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This is why they call a giant mess a train wreck.
Nothing official on what happened, but it looks to me like the orange bulkhead flat car rammed into the back of the gray covered hopper (making the big boom), then couldn't make the turn. Why? I'd guess the draft gear, (the coupler and the buffer assembly that holds it on to the car) on one of the two cars failed letting the two cars slam together. Why? probably for reasons I don't know. But my suspicion is the helper engines in the middle of the train somewhere off screen were pushing a little harder than they should, and basically the train was trying to smoosh itself between the helper engines and the ones up front. Yes, that should theoretically never happen, since all the engines including the helpers are controlled together from the front. But if something can go wrong it will.
Nothing official on what happened, but it looks to me like the orange bulkhead flat car rammed into the back of the gray covered hopper (making the big boom), then couldn't make the turn. Why? I'd guess the draft gear, (the coupler and the buffer assembly that holds it on to the car) on one of the two cars failed letting the two cars slam together. Why? probably for reasons I don't know. But my suspicion is the helper engines in the middle of the train somewhere off screen were pushing a little harder than they should, and basically the train was trying to smoosh itself between the helper engines and the ones up front. Yes, that should theoretically never happen, since all the engines including the helpers are controlled together from the front. But if something can go wrong it will.
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But my suspicion is the helper engines in the middle of the train somewhere off screen were pushing a little harder than they should, and basically the train was trying to smoosh itself between the helper engines and the ones up front.
Very possible, I'd agree. Tiny errors in synchronization could be very additive.
From:
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My mother's cousin worked for the Santa Fe Railroad and once showed us around the rail yard at the small city where he lived, including getting inside a diesel locomotive or two. But I was very young, only saw him that once and didn't understand much of what he said. But from then on, I eagerly watched the Santa Fe trains we passed driving to and from my grandfather's house in Kansas. When I was about 14, my family was in Silverton up in the Colorado mountains when we saw the narrow gauge train (steam engine with both passengers and freight) arrive there. My father wanted to ride it someday, tried to get tickets for another day while we were there, but could not. He always wanted to do it some year, but never got the chance. When I was about forty and on vacation, I saw another of the train arrivals in Silverton (all tourist by then), then minutes later while wandering through the town, I saw a train set in a store window, and the model-train bug hit me then and there. (I took my sister with me on the train to Silverton the year after I moved to Arizona!)