(The following story by Jill Kasparie appeared on the KTVO website on September 14, 2009.)
CHILLICOTHE, Iowa — Sixteen BNSF Railway cars derailed near Chillicothe, Iowa at the beginning of June.
Officials determined that only two of the cars were salvageable, the other 14 were damaged beyond repair.
The train cars sat next to the tracks for more than three months, but now it’s finally clean up time.
Crews are using torches to cut their way through the debris.
The workers are slicing and dicing each car into pieces, which are then loaded up into a truck and sold as scrap metal.
“There’s 11 [cars] that are all steel and there’s three that are partly aluminum and party steel,” said Jerald Acker of Progress Rail.
So why have the mangled train cars been sitting along the road for three months now?
BNSF Spokesman Steve Foresberg says there isn’t usually such a delay.
“It may have just been a case where crews were so busy trying to get track maintenance work done [this summer] that it took them longer than expected to come back to this location and cleanup those cars,” Forsberg said.
Ackler told KTVO that Mother Nature could be to blame for the hold up.
“They had water drainage problems, a lot of rain but they just got everything fixed so the water would drain so we could work on it,” Ackler said.
The crew expects it will take about two weeks to cut all of the cars down to size and haul them off.