(The following article by Jeff Horwitz was posted on the San Bernardino County Sun website on April 4.)
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Eleven cars of a westbound BNSF Railway freight train derailed on their way out of the Cajon Pass on Monday morning, spilling corn kernels in 3-foot-tall mounds onto the tracks and tearing up the rail bed.
Shortly after 10 a.m., the rear eleven cars of a 6,289-foot train traveling west from Barstow to Los Angeles hopped the track near Cleghorn Road, turning several train cars on their sides and leaving others tilted at a precarious angle. All of the overturned cars carried corn, but information on the the rest of the train’s cargo was not immediately available.
BNSF investigators assigned to the crash did not have an explanation for what went wrong, said company spokeswoman Lena Kent.
A railroad enthusiast at the scene said he watched the derailment occur.
As the train’s rear engine came around a curve, Stuart Roland said he saw smoke blowing off the wheels of the sixth car from the back of the train. At the time, he said, the train appeared to be going about 25 mph.
“As the train came by me, I noticed that the car was off the track,” Roland said. It began to wobble, he said, and the rest was “physics.”
Shortly after noon, trucks carrying bulldozers and lifting equipment began to arrive to clear the derailed cars.
The derailment is not the first to happen in that stretch of Cajon Pass. It has been just more than 10 years since an Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Co. train, now BNSF Railway, carrying toxic chemicals derailed only a few miles away, killing two crew members and shutting Interstate 15 for more than two days while the wreckage burned.
Although the corn created a mess, the damage caused by Monday’s derailment was relatively minor, said Kent.
Because the railway has a second track running parallel to the one that was damaged, Kent said, BNSF Railway would be able to continue sending cargo through the Pass.
She did not know when the cars would be cleared and the track reopened.
While railroad police and men in orange BNSF Railway jackets paced along the tracks and inspected damage, Roland recounted the moments before the cars hopped the rails.
The Boynton Beach, Fla., resident has been a train enthusiast all his life, he said, and had come to California for a train-watching vacation.
Dressed in a Northwestern Railroad employee jacket and baseball cap, Roland had been filming trains at the site of the accident since 8 a.m. Monday, he said. He had not, however, managed to catch the derailment itself on tape. The rugged pass where the accident occurred, known as Sullivan’s Curve, is famous among train hobbyists, Roland said.
Told of the witness, Kent was not surprised. Despite the hours they log working on the railroad, she said, many of BNSF’s own employees spend days off staking out rail lines.
“It gets into their blood,” she said.
On this trip, Roland has already been to railways in Riverside, Colton, Bakersfield and Daggett before coming out to Sullivan’s Curve, he said. There was nothing he could have done to prevent the derailment, he said, so he figured he might as well enjoy it.
“This is like Las Vegas,” Roland said. “You can’t have any better luck than seeing a trail derailment in front of your own eyes.”
Roland is married and has two children, although neither is interested in trains. His wife used to come along on train safaris, he said, but was unable to keep pace with his accelerating passion for locomotives since he retired last year from what he described as a regrettably non-train-related profession.
“This is my second trip since she said, ‘no more,’ ” he said.