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At least this can't happen on the Orange Line anymore

Forest Hills plunge

Sure, the tracks can kink all they want, but at least riders don't have to worry about plunging to the ground (well, except maybe in that stretch under the Big Dig ramps). This photo, from the BPL's Leslie Jones collection, shows the result of a derailment in 1921. The T took down the elevated in 1987.

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Comments

There were no riders on that train - only workers. That's the back end of the station, and the passengers had already disembarked. The train came out of the back of the station, and reversed to switch on to the inbound line.

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True, but there were vehicles at street level that were endanger of being hit by falling equipment. There's a discussion of this somewhere in the railroad.net archives. Apparently, a BPD sergeant played an heroic role in clearing the area at considerable risk to himself from the possibility of further collapse.

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we are all lucky that the tracks did not kink on the overpass over the Charles into Wellington station or we would have a disaster.

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The orange line goes under the Charles between Community College and North Station and over the Mystic River between Wellington and Sullivan Square. But at any rate, yes, good thing the tracks didn't kink on the bridge.

And just what's the deal? It doesn't seem like we had such extreme temperature changes that would result in kinky tracks (ahem..). Is this a question of maintenance or did we always have tracks pretzeling up every summer but somehow they were inspecting more frequently and fixing them in the night...? I mean we've had some brutal summers and I remember ac's breaking down but not tracks getting all freaky.

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Maybe someone was playing a Kinky Reggae track on the Orange Line.

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Well, it doesn't happen often, but we went from kinda cold to kinda warm, pretty rapidly. There's "play" in the rails where they're bolted together, but sometimes 'excrement occurs'.

The force required to shift the rails, ties AND ballast is enormous.

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That's all.

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