Well, you couldn’t definitely see the flames in the video, and that may have been what made them break.I wonder if there was a malfunction or sabotage. 20 miles is quite a distance, although I’m sure it takes miles to stop a loaded train.
Sorry, you COULD see the flames.
“I wonder if there was a malfunction or sabotage”
It’s a “hotbox”, something as old as railroading. An axle bearing overheats to the point that it creates a fire.
One reason that trains used to have cabooses was to watch for hotboxes. Today railroads use automated defect detectors that are supposed to alert crews to overheating axles.
But there’s a new problem that’s been created by a data driven innovation called Precision Scheduled Railroading. PSR has enabled extremely long trains with smaller crews, which to bean counters is perfect. But it’s also changed the way that trains are assembled, which has created an inherently dangerous situation that leads to derailments.
Before PSR trains could be assembled with heavy cars up front and lighter cars at the end. If you don’t do that you end up with heavy loads behind lighter cars, and when the train applies its brakes heavier cars can shove lighter ones off of the rails. Inertia at work.
But PSR treats cars like they are computer digits, it’s interested in destination and pays little or no attention to weight distribution. Combine that with massively longer and heavier trains and you have created a recipe for disaster. Railroad workers have warned about this but no one pays them any attention. It’s the usual situation of regarding the worker bees as if they are idiots. We can expect more derailment disasters until the problems created by PSR are addressed.