Western Railroad Discussion > CSRM and Duffy street Incident

From time to time I see metion of Calif State Railroad Museum and a Duffy St. incident.

Can someone explain what this is or a link on where information can be found?

The Duffy Street incident was the SP runaway off Cajon pass in 1989 that derailed and spilled it's contents into backyards and houses along Duffy Street. The train weight given the crew was roughly 6,000 tons but the actual weight was closer to 9,000 tons. They also had two(?) of six units without operative dynamic brakes.
I'm sure there are other folks out here that can fill in the blanks and correct any errors here.

TLC (the learning channel) showed a really good show on it. I have seen it a couple of times now.

Well DUH.

OK, I know what Duffy street incident is, for some reason I was associating it with CSRM.

So I take one of the engines involved is now at CSRM, and that is the link.

Time to go back to bed.

I don't know what the direct connection would be, except that CSRM might have doccumentation on this accident.

I'm sure most people on this board know that Duffy is the name of the street in San Bernardino that lost several homes to a runaway Southern Pacific potash freight decending Cajon Pass on May 12th. of 1989. Two S.P. employees and two children in the destroyed homes were killed. During the clean up of the wreck, a petroleum pipeline was reptured and the resulting explosion and fire took out several more homes with more loss of life. See http://www.trainweb.org/KernJunction/cross.htm

Having lived in the Rialto area when this incident occured,I hope to never ever see anything like that again. I've never seen anything like that fire when the pipeline exploded. To this day,the Duffy St. neighborhood
still has many empty lots where homes once stood.

The documentary (already mentioned) on TLC tells
a graphic story of what occured that day in 1989.

It sickens me to hear the story of how the one lawyer handling all the lawsuits for the victims screwed up the case so badly. The victims only ended up getting a few thousand dollars each.


George,
Fontana,Cal.