dave1905

Part of it is it would be a HUGE project. Railroads don't track how they paint their cars to begin with. There is no real record that says car ABCD 12345 has paint scheme 327-A on it. Railroad cars aren't sequentially renumbered. If a railroad owns 500 of a class of cars and rebuilds and renumbers 200 of them, it doesn't rebuild and renumber them in sequential order. It routes the first 200 cars of that class it can get its hands on to the shop and the shop works them as they come in and will renumber them in the order they go out. Basically you just have to find a picture. One other consideration is age. The car in the picture was new in 1976. That would make it 40 years old in 2016. In earlier eras freight cars were limited to 40 years, that was extended to 50 years and in certain cases a class of cars can be extended to 65 years.

That would be a later version of the engine. The B23-7's were delivered in the 2200-2300 series and then renumbered into 4600 series to make room for additional GP38-2's. They were used on locals and through freights. The steps make them less desirable as switchers (compared to the GP38 and GP15 engines) although the MP used just about every 4 axle as a switcher at one time or another. A lot of them ended up on rock hauling jobs in South Texas. Later they were renumbered into the 100-200 series numbers and some ended their careers as radio control brake dummies (no engine, just housed radio control apparatus.

You need some metal buildings and it can be pretty overgrown with vegetation in places, it's a sub tropical climate. Lots of vines, lots of tall grasses.

Those Mantis cranes are really cool pieces of equipment. The neat thing about them over sidebooms is if you have a derailed double stack, they can pick the containers off the top level of double stack quite easily. On that black material under the tracks, I wonder how much of that is cinders from countless camelback steam engines, since this is the former LV or CNJ.

I apologize for my tone. Knowing from first hand experience that we can run hundreds of 8,000-15,000 ft, 10,000-20,000 ton trains at 40-60 mph across thousands of miles of track every day, I was reacting to the comment that US railroads are in terrible shape.

Not how it works here in the states at all.

If it's Louisiana you ought to have a chemical plant.

Having equipment to resolve a problem and having the line shut down to investigate a problem are two separate things. Having to wait for an investigation is a purely bureaucracy thing. This isn't rocket science, it doesn't take that long to gather relevant information to determine the cause of a derailment and a lot of that can be undertaken while the recovery response is being organized or even while some repairs are being made. Ironically, the fact that US roads are predominately freight may make the repairs of the lines and restoration of service more time sensitive than if the lines were mostly passenger. You can bus passengers around an outage, you don't have those same options with 50-100 thousand tons of coal. Railroad wrecking equipment is very expensive to own and maintain. And despite what y'all think, it isn't used that often. Rather than one railroad owning equipment and only using it once a month (or less), it is waaaaaaaaay more cost effective for a contractor to own a set of equipment and then it be used by multiple railroads. The contractors can disperse the equipment better.

You do realize that the UP alone has roughly 3 times as much track mileage as the entire British national rail system and it is one of 6 major railroads in the US. In the US there are different classes of track based on the speed and operating conditions. Much of that "poor infrastructure" is in reality low grade lines that aren't going to be operated at high speeds regardless of track quality. There isn't any point to maintaining a line to 125 mph standards when you are only going to operate one freight train a day at 20 mph over the line. By all indications, this derailment had absolutely nothing to do with track quality.

Be kind to yourself. Move the grade crossing about 3" to the right and get it out of the switch.

Major US railroads have cars of track panels and ballast standing by at strategic locations and are dispatched as soon as possible. In addition within the first couple hours they are locating track equipment to work on the track. The derailment contractors are ordered generally by "divisions", each division is two sidebooms and a front end loader. They also come in "steel" and "padded" varieties. Steel sidebooms have regular steel tracks and are best on wet or rugged terrain where traction is required. Padded sidebooms have rubber pads bolted to the tracks and are best in yards. They can crawl over tracks without damaging them. A lot of rerailing contractors also use roadable heavy duty cranes to rerail equipment. The cool thing about sidebooms is that two sidebooms can pick up a rail car and walk away with it, 4 sidebooms can pick up and engine and walk away with it.

Those single point switches are very common in trolley and other urban street trackage. Here are scans of a RACOR track products catalog that might give you a cleared look at what paved area switch parts look like. The switch pictured is a double point switch, but the idea is similar.

The Athearn/Roundhouse 2-8-0 and 4-4-0 engines in the green box are excellent runners, as they have all wheel pick up on both the tender and engine drivers. Here is one I modified to be a camelback:

The ORG is handy to find what railroads served what stations and for passenger service. Freight service is less well documented.