T7 "jackknifes" at Riverside

I wish I could get a picture of it, but when I arrived at Riverside today at 11:30am, the second car of a deuce, 3696, went "split switch" on the loop where it comes around to the standby area.

The front and rear trucks managed to make it onto the left track, but the center truck ended up on the right (outside) track, giving it a jackknife look. It stayed on the rails though.

There were a lot of inspectors looking at the switch, and a few actually trying to fix the the trolley.

It looks like they lifted the center truck up with a crane and placed metal beams under the wheels, and then used hydraulic rams to slowly push the center truck back onto the correct track.

When I got back a little after two, 3696 was still there but fully on the track. They were bringing around another T7 behind it to link up and probably push it off for further inspection, but they were still being careful with the switch.

Wouldn't it have been easier to just back the trolley up slowly rather than use a crane to fix the problem?

b&m 1566 wrote:Wouldn't it have been easier to just back the trolley up slowly rather than use a crane to fix the problem?

I'm guessing that if you are suspecting a bad switch, you don't want to aggravate the problem and then risk further damage by derailing the train.

Yeah I kinda of agree, why wouldn't you just back that baby up? Seems strange.

Actually, I think the reason has more to do with potential damage to the trolley itself. William Volkmer explained in one of his Boston Trolleys in Color books that when an LRV splits a switch, this is almost guaranteed to cause severe damage to the articulation joint, and in the case of the Boeings, it was often enough to knock a car out of service because of the difficulty involved in getting spare parts and making repairs. Just because the car stayed on the rails doesn't mean it didn't sustain some internal damage.

Also, if the center truck had split the switch, that means it tracked incorrectly against the direction of the points. Backing the trolley would mean bumping over the points incorrectly again, which as Caduceus notes could damage the switch, unless you were somehow clever enough to re-align the switch for the center truck and then again for the front truck while the trolley is still in position above the switch. This could even be physically impossible depending on the circumstances, and I'm sure it's not exactly a recommended procedure.