I can't top that.  The only derailments my feeble old mind can recall are from my childhood and were strictly scientific in nature.  Where centrifugal force overcomes gravity at high speed causing irreparable damage to Tyco loco's.

It was later in life that I learned about SCALE SPEED.  Luckily the Tyco's made good crash test dummies. [wink]

The funny thing about your story is that if you were trying to get that pin out it would not fall out for you.  Murphy's law I guess.

So I just got trains running around last Thanksgiving (too late for my open house, where the visitors saw my benchwork and spline roadbed where the trains WOULD run, someday...).  I was excited as can be, because my sidings and return loops could hold a 48 car train (47 Kadee cars and a brand new Athearn RTR Cotton Belt bw caboose) pulled by 3 diesels.  My neighbor (not a model railroader) stopped by for something else, and I dragged him down to the basement to show off.  My wife had asked me to drill a hole in the handle of a plastic comb, so I thought it would be simple to do that while the train was running.  He was impressed, until I dropped the comb, reached down to pick it up, and hit my head on the bottom of the benchwork as the end of the train was passing over.  The track is 56 1/2 inches (!) above the concrete floor at that point, and I hadn't yet put in any sort of safety net.  Two of the Kadee cars and the new caboose landed on the floor, with fairly dramatic results.  It seems Kadee cars EXPLODE when they fall that far to concrete.  One of the axles even broke in two!  The caboose shows only a couple dings on the corners of the roof, though.  I've bought a new pair of trucks for the car that needs them (could have just bought the wheelsets), and the repairs will take just a bit of CA on the cut lever pivots (on both cars) to be completely good as new again.

Lesson learned?  Improve situational awareness, don't multi-task if one of the tasks is critical, and don't take unnecessary risks with valuable cars!  I know accidents will happen, but stupidity (or inattention) makes them happen faster and more expensively!

My weirdest derailment is yet to be explained.  I had been running a train around my layout getting ready for the Piedmont model railroad tour to make sure it was dependable.  The open house lasts for 4 hours and the trains run continously during that time (hopefully).  Anyway, the train succcessfully made at least 50 trips around the layout without a hitch.  I stopped the train and didn't return to the layout until two days later.  When I tried to run the very same train around the layout the second engine in the consist would derail in the exact same spot every time.  The weird part was that it was in a straight section of track!  I checked the track, the loco, everything....but could find nothing wrong.  I took the engine out of the consist and ran it around  by itself and it derailed in the same place.  When I turned the engine around and ran it short hood forward it didn't derail!  Both engines in the consist were Proto 2000 U30's.  I tried a number of other engines in the consist and none derailed.  I ended up runnin a U30 as the lead and a RS36 in consist for the open house and no problems.

Now it gets weirder....  After the open house just for fun I put the offending loco back in the consist as it originally had been and it went around the layout without a hitch!  Was it just "shy" and didn't want to be seen by the 67 people that visited my layout?  I'll probably never know.

Rick

The Year is 1989 My SP and Santa Fe Rail Roads are in the glory days and it's a warm (90 Degrees) Summer Day in Northridge California I'm in the garage running a 50 car train with my two Rivarossa Cab Forwards speeding along the Desert portion of the Railroad on about 2/3's of the way across my 20 ft straight section.

Lets go back about 15 min : As the south bound Freight leaves the station in Fresno California headed for Los Angeles with 30 Freight Cars and needing to run through the Desert and a stop in Mojave to pick up 20 more cars destined for San Diego. I went over and pressed the automatic Door opener to let in some fresh air and some light into the garage. The temp was running close to 100 degrees and the cooler  90 degree air felt good as the 2-1/2 car main Door opened and a flood of fresh air filled the room. I finished the pick up of the 20 cars from the Borax Mill in Mojava, the 18 Foot wide Door had just stopped and the engines were cuffing like crazy I could see the second SP Cab Forward exit the station area with it's 50 car load heading out of Mojave and it was picking up speed now. Everything was running great no sound unit in the engines like today but with 32 Drivers cranking it still sounded good. My Friend Terry was talking to me and had just finished switching the Borax cars onto the Freight and was saying how smooth it operation had gon as he was very new to the game and was just sitting in his chair and I sat back into my chair and was just reaching for the throttle when out of the corner of my eye a Bright Red object flashed across the room coming in through the Large open Doorway. WHAMMO a Bright Red Frisbee flying saucer SLAMMED into both Engines. Both engines 22 Cars and Frisbee all hit the floor in a loud CRASH. Two 17 year old teens that actually had thrown two Frisbee's at the train at the same time of which one went over the top of the garage were Laughing hysterically in the allie behind my house where the door open out to as their father had just walked out the back gate to witness the disaster. One of my other friends had been setting on the chair on the opposite side of the room took off out the door and reached me just before I took one of the kids heads off with a baseball bat. You could say I was a little Pissed off. After a court appearance and law suit and luck for me the Judge was a Model railroader I received $2500.00 Damages the Max for small claims court but the two boys spent the rest of the summer on a trash puck up crew from 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. every day including the weekends and their father who was a good neighbor asked me if I had an extra Bat after the Judges verdict. following is a photo of the two Cab Forwards as I still haven't repaired them. Some day I may fix them when I find the time.

Did someone mention Derail?

I took the photo today and it's the first time I've looked at the engines since the court day.

Dan

...nor would I want to.

Oddest "derailment" didn't actually involve a derailment as I remember, it was simply two couplers popping apart, leaving a caboose behind at the grade crossing that had caught it's coupler trip pin.  Happened on the BC&SJ...and might have been caught on video.

 Also, while turnouts are probably the #1 source of derailments, #2 for me is definitely helper ops, where a section of cars between the lead locos and the helpers get stringlined on a curve.

The op session Jeff is reffering to was taped for "Ops Session Live #3" (available from model-trains-video.com). My memory is not clear on if the incident itself was caught on video. But some wisecracks about the Reefer Express missing its caboose were.

The cause of the problem was a caboose with a dropping coupler. The dangler caught on the east grade crossing at Oakhill and instantly uncoupled the caboose. I don't believe however, that anything actually derailed (go figure).

Much merriment was made about the reefer express charging down grade from Oakhill sans caboose. The engineer didn't notice anything was a "miss" until it was pointed out to him...

Charlie

Had some scrap iron get under a gondola while loading and wasn't noticed, this caused the car to tip spilling its load at a crossing.  Not a good day for the local crew.

[IMG]http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa66/steamage/gondola_derail.jpg[/IMG]

I was running a freight around my layout to help breakin a new SD45T-2 (before the new Athearn tooling) and everything was running fine for about 10 minutes.  Then I turned around to take care of something and then I didn't hear the train running anymore.  I turned around and my new SD45T-2 derailed and had taken a dive into "Fascia Canyon" and broke a truck at the bottom of the "canyon floor" (the cement garage floor).  The engine took a couple of cars with it as well.

I used to have derailments in the old days due to indadequate car weighting. Those problems have disappeared since I joined Brooklyn N-Trak because a fellow club member took my empty gondolas and coal cars and weighted them so they can be anywhere in the consist and not come off the tracks because they car or cars behind are heavier.

Urv

Ok, here's one more... definitely a lesson in letting trains run unattended...

On my first BC&SJ, the 4x8 version, I used to set a train in orbit and around and around it went. This layout was a twice around with about 5" of vertical between the lowest point on the doubled-loop and the highest.

One night while the train was going round and round I needed to duck into the house (from the garage). I was gone perhaps 2 minutes. As I went back into the garage from the house I was just in time to observe that

• there had been an uncoupling between two cars
• leaving the caboose and a few cars sitting on the track in front of the South Jackson depot
• and the engine (and other cars) relieved of the drag from having an entire train behind it was rapidly approaching the marker lights on the caboose (Horace Fithers sez there were crewmen bailing out of there in one all-fired hurry!)
• there was no way I could get back to the throttle (pre-dcc) in time to do anything...

BOOM! The engine plowed into the cars sitting in front of the depot sending 'em all over the place and thankfully derailing the loco or it might well have pushed all the cars over the edge of the world into The Abyss.

I believe the culprit was one of those darned Atheran coupler pockets with the little spring metal clips holding the coupler in place. I'm guessing the clip popped off dropping the coupler on the track (at least the front car in what was left of the cut sitting in front of the depot no longer had a front coupler...)

Sigh...

Charlie