I'd say that there are at least three engineers and a conductor on the market for new underwear. If you have ever been on the rails when a train is bearing down on you, they look MUCH bigger than they do in passing.

It's possible that they screwed up the track occupancy clearance at the RTC level, but my guess is that one of those two ran a stop signal, and based on the fact that they are frantically backing up at the time, I suspect it's the CP freight. That's pretty much an automatic cardinal rules violation; there's a crew who will be looking for new jobs once the dust settles.

It's the attention to minute details that make this one special; e.g, the arm that goes spiraling off at the :18 mark.

The brakes locked the whole length of the train as soon as the air hoses came apart. Still, this would have been a much more interesting derailment if it had involved full loads of potash or something heavier than those little container flats. Even though the containers look intact, I would be willing to bet there is damaged merchandise for a good dozen cars back from the derailment; shippers never strap their stuff in as good as they think they do. BN's going to be dealing with lots of damage reclaims.

On a boring, anecdotal side note, I picked out one of the readable car numbers going by and looked up its movement history. If the guy posted the video within a day or so of the slide then I can confirm that it happened on the BNSF not far from Seattle.

We've done this trick in our back yard in Winnipeg when it gets cold enough to try it.

Since we live in a bungalow, we have to toss the water up into the air rather than pouring it off a balcony, but it makes the same curious hissing sound as you can hear in this video starting at about the 29 second mark.

Is that just the sound that water makes when it crystallises very quickly, or is there some other physics at play?

In reply to this comment by shveddy:
Obviously I'm joking, but brownie points if anyone can tell me which shit scifi novel I read in high school put the idea of internally orbiting black holes destroying the earth in my mind.

I remember that being a plot complication in James Hogan's Thrice Upon A Time.

I thought this looked familiar...

Ugh. I can't link back to the original though because the comment system strips out the link. If you search for "Bowling" it's about 5 pages in under the title "That's the last time she'll be bowling here!"

Thirteen floppy discs to install what a friend of the day assured me "sucks a bit less than Windows 3.1"

He was right; Windows 95 didn't really suck that bad.

This might explain why Vancouver tossed in Auld in as part of the trade for Luongo.

This guy is my new hero.

Clever piece of work, but the lead-in was a bit too long. If you skip to the 40 second mark you are not really missing much.

The power of schadenfreude compells me to upvote.