Canadians Derailed a Train and Drove It to City Hall for Power After a Ice Storm

After successfully bringing city hall online, officials rolled in a second unit, number 3508, which was reportedly meant to hook up to a local high school serving as a shelter. For reasons lost to time, this didn't work out, though one account implies the school may have been further down the road than city hall, and that 3508 couldn't get past 3502. In any case, power was reportedly restored on Jan. 17, and the locomotives ground back down the road and into the shop for service.

Amid continued rolling blackouts in Texas, propping up power grids with locomotives may sound to many shivering Texans like an increasingly appealing stopgap. Unfortunately, though, the closest thing the U.S. has to a national rail provider like CN is the chronically under-funded Amtrak which, even with locomotives to spare, would struggle to get them to cities in need. Amtrak is chronically delayed by the private railroads whose infrastructure it relies on. Big business, after all, should be expected to put its interests first, no matter the cost to the public, be that a delayed train or weeks-long power outages in the dead of winter.

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