I don’t get this story at all. Riding in a coal car would be messy as heck. And are you sleeping in it to the point where you don’t notice the darn thing (or others around you) is being unloaded?
FTA:
“Sometime over the weekend the couple were killed when their train stopped at a local Florida power plant. When the railcars arrive, they open from the bottom, releasing their cargo several stories below into a waiting truck.As the AP reports, officials at the plant are not sure if the couple was sitting on top of the coal when another load dropped, or if they were in a railcar that was dropping its payload.”
Most people are utterly ignorant of how modern rail infrastructure works and how automated many areas of the rails are now.
eg, those coal cars: Some unload with rotary dumpers. Those you’d see coming from way back on the train. Others just move slowly along either an elevated section of track or over a pit. An electrical signal tells the coal car “dump here.” A mechanism opens the bottom of the car and 100 tons of coal simply drops out the bottom of the car in a couple seconds. The train progresses slowly onwards...
As to what you hear? A whoosh. That’s about it. If you’re on an elevated track above the coal pile, you probably don’t hear much at all from on top of a loaded car - the bigger noise is down below you. If you were smart, you’d know what is coming because you felt the train slow to a crawl near a power plant. That’d be a really strong clue that things are about to get really interesting - but only if you could put 2+2 together to get something close to 4.
Same deal for grain cars. Simplot has a huge circular chunk of track in Idaho where a grain car comes in, they close the switch and the train unloads in a couple circuits around the circle of track. Switch opens up, train moseys off the circle and the next one pulls in. Not a whole lot of drama, just a whole lot of grain moved from train to feedlot silos...
Dumb people (and that includes a whole lot of people with advanced degrees) oughta stay away from modern machinery. They’ve got no notion what they’re messing with. I believe that this is a contributing reason why manufacturing sectors of the economy cannot find employees. I’ve had operators of large machine shops that service the coal mines of the Powder River Basin here in Wyoming tell me “You can see in the first 10 minutes of the interview that if I hire this guy, he’s going to be a red stain on the shop floor within the first month.” Lots of people simply have no clue, no situational awareness, no appreciation for *what* is dangerous, never mind *how* dangerous. And these guys in management of these shops tell me that the majority of their applicants now fall into this “future red grease slick” category.
I want to know why Willie didn’t save them....