Hello I work for the railroad and can shed some light. Minor derails happen all the time in yards and Industry tracks. These are low speed derailments where you are lucky to see more than a truck on the ground and very little damage actually occurs. Almost all of them are caused by derails that were forgotten to be removed or crews going part way through an improperly lined switch and reversing. The bar for it counting is if someone is injured or if the total damages exceeds 35k which isn’t hard as they factor everything in including the cost of wages of anyone involved in rerailing it. The metric that’s actually scary is over 500 trespassers are killed by train strike each year in the US.
Hello I work for the railroad and can shed some light. Minor derails happen all the time in yards and Industry tracks. These are low speed derailments where you are lucky to see more than a truck on the ground and very little damage actually occurs. Almost all of them are caused by derails that were forgotten to be removed or crews going part way through an improperly lined switch and reversing. The bar for it counting is if someone is injured or if the total damages exceeds 35k which isn’t hard as they factor everything in including the cost of wages of anyone involved in rerailing it. The metric that’s actually scary is over 500 trespassers are killed by train strike each year in the US.