BR60103

My panels -- from the elaborate to the ones with Atlas electric switches. St Mary Ax has a hand drawn track plan that's not shown; the plan is Minories. All points are manual. The elaborate one (Exeter St Dayle's) is designed to slide into the top shelf between the books and the framework. (Posted to show the other end of the spectrum from what has gone before)

With the degradation of education since the 1960s, Ontarians no longer are taught what the names of the numbers are beyond 9.

I have a couple of comments and queries about my Clan. I took a piece of insulation (from mains cable) and drilled it out a bit larger and slipped it over the peg of the engine-tender connection to keep them together better (given the fragility of the wire connector). The brake mechanisms that need to be installed don't seem to fit and don't really match the instruction diagram. One is square and one has tapers but neither looks to fit on the bottom. The front axle often doesn't rotate. I think I tracked this to the Kadee coupling I installed. The little nubs that hold it in fill the whole space between the NEM box and the axle. I took it out and filed a slant on it; it seemed to work on my layout but I noticed it stuck when I double-headed it behind another Clan at Lostock on Saturday. None of the bufferbeam detail will survive the Kadee that I installed on the bogie.

Thank you 34... I went looking for a 2.5mm nut driver today. The closest I could get were some bolts from a model aircraft shop with a hex socket. Between that and pliers I managed to reposition the crank. By the way, my model came with a bag of coal. Does anyone know what radius is required if I install the flanged trailing wheels?

I purchased my Clan McGregor on the weekend. It works well. However, the speedometer cable seems to flex a lot. The crank that it is attached to is not pointed at the center of the wheel, as I'd expect, but off to the side. Is this right or should it be set for least movement? Can I move it by loosening the screw and re-tighteneing?

Kadee make a big selection of mounting because the American market has a variety of places to mount. Kadee's website has specs for the mounting height for all their variants. You do not need to settle on just one as they are all compatible. You may have to use different lengths depending on buffers and how far back you have to mount the draft gear. When I started, Kadee had the 4/5, 6, 7, 8, and 10 (10 is now 5). And they were mechanical, not magnetic.

I've wondered about the practicality of making these in single-compartment units: a first and a third second. Plus the other little rooms. How close to uniform were compartment sizes? They could probably be fudged a little to fit.

Carl: thank you for the poem.

My father used to have a bit of poetry that ended "... but the islands are MacBrayne's!" Does anyone know the rest? (It could be common in Scotland, but not here)

I originally wrote this 5 years ago. What I left out of the story was the suspicion of the cause. The truck in question had oil axle boxes, i.e. not roller bearing. The cars were checked in Chatham before being added to the CPR train. It was said that the axle box had a lubricating pad in it (to move the oil from the bottom of the box up to the journal) that was a size too big. There was debate about whether that would matter or not, and whether it had happened. Apparently, at one yard the pads were all separated by sizes except for the two largest which shared a box. The pad itself was burned. A lot of the recommendations of the inquiry were moot, because the railways were already implementing them. There was some concern that even if tank cars were given roller bearings, the car in front might be something else with plain bearings. Note that if you modelled this scene in HO, there would be a piece of tank car 25 feet from the wreck site. The locomotives on the train were GO Transit units, rented to CP for the weekend. They were equipped with rear-view mirrors but CP discouraged use of them for checking back over the train. The investigation didn't assign any blame, or even try to decide where there was fault; it was for checking procedures and making recommendations. I saw a notice last week asking for people with memories of the event to share them at a meeting. (Is the diagram big enough? I can try to scan it again.)

The efforts: The fire department had hoses on the burning cars for days. The fires were out on Tuesday morning and the chemical team started evacuating the rest of the chlorine from the tank. Up to this point, there was no knowledge of how much chlorine was still in the tank - various chemical reactions had made the measurement of the remain liquid uncertain. There were problems with the patch. On Wednesday they decided to vacuum out the chlorine instead of pressurizing. The operation was completed by Monday. What happened? There were no injuries. A few small buildings near the tracks were destroyed. The dreaded chlorine cloud never appeared. The feeling was that the chlorine had been sucked up into the atmosphere in the first few explosions and was never a danger. Mississauga, an amalgamation of small towns, had spent the week in shelters and felt more like a community. The Inquiry report recommends: hot box detectors rear view mirrors on locomotives roller bearings on tank cars (and other cars) double shelf couplings on tank cars better head shields, thermal protection and better protection for bottom valves. Most of my information comes from the inquiry report of Mr. Justice Samuel G. M. Grange.

BLEVE "We??™re in the big hole, Ted, but still moving." "Jesus Christ, Ted, one of them tank cars blew up!" In the middle of the next city west of Toronto, there are twenty-four cars piled in a heap. Nineteen contain "Dangerous Commodities". Within half-an-hour three of the propane tankers have exploded; parts of these cars have gone 145 feet east, 440 feet southeast and 2,222 feet northeast. The front of the train has stopped just over a mile away. Good luck is with us tonight; the train has passed through the town of Streetsville and the derailment is in the middle of an industrial area. The heat of the fire on the tank cars caused BLEVEs -- Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion. The liquid in the tank cars has been heated to the point it is vaporized and the tank can no longer contain the pressure. Applying Boyle's law, when the tank ruptures the pressure decreases abruptly and any remaining hot liquid vaporizes instantly, and may shoot the tank a considerable distance. And in the middle of all this is a tank car of Chlorine. And this tank has a 2 to 3 foot diameter hole in it. The year before, a Youngstown, Florida, a chlorine tanker was punctured in a derailment and 50 tons of chlorine drifted over a highway and killed 8 motorists and their passengers and hospitalized 89. By Sunday, a large part of Mississauga had been evacuated, as well as bits of two neighbouring municipalities - Burnhamthorpe Road to the lake, from Highway 10 to Erin Mills Parkway/Southdown Road - 17.4 square miles and 75,000 people. The evacuation lasted until Friday.

November 10, 1979 Saturday: Sarnia 07:10 a.m. C&O local 4 leaves with 69 cars, 63 to be interchanged with the CPR at Chatham. Many of the cars are tank cars containing caustic soda, propane, styrene, toluene and chlorine. The cars are left at Chatham yard at 3:55 p.m. Windsor 12:45 p.m.. CP train 84 leaves Walkerville yard. The motive power is GO Transit, leased for the weekend. They pick up the C&O cars at Chatham and leave at 6:00 p.m. Train 84 has 102 cars. At London, train 84 becomes train 54 and receives a new crew. 4 more cars are picked up. At Woodstock, 5 cars are set out and 5 are picked up. The train is now 6,627 feet long and weighs 9,050 tons. At 11:15 p.m. train 54 passes Guelph Junction, milepost 39.02. This is at the top of the Niagara escarpment and the beginning a long, steep downgrade. A couple in a car see smoke coming from the train, possibly from a journal box. At this point the train is 39 miles from Toronto. 15 miles farther, at the bottom of the grade, a couple see fire 2 to 4 feet in diameter coming from the wheel. Several more people see flames or sparks. Around milepost 17.98, the end of the journal of the rear axle of the 33rd car of the train falls to the roadbed. It is red hot. The rest of the axle and the two wheels are found, glowing red, in a backyard. Another mile and the tank car is tilted about 15 degrees. Sparks are shooting from where the truck is scraping along the ballast. The front wheels of the rear truck have derailed at mp 16.82. At Mavis road, mp 16.56, the truck meets a trailing switch and is torn from the car. The tanker stops; the following car turns sideways, and 24 cars are spilled over the level crossing in a space of just over 400 feet. It is a few minutes short of midnight. Nine of the cars contain propane; one contains chlorine; there are 3 cars of styrene, 3 of toluene, 4 of caustic soda and some boxcars. All the cars originated on train 4 in Sarnia.