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Safety Challenges

Safety is not just a slogan for us; it is a yes or no in terms of how we operate. However, one must always make Solomonic decisions as to whether you operate or not, and we are faced with that in many circumstances.

In the Andes there are several names for landslides depending on their size. A small landslide is a derrumbe in Spanish. Pictured is a large landslide or a huayco. A huayco is generally anything that is larger than a house that comes down on the track. These rocks came down on one of our zigzags and this is how we dealt with it.

In Peru we have a full-time dynamite guy on staff during the rainy season since that is when the huaycos occur. After the rocks are dynamited, the bulldozer shoves the rocks away and the railroad is reopened.  Interestingly, operating on a standard gauge in the Andes, even though it is standard gauge, hi-rail vehicles do not work. I was quite surprised to learn that a rubber-tired vehicle has no traction on a 4.2% grade. This is another country where track motorcars are used instead of hi-rail vehicles.

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In Peru we also run the track inspection car right ahead of the train. There is a tradeoff and, yes, it is possible that the train would run over the track motorcar, but that is not as likely as coming around a bend and hitting a huayco. In fact, this is a North American practice – the Western Pacific did it for decades and still does it as part of the Union Pacific, as does the British Colombia Railway.

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This is our main line in Guatemala. The good news is that because we parallel a river, it is not all 3% grade. The bad news is that the river sometimes decides to take our track away; it winds up hanging in the air as pictured and we have to keep moving it back onto the bank.

There are interesting low-technology solutions that I’d never heard of. Bill Duggan, who is formerly Vice President of the Iowa Interstate Railroad, was a Division Engineer on the Illinois Central, which parallels the Mississippi River. He best of all people knows how to “train rivers”, which is Bill’s expression.

Bill is now President of the railroad in Guatemala and his solution for river defenses was to put boxcars in the river and fill them up with rocks during the dry season. When it rains, the riverbank will fill in behind the boxcars. I am here to tell you that it works; we’ve actually moved rivers using scrap boxcars. It is not a conventional solution, but it works and the price is right.

This is our main line in Guatemala City; we basically operate through a garbage dump. It is not ideal and we’ve actually had trains stall with presidential candidates on board when running our steam train. If nothing else, it shows people the conditions under which operate. Again, “this is not Switzerland” but it is where we have chosen to operate.

To the left is pictured cow intestines drying in the sun. One of the things we get to do is make up nicknames for places, therefore, Tripatenango in Spanish means “The Place of the Cow Intestines”. For those of you who are train photographers, please note that I actually got off the train, ran ahead and set up this shot by special arrangement just for this group. And if you charter our steam train in Guatemala you can do this with our steam engine; bring your ladder and video gear.

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Quite frankly this is not the only Third World environment that I’ve done business in. When I was in the operating department at Conrail, this was our line through Brooklyn. And I can assure that even though it is now a short line, this is what it looks like right now. You are where you are and Guatemala is not Switzerland; neither is Brooklyn!

In some countries security is a consideration and you have to deal with it in the appropriate way. In this particular case we were running a train for VIPs so we made sure there was security on the train. I would also point out that we have never had an incident of any kind.

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