildlife service admits it's a major foulup. They've killed over 20,000 migrating birds in one year alone. Not sustainable losses.
All of this was known info in advance, but they built them right on the edge of the Mojave National Preserve anyways.
Those tower style solar plants also cause some severe eye strain on passing motorists on I15. I really thought the problems to drivers would make the news, I never expected to hear about tens of thousands of birds bursting into flames every year (they call them "streamers" around here) .

We have solar plants near Boulder City that work perfectly however, but they are a different style, that lays low to the ground. The Boulder City ones work on the same principal, heat a brine mix that is pumped into a conventional boiler to make steam for a turbine. They actually work similar to a nuclear plant, but use the sun to heat the mix instead of a nuclear pile.
The big failure is the tower style.

I support pipelines when practical, but the Keystone pipeline will only serve the southern states, they will still have to transport by rail to Ca and other states and ports like they are currently doing. (which is funny because some of you seem to believe Ca bans all that type of thing) And yet the TransCon to Ca is one of the busiest unit oil train routes.
My only problem with the Keystone pipeline is that parts of it were planned to be built on unstable swamp somewhere along the way. I had read a report about that at one of the USGS sites. Most of it seems okay, but they need to reroute around that unstable land area. They want to cut corners and go through the "mud" to save some money. Typical.
We have pipelines in and out of the Bay Area and L.A. sending gas and other products out of state, and they even have survived major quakes.

I just read somewhere today, that the railroads will still have tons of business from the northern oil fields. Apparently it's not practical to ship the oil shale oil from Canada by pipeline, do to it's viscosity. Also the pipeline won't be able to compete with the shear volume the railroads are already shipping.

Recorder says they were well under the speed limit.

Pull aparts can do vicious things. They can go undetected until they pop under a train.

BNSFdude wrote:Pull aparts can do vicious things. They can go undetected until they pop under a train.

What's a pull apart, aside from being a type of sticky bun?

Expansion and contraction caused by rapid temperature fluctuation can cause weakened points in rails to pull apart. The area where this derailment occurred happened to experience just that the day before and the day of.

BNSFdude wrote:Expansion and contraction caused by rapid temperature fluctuation can cause weakened points in rails to pull apart. The area where this derailment occurred happened to experience just that the day before and the day of.

Ahhhhh, thank you.

I have a friend who used to work for the Wisconsin Southern RR years ago as an engineer (he's now a supervisor for another railroad). He was rolling down the track at a decent speed when he felt this massive tug backwards on his lead unit. He immediately swung his head out the side window to look back and saw a bunch of cars jackknifing left and right out towards both sides of the track.

Turns out an axle snapped in-half on one of his trailing locos (I think the last unit). The broken axle then hit a tie and dug into the ground like a pole that digs-in when you pole vault. This launched the truck and it's remaining axle (it was a geep) off the track about a foot, destroying more ties and bending the rails laterally as it came down. Then it was all a chain reaction on the cars that were immediately trailing. Not always the safest job, but nobody was injured. It was a mess of wrecked cars though. Just shows that steel metal does indeed fatigue.