dave1905

The "blue" is actually a charcoal grey color that has some blue tones in it. The last time I saw NJDOT engines in the flesh was in the 1970's and they were definitely a charcoal grey. It appears the "grey" has gotten bluer over the years, with the EL, era engines tending more towards grey and the more modern engines tending more towards a dark blue. Compare 5902 or 5681 to 4101 a more recent acquisition. There is a definite shift to blue.

Track plan reminds me of E. St Louis. A truly knotted mess of junctions and railroads. Two major terminal railroads operate the largest terminal yards, the Alton & Southern (ALS) and the Terminal Railroad Association (TRRA).

Long trains aren't even a PSR thing. On the railroad I worked for, the Supts and VPs would go over train length every morning and if there were short trains the responsible party had to explain why they were running such a short train. The Network Operations group would track train length in more detail and trains that ran less than 5000 ft or less than 75 cars consistently would get flagged for review to see if they were still needed or the service could be shifted to another train. That was pre 2016. On the western roads there were shorter trains but they were more the exception rather than the rule.

Foam is common, but I don't know if "favored" is correct. I only know of one layout in my area that is built on foam, the other 15 or so are built on plywood, Homasote or spline. I have built only layout on foam, a small one for my son a couple decades ago. All the layouts before and since then have been on plywood or a Homasote/plywood sandwich. All of those have been room sized permanent (non-sectional) layouts.

IPD boxcars are really tough because they were scattered to the winds after the IPD program ended and were often patched or repainted multiple times by multiple owners in a short span of years. As others have mentioned, finding pictures on the photo websites is probably the best option. One story about repaints. A leasing company acquired surplus engines from various railroads, patched them with leasing company reporting marks then long term leased them to the UP. The UP ran them through a contract shop to install UP required equipment and repaint them into a UP paint and a UP number series. While they were in the shop, the UP decided to renumber that series of engines, before they had been delivered to the UP. In less than a year some of those engines had 4 numbers and two (or three) paint schemes. The original owner, the patch/repaint leasing company, UP first number, UP second number. Second repaint story. A railroad stored a large number of 50 ft plain boxcars on a branch in cuts of a hundred or so. It ended up that 2 NS boxcars got mixed up in that group. The NS told the railroad they wanted their boxcars back. The railroad said they weren't going to dig out 2 cars out of the middle of all those stored cars, but they would take the first two of their boxcars on the branch (same basic type) and renumber them to the NS series and give them to the NS. Never heard if that is what they did, but that was a true scenario.

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.