(The following article by Jim Gransbery was posted on the Billings Gazette website on October 26.)
BILLINGS, Mont. — When a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train derailed while passing through Worden early Saturday, it tore out about a half-mile of track on the mainline. The grain hopper cars managed to stay off Highway 312, which runs parallel to the north.
Twenty-three hours and 45 minutes later, the railroad was open again.
“We have 25 trains a day on that. It needed to be fixed ASAP,” said Gus Melonas, BNSF’s spokesman in Seattle. “It happened about 1 a.m. Saturday, and traffic resumed at 12:45 a.m. Sunday.”
A response team known as a “Cat-Pack” is marshaled as soon as possible and dispatched to the scene of a derailment with the first objective of clearing the roadbed of debris, he said.
The BNSF surfacing crews, formerly known as section gangs, do the track repairs, laying the rails in 39-foot, premade sections. The crews are then followed by on-track equipment that stabilizes it, building up the roadbed under the ties and rails.
Melonas said BNSF has three Cat-Packs around the state – in Whitefish, Billings and Havre. About 90 percent of the work is done by privately hired construction crews. The derailment equipment includes front-end loaders and cranes.
About 50 people are working the cleanup near Worden, Melonas said.
The 109-car unit train was hauling soybeans from Illinois to Washington. Forty-three of the cars left the tracks at 46 mph, he said. The cars were left as crumpled carcasses along the right-of-way with tons of soybeans piled around.
Each hopper car holds 100 tons of grain.
Melonas said 30 percent of the soybeans could be salvaged. The remainder will either be taken by a private contractor who screens the material and sells it mostly for livestock feed, or it will go to a landfill.
Tuesday, the salvageable beans were being vacuumed up and loaded into grain trucks and hauled to a nearby elevator.
The cars, too, will be salvaged or scrapped, he said. “If they are beyond mechanical repair, they will be cut by torch and scrapped.”
The cost of the cleanup is undetermined at this point, Melonas said.
He said the nice weather in the Yellowstone Valley this week was favorable for quick work.