(The following story by Carol Broeder appeared on the Arizona Range News website on February 11.)
BOWIE, Ariz. — Amazingly no one was injured in a dramatic train derailment, which strewed railroad cars across the desert near Bowie last Tuesday night.
Twenty-two cars derailed on an eastbound, 107-car freight train about a mile east of Bowie, said John Bromley, Union Pacific Railroad’s director of public affairs.
The incident occurred at 11:17 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 3, he said.
Seventeen of the 22 derailed cars were empty, while two held automobiles, two others held scrap paper, and one held drums carrying non-hazardous materials, Bromley said.
Trains were delayed on both sides, and other trains were re-routed through Northern Arizona, he said.
All of Union Pacific’s affected trains carry freight, so no passenger service was disrupted, Bromley said.
The company hoped to re-open the track by 9 p.m., but succeeded in opening it earlier at 5:20 p.m. Wednesday, he said.
Randy Sholl, Union Pacific track maintenance manager in Willcox, said crews from Willcox and Tucson replaced 537 feet of damaged railroad tracks, starting at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday and finished by early evening on Wednesday.
Sholl added that the code line to the train signal system (mounted on telephone-like poles) also needed replacement. It was broken during the derailment and cut in other areas to get track-repair equipment in.
The cause of the derailment is still under investigation as of Tuesday.
Last week’s derailment came less than six months after a derailment in downtown Willcox on July 30, 2003.
An eight-foot angle iron tangled in a train’s wheels and punctured a fuel tank likely caused the incident.
The derailment of a locomotive’s two front wheels and the punctured diesel tank stopped train traffic for about eight and a half hours.
Willcox Fire Department personnel temporarily plugged the leaking tank after about 1,000 gallons of diesel spilled onto the track for at least a mile, Bromley said.
There were no injuries in last summer’s derailment, which “could have killed everybody” near the track, a Union Pacific engineer said.
(Ainslee Wittig and Steve Reno contributed to this article.)