SHARON, Vt. — Work crews using cranes put Amtrak’s Vermonter passenger train back on the rails Thursday and moved the locomotive and five cars back to White River Junction, the Rutland Herald reported. Work continued through the night to repair the track that was damaged when the passenger train derailed in a collision Wednesday.
Truck driver Reginald Rogers, 58, of Bethel was released from the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center after being treated for what turned out to be minor injuries he suffered when his tractor-trailer truck was demolished by the train. The crash occurred at the Sharon Industrial Park grade crossing on the Back River Road just after 7 p.m. Wednesday.
The Amtrak engineer, Jeffrey Neipp of Layden, Mass., was treated at Dartmouth Hitchcock and released. The Vermonter’s other four crew members and its eight passengers at the time were not hurt. Officials said the train carried a particularly light load of passengers because many people chose not to travel on the Sept. 11 anniversary.
Amtrak put buses on the route Thursday and planned to continue moving passengers through Vermont on buses today. Regular train service could resume as early as this evening, with the northbound run, rail officials said.
The train that was derailed was able to make it back to White River Junction under its own power late Thursday afternoon. At first glance, Locomotive 806 looked fine, but a close inspection of its front end showed signs of the sheer force of the collision that had shattered the truck.
The solid steel snowplow on the front of the locomotive was folded over on the top, and fist-sized holes had been punched through the front of the large engine. Dents in the steel were six to eight inches deep in places. A signal light was missing, some reinforced copper electrical cables were cut, and a pane of bullet-proof glass over the main headlights was shattered.
On the left side of the locomotive, where the cab of the truck had been whipped around and slammed into the side of the train, a large vent panel and maintenance hatch had been shoved in. The steel ladder the engineer uses to climb into the huge machine had been ripped loose and twisted. Several curly-cue scrap marks down the side of the train showed where the truck had been dragged nearly 400 feet before the train came to a stop.
Still, the locomotive is operable and may be able to travel back to its repair yard in Philadelphia under its own power, officials said.