New Member

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There must be some supernatural force at work here because my copy of the NTSB report on the 611 excursion train derailment has disappeared like Ken's and Harry's.  So, I just have to depend on my memory of 18 years ago.

As an interesting sidelight on this matter, when I arrived at the derailment site, Mr. Hobert Scott, NS VP Mechanical, who had arrived earlier from Norfolk, called me over to point out to me a skimpy ballast shoulder leading to the east turnout of Juniper middle track, which was the initial point of deailment.  A bit later we learned that the NTSB would be on the scene so I was told to terminate the NS investigation and to cooperate with the NTSB investigators.  After the NTSB team arrived I worked with the NTSB mechanical specialist inspecting all of the equipment.  After a few days of finding no cause some of the NTSB team members returned to Washington only to be told to return and look some more.  The track specialist had the NS to pull the twisted pieces of the turnout out of the swampy weeds and reassemble the turnout as best as could be done.  The mechanical specialist and I had all of the equipment ahead of the derailed cars put over a pit so we could look for missing equipment that might have fallen onto the track structure causing the derailment.  Of course we found none, although I discovered a pair of Armco wheels under the 611's tender, which I had removed because Armco wheels were prohibited under freight cars many years earlier because of a high failure rate.

The NTSB next had a public hearing in Norfolk, at which I testified and about which one NTSB member confided to me was simply a publicity show.  The NTSB team even included a "human factors analyst" to investigate any possible human cause of the derailment.

Well, some thirteen months later, as I recall, and with the involvment of many NTSB experts, the NTSB report came to essentially the same conclusion that Mr. Scott had done a short while after his arrival on the scene.  Just shows what an intellegent man with a solid operating and mechanical background, such as Mr. Scott, can do.

Gordon Hamilton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org 
  To: nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org 
  Sent: Saturday, July 03, 2004 11:02 AM
  Subject: Re: New Member


  Ken:
  My copy of the NTSB report has disappeared also.  As I recall, a section man
  had placed a slow order on the turnout to the middle track at Juniper.  The
  roadmaster then removed the slow order.  The NTSB concluded that the
  switch point gapped.
                                                 Harry Bundy 


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