Western Railroad Discussion > Gaviota wind incident from 2006

I came across this interesting page with photos from 2006 when high winds blew some car parts onto Gaviota Beach:

http://www.silcom.com/~pordecon/gcwsp_uprr.htm

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

It is interesting to read more about the public/private partnership that resulted from this incident. A number of entities, including NOAA and UP, worked together to build weather stations to monitor the wind. The area has a micro-climate that generates hazardous winds from time to time. Now the tools are in place to protect trains, motorists and others that are impacted by strong winds. This is the type of thing that doesn't get done when NOAA has to operate under sequestration.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/13 09:51 by radar.

THINK COVERS HAVE BEEN LOST ON SHERMAN HILL AND ROCKY COLORADO

I was kind of curious as to how this happened. Were the covers not strapped down?

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

Here's a pic of the coil car covers that blew off at gaviota in 2006, sitting at the parking lot.
My guess is that the covers are just held on by gravity,
as are containers on well cars, and freight car bodies on their trucks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/13 15:13 by pdt.

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Back in the early 70s we had a train on the Coast that was the GGM. You could boggie along at 60 no problem. You would only lose about 5 to 10 mph going up the hill to Arlight. UNLESS, you had a bunch of mtys with the doors open. You would be lucky to make it over at 10 mph. Sometimes having to double to Honda.

There were a lot of places like that on the system. When I was working out of Dunsmuir years later, I was called for a cab hop up to Bolum where the wind had blown a few pig cars over. From then on, if you were on a pig, you had to call the dispatcher from Grass Lake and find out what the winds were.


Nudge

pdt Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Here's a pic of the coil car covers that blew off
> at gaviota in 2006, sitting at the parking lot.
> My guess is that the covers are just held on by
> gravity,
> as are containers on well cars, and freight car
> bodies on their trucks.


Containers have a lock down device.


V

SLOCONDR

>Sometimes having to double to Honda.

Double to Honda? HMM. Makes sense -- one trip WB on the Cal-P approaching Bahia at 55 MPH we where hit with a strong gust of wind, and our speed dropped by 10 mph in the space of about 5 seconds, and this was a mid sized train (with a lot of open doors on the empties).

>Containers have a lock down device.

Flatcars have them, but I don't recall ever seeing them for the bottom containers in well cars, locating bosses yes, but not locking devices. The top containers are fastened to the bottom ones with what the maritime industry calls IBCs, inter-box connectors. All those stacks of containers you see on ships use the same things. Once the top layer is loaded, each stack is tied down with cables. In those pix you see occasionally of the stacks of containers leaning, some even missing, the cables have broken because of storm action.

>held on by gravity . . . and freight car bodies on their trucks.

And the truck frames to the axles, except for passenger cars.

Earlier designs of this type of cover always had a set of latches, which released automatically using a lever and cable apparatus inside the lifting lug at the hard point on the top. In the pix there is no evidence of this release mechanism, so one would have to look at the cars to find the latching mechanism. As light as aluminum is, and given the venturi/airplane wing effect arising from normal train speeds, let alone abnormal winds, it's inconceivable these don't have some sort of latches. They just aren't visible in the pix.