How Do Detour Trains Work?

[High Hood]

Suppose there is a 2 railroad town, and due to a natural disaster, one the railroads gets cut off for several weeks while repairs are made. In order to still serve the customers in town, Railroad A runs detour trains over Railroad B. I’m wondering how would these detour trains would work and how the two roads would handle them?

[Chris333]

I have seen local (to me) detour charts. Usually they try to plan it out ahead of time. But I'd guess a lot of times it just gets written down after it happens for the future.

[learmoia]

Having worked with a bit of this in the past from floods:  (speaking in 21century terms)

If the incident happens in a specific town, Railroad A would embargo the town due to natural disaster, which would block all movement/interchange  for cars to that town until the embargo is lifted.. (nationwide)..

If the disaster happens on a route between town A and Town B, the railroad would re-route traffic around the outage (if possible.).. Or the railroad would work with another road to route traffic from A to B via their lines.

This can happen. A couple of ways: (largely depending on volume and length of the detour.
A's cars on B's trains.
A's trains on B's tracks  with B's crews. Haulage / Detour
A's trains on B's tracks with A's crews. Trackage Rights.

Option 1 and 2 are most common.. Option 3 is a long term agreement.

These 3 arrangements actually take place every day and you may or may not realize it's going on..

An obvious example is BNSF/MRL.

UP has several agreements with BNSF.

CN and BNSF have agreements in Iowa for various commodities.

NS technically operates into Des Moines, IA on paper (BNSF)

~Ian

[Doug G.]

Thanks for the great info, Ian.

Doug

[learmoia]

My initial response was pretty generic to avoid giving out any work related confidential material.  However, thinking back, I think I'm safe discussing some historical info from the 2008 Iowa floods. 

These floods gave me both direct in indirect experience working both operational and paperwork sides of all aspects of 'detours'.

Due to heavy rains combined with northern snow pack melting, we were dealt with record breaking flooding which effected all railroads in eastern Iowa.
The resulting damage yielded some unique operating situations and challenges that lasted YEARS..
We could write a book about it.. but I'll discuss only the detour moves that were involved.

Operationally, we were down for 3-4 days repairing washouts (Entire Railroad Embargoed).

-- Technically our operating 'main line' was cut in 2 places due to bridge washouts.
1: Waterloo, IA Main line bridge (owned by UP) washed out - Took almost 2 years to fix.
2: Cedar Rapids Main line bridge (Owned by CIC) washed out - Took 6 months? (I didn't remember) to fix.
(We'll circle back to this)..

Given the vast amounts of damage, in the immediate aftermath, (for about 2 weeks), Iowa Northern was the only railroad (nation wide) who could get Ethanol (produced west of the Missisippi River) to the east coast.  I believe there were discussions to divert trains via our 'path to Chicago' but other railroads got themselves patched up enough to move trains before that was needed.

Since there was such wide-spread damage, there wasn't much 'detour traffic' to speak of since no one was operational, there was no where to detour traffic to.

So back to the bridges.
The Waterloo Bridge cut the Iowa Northern mainline in half, and Cut off UP at Waterloo from the typical route to the rest of the UP system.
This bridge took almost 2 years to fix... and 2 'Detour' Operations were put into place.
1: UP Traffic from Waterloo:
Iowa Northern would build weekly 'pre-blocked' trains for Proviso (UP Chicago) and IANR would operate these trains to UP interchange at Manly, IA, and UP would run the train from Manly to Proviso.

2: IANR Traffic (North of the bridge) to Cedar Rapids:
Iowa Northern would build unit trains (as needed) to operate as Haulage (Option 2) from the message above) from Manly to Cedar Rapids via UP (UP Power, UP Crews).

--One unique special move was IANR equipment 'trapped' south of the Bridge that needed to get North of the bridge.

To do this, IANR built a 'unit train' (so to speak) with IANR equipment to operate from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo (via CN) using Iowa Northern Locomotives and Crew with a CN "Pilot".


The Cedar Rapids Bridge on CIC cut off IANR and CN from CIC Interchange.
This blocked Iowa Northern Customers (south of the bridge) from accessing Cedar Rapids destinations.
To work around this, IANR would operate trains via UP Tracks in a see-saw move through downtown Cedar Rapids.
Due to the track arrangement this required the following sequence of moves with locomotives on both ends of the train.
Pull into UP Yard.  ----->
Pull train into Down town.  ---->
Shove train through downtown Cedar Rapids to CIC interchange.  <------
Pull train through Interchange Transfer (Switch back) to get from UP Track to CIC Track to interchange yard.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cedar+Rapids,+IA/@41.9565016,-91.6937032,314m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x87e45f7aa02f4251:0x55ee60432ce6ddc0!8m2!3d41.9778795!4d-91.6656232
(If it doesn't take you there.. go to Wilson Ave.)
UP is the leftmost track, CIC is right most, Middle track is the transfer. (We're coming from the North, trying to get South)
(You cross Wilson Ave 3 times with the full train to make the move.)

(And we had to make the same move to get the outbound train out of Cedar Rapids.)

Luckily this happened overnight.

~Ian

[nkalanaga]

In the mid and late 70s we saw a fair number of MILW trains through Pasco, WA.  They could reach the old NP in Ellensburg? Cle Elum? on the west end, but where they rejoined the MILW to the east I have no idea.  There may have been an interchange in Lind, WA, but the lines were quite far apart, vertically, there.  They may have gone all the way to Spokane, where the MILW had a branch. 

These trains were the entire MILW train, with locos, and I assume BN pilots.  The most likely reason was MILW's track, which was so poorly maintained that the trains simply wouldn't stay on it.