Your greatest MRR disaster

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cncproadwarrior

cncproadwarrior

North of the 49th
I was laying some ballast yesterday and I was inadvertently leaning an elbow on one of my scratch built truss bridges when I heard a gut wrenching "CRACK!". I froze like a deer caught in a headlight.:eek:

I checked the bridge and it turned out to be minor damage that I easily repaired.:rolleyes:

That made me curious to hear about disasters or near disasters that members here may have experienced.
 
My biggest disaster occurred after a bigger disaster, when on Jan 1, 1980, the LHS in Mobile burned. The owner had lost his insurance after Hurricane Frederic blew thru in Sept. He was going to sign new insurance papers on Jan 2. The fire had started in the furniture store that shared the building. :mad::mad: Overall Roy (the owner) had lost over $500,000 in model rr stock that couldn't be salvaged and sold in a fire sale. His total loss in stock was over $1,500,000. This was a real hobby shop that catered to model railroaders, plastic modelers, RC, control line airplanes, arts and crafts as well as the first micro computers, Commodore Pets, Commodore 64, North Star Computers etc...

During the fire sale, I had bought a PFM Russian Decapod 2-10-0. While its box had suffered some smoke damage, the loco itself had no visible damage sitting in the display case.:)

I took it home, and took it apart for stripping and painting. A few small parts came off as I took it apart and didn't think much about it. While soaking in lacquer thinner to remove the shield coat from the loco, the loco "dissolved" into several hundred parts. It turned out that the only thing holding the loco together after the heat of the fire WAS the shield coat!:eek:

Overall it took me almost 18mths to get the loco back soldered together and back to running as a PFM model should.There was only one small part I couldn't locate where it went on the model after I was finished. I eventually sold the loco for 4 times what I paid for it, damaged box and all.;):)
 
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Although it's more of a humiliation than a disaster, I had my first official operating session last Thursday night. (yippee!!)
I cleaned the track and the wheels, test ran the trains, and overall straightened up the train room, fairly standard stuff.
When the guys showed up we went thru a brief orientation session followed by a tour to get to know the layout.
Allright then, time for the first train!
Burlington Northern train WLZ 7914 East lead by a Broadway Limited SD40-2 spewing forth all the right sounds right on cue lashed up with an Atlas C30-7 pulling some two dozen conatiner cars in tow drifted out of the yard lead and around the curve to Black Bear Lake.
A thing of beauty it was!
Lumbering past the Fuerst Matthes paper mill in Huard, it crossed over the Grand Coulee Trestle as the guest hogger notched up on the trhottle and got ready to tackle the 2.5% grade up to Mallery in the hidden staging.
That's right about when we heard the big thunk followed by the unmistakable sound of wheels trailing over the ties and along the ballast.
Emergency stop!
A closer inspection revealed the first high stack container had wedged itself into the roadbed above it in the helix! Somehow while cleaning and tweeking the layout I managed to compress, or lift one layer of the helix into the other.
Gremlins I muttered.
After clearing the adjacent tracks and removing the derailed cars we inserted vertical shims between the tight spaces and carried on for what beacme a great night of operarting.
Can't wait until next month!
 
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I had an Atlas Santa Fe Alco S-2 that was involved in a really bad collision with the ground.... But it survived with only a paint scrape.
 
Truly brilliant. yep

The idea was to speed up the process of ballasting track. I mixed up a slurry of ballast and powdered casein glue (I had a large, old can of the stuff on hand). Next I poured it out on the lines drawn on the benchwork and laid the pre-formed flextrack in the gelatinous goo. The following morning the track was very firmly set; in fact most of the ties had sunk below the level of the now-solid porridge that was supposed to be my ballast. Adding insult to injury, the glue gave off an offensive odor for a long time. I had to make this area of track to look like an overgrown section by painting over the oatmeally mess and dropping ground foam (grass) to cover my disaster.

When I finally went to re-do that area, there was no soaking the track and recycling it. :o
 
turned up to exibit at scaleforum, the annual exhibition of of the scalefour society (P4 gauge) proberbly the UKs best fine scale exhibition.

set up on friday runs ok but some damage from the journey

saturday turn up and none of the joints line up, derailments every where.
sunday a compleately different set of problems.

the cause was a combination of my rather rubish base board construction
and the temperature in the hall varying as much as 20 degrees C
it worked fine for 00 (our version of H0) but for P4 where the flanges on the wheels are exactly to scale it resulted in an epic fail.


In my defense it was my first finescale layout and my first portable layout, plus built over a fixed period for a challenge over the time of my final year school exams. Far too steep a learning curve
 
I introduced a gift locomotive, an IHC steamer, to my concrete floor. It could have been worse. It could have been one of my BLI engines. :(

-Crandell
 
Last month--a discovery after two ATLAS RS2's collided with a single Bachmann H16-44 paralleling the consist on the 2nd lead causing one RS2 to fall to the floor.

I needed to get the 2nd lead away from the other spur was one discovery as well as do not leave the 2nd train too close to the point:rolleyes::o----the second---the ATLAS's were built like tanks--one fell to floor--and only lost a plow at the front---:eek::D:D
 
Found a bachmann 2-8-0 steamer while helping some friends clear out for a garage sale, and I wound up with it. Too bad I dropped it and broke the axles, it never ran again, and I hadnt even really had a chance to run it.
 


One of my dash 9 falled on the ground, it derailled from an half trown switch,after inspection it only had a small scratch and the plow was ripped of. So I started to breathe again
 
I lost a four unit set of diesels (3 tunnel motors and a custom painted MoPac U30C) and 10-15 coal hoppers at our club when one of the other members ran a red signal and plowed his train head on into mine at the highest point on the club's layout--over the concrete floor. There were bits and pieces of my trains all over the floor. Financially, the other club member fared worse. His train consisted of a brass Niagra (or Mohawk, I can't remember which) and 10 brass passenger cars, all pretty much destroyed.
 
I haven't [yet:eek:] had any sudden, split-second type disasters since returning to the hobby 20 years ago. However, I did make a poorly-informed decision that had a highly negative impact on my would-be layout plans. When my wife and I were looking at what is now our current house, I figured I could erect a pretty decent-sized layout in the two-car garage. I'd simply run some duct work from the existing heating/AC system into the garage for climate control.

4 months after moving in and learning how miserably cold an unheated garage can get during wintertime, a HVAC expert pointed out that the existing system was exactly the right size for heating only the main house - nothing more! I would have to invest a few thousand $$$ into a separate climate control system for the garage, plus insulate the attic. Since my wife had recently lost her job, there was no extra money available whatsoever for me to spend on that upgrade. So as a result, 4 years passed before I was able to find the money to pay for necessary improvements and resume building my dream layout.
 
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Gee whiz, where do I begin....
Once an Athearn F7 went a little too fast and jumped off a switch. Off a bridge. Into a deep ravine. Then rolled off to the floor. Five seconds later it was back on the track, only going a bit slower.
Another one involved a Christmas tree loop. An ancient Model Power F unit hit a curve so fast it kept going in a straight line... into a wall.

But that's nothing compared to the utter disgrace that happened to my Spectrum 2-8-0 several years ago... In a bout of what can be best described as eager young stupidity, I quickly hooked up a power pack to take her round the line. The headlight went on, but the engine stood still while humming. I pushed it, but it didn't move a bit, until everything just died. No light, no humming. I checked the wires, and that's when I thought I'd give myself a good old kick in the pants- I inadvertently hooked the tracks to the AC. Now that engine is as good as a photo prop...
(Any suggestions for a replacement motor?)
 
nothing more than a derailment and a engine on its side with a few cars. however I have seen a few bad ones at a clubs lately. Saw a stoped passenger train get rear ended after someone left the switch open on the main and a 5 engine freight came thru and entered the siding. knocked 5 cars over and pushed the passenger loco onto the station platform.
 
Not my story but my dad's.

Back in the 80's my dad was doing some remodel siding work on a house in the Cleveland, Ohio area. He was pulling the siding off of the house by the hose bib. He had to pull on the hose bib a little to get the siding out from behind the collar of the hose bib.

Well apparently he pulled too hard.

He hears the sound of water splashing coming from the inside of the wall. He immediately realizes what had happened and he ran into the house and down into the basement to find the shut off valve. As he gets into the basement he is horrified by the sight of what he sees.

The water pipe was mounted between the floor joists of the first floor and had come apart. A steady stream of water, at full pressure, was spraying on an HO layout that was completely modeled and covered the entire basement.

It was a complete loss. He still has a hard time telling that story... makes him cringe everytime.
 
walking out of a train show with my recently completed module and a gust of wind makes it a 20 lb. kite all the less a total loss its still in the garage without anything but roadbed but a new corner took first priority over healing the straight
 
Wow, some great (?) stories here! I have one more...
It happened years back when I was working on my greatest N scale layout.
I had just finished plastering a hillside that the track looped around on one end of the layout, a folded dogbone kind of thing.
Well I couldn't wait to watch a train run around it so I fired up my two atlas GP40's with twenty four ore cars in tow.
Around they went as gracefuly as can be, all was right with the world!
On the second go 'round I noticed a cat hair lodged on the roofwalk of the caboose. Without thought or hesitaion I wet a finger and pressed down on it, just enough to have the cars tumble one by one in rapid succession into the still wet plaster.
I sold the cars just two years ago at a train sale, they still had a little white residue on them!
 


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