So, yeah, my Dad was a dispatcher for the railroad. That basically meant it was his job to keep trains from running into each other. (And also to put the engineers’ mail on a little elevated arm so they could grab it without stopping the train as they went past the depot. That made a big impression on me as a kid.)
He had a vacation week–his idea of vacation was “stay at home and read books/watch TV,” and everyone he worked with knew that.
They also knew that he was a serious hobby photographer, having won photography contests for railroad employees.
He has his week off, and the dispatcher filling in for him…lets two locomotives collide at low speed in the rail yard
Dad gets an early morning call from his supervisors asking if he could pretty please–we know you’re on vacation–go to the depot and take preliminary pictures for insurance purposes.
This is one of those pictures
(no real reason for posting this, beyond that I have the photos, and also that Dad was absolutely not responsible for this even though he was one of the normal dispatchers at that depot)
Editing to add: I’m pretty sure there was only property damage–the locomotives were moving slowly enough that the engineers on board, once they realized the other one wasn’t going to stop/be able to stop, either, were able to jump off. It just takes a lot of time to bring even a single, slow-moving locomotive to a full stop.
Was unprepared for “preliminary photos” to be actively flaming twisted metal
