Expect More Derailments & Serious Train Accidents As Higher Summer Temp Spikes Warp Rails
In a warming world, the U.S. could see its cities inundated with water, its power grids threatened by intense storms, its forests devastated by wildfire and insect infestations, and its coastlines washed away by storm surges.
Climate change also threatens roads, pipelines, power lines and rail lines in ways that may not be quite as in-your-face as the stark images of homes washed away on a hurricane-eroded beach. Bridges and highways can be weakened or destroyed in floods. Power lines can be burned in wildfires and damaged in major storms. Roads and airport runways are vulnerable to extreme heat, which can soften and deteriorate asphalt.
You can add ‘sun kinks,’ or railways that buckle in extreme heat, causing derailments, to the list of things that are already taking a toll on U.S. transportation, a problem that figures to grow significantly as the U.S. warms.
As average U.S. temperatures warm between 3°F and more than 9°F by the end of the century, depending on how greenhouse gas emissions are curtailed or not in the coming years, the waves of extreme heat the country is likely to experience could bend and buckle rails into what experts call "sun kinks." Intense heat expands the metal, curving and misaligning rails that become a danger to the trains gliding over them. Considering the increasing amount of hazardous materials and number of passengers being transported by rail in the U.S., that could have disastrous consequences.
EDIT
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-warp-railroad-tracks-sun-kinks-17470