"How is it happening?"

 

“How is it happening?”

By Jim Culp

February 20, 2023

I spent years modeling railroads and trains. I loved the hobby, but it was expensive. Anyway, modeling in any scale, any vehicle/car/tank/truck can teach you a massive amount of information that you may not have learned otherwise. My step-father was a railroad man for 34 years on the Santa Fe Railroad, and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about the job. So when I started modeling trains at age 11, I had a subject matter expert at my disposal. Eventually, Pop got interested in it and we did it together for a few years.

Fast forward Forty-Three years, and here we are at the impending break of war. My daughter and I have been “conspiracy theorists” (peoples name for it, not what we are) for a long time. We love to check things out and see if they make sense, or they look like fraud/lies/crooked government/etc. Last week she asked me about the train crashes. I offered two options that I could easily believe to be the cause.

One: Lack of adherence to preventive maintenance. I can’t say what the railroads’ maintenance schedule is, or how they go about it. What I can say is that it is probably a failure of the truck(s). Other than the couplers and droplines, the trucks are the only thing that constantly move with the rail’s curvature. Look at slide A. There are at least 12 points that even my old eyes see where a failure can take place. I would like these companies (Norfolk Southern and others) to provide service records for at least the last two years. Now look at slide B. This is the anatomy of a Bettendorf truck (used by many railroads operating in the USA). There are many manufacturers to choose from, but Bettendorf trucks are made right here in the USA in Bettendorf, Iowa.

Now I turn to potential cause 2: The CIA (some weeks ago) told the President and his cabinet that they have identified over thirty Russian “sleeper cells” within the continental USA. These are cells of 4-5 people that raise babies to become “sleeper agents.” That term means that the agent (all trained up) can wait up to twenty years before taking on a mission of whatever type. Could this be the cause of these derailment disasters? I think so. It wouldn’t be all that hard for a person to take a minimum of devices and place them here and there. Remember the parts of the truck? It would be nothing to weaken 3-4 of these, and even one bad truck could toss the train, Remember that these tanker cars are carrying 34,500 gallons of fluid…then multiply the number of cars carrying the same, and you get a staggering figure.

That’s my reasoning. Stay tuned for more.

-JimC

 

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