(The following article by Mike Goodwin and Cathy Woodruff was posted on the Albany Times-Union website on October 13.)
AMSTERDAM, N.Y. — A CSX freight train derailed in this city’s downtown Wednesday morning, sending 18 cars off the tracks including one that landed partially in the Mohawk River, authorities said.
The 84-car train mangled east- and westbound tracks when it jumped the rails at 8:20 a.m., sending boxcars slamming into each other and forcing suspension of all freight and passenger rail traffic between Albany and Syracuse. Several of the cars narrowly missed a warehouse owned by Terleckey Brothers, a local trucking and tire firm.
The cars that derailed were from the middle of the train, which originated in Cincinnati, and the two-member crew was unharmed. The train was bound for the Selkirk yard just south of Albany.
A data recorder was retrieved from the train and investigators will use it to try to determine what caused the wreck. “That information will be downloaded very soon,” CSX spokesman Maurice O’Connell said.
He said the engineer would be tested for alcohol and drug consumption as investigators search for a cause of the derailment, which occurred at a switching point on the eastbound tracks in this Montgomery County city.
The cause of the derailment remained under investigation, and CSX officials are expected to probe possible driver error, flaws in the tracks or some other problem.
Ten of the cars that derailed were empty, including the car that landed in the river. That car contained a residue of ignet, a powdery substance O’Connell likened to aluminum. Department of Environmental Conservation officials said there was no risk of contamination from the car that landed in the river.
Other cars contained loads of the nontoxic powder, wood pulp and soy bean oil, officials said.
The derailment was the first in recent memory in Amsterdam. The accident is dwarfed by a derailment that occurred in Fonda in December 1995, when 51 cars were knocked off the rails. One of those had been carrying sodium hydroxide that spilled into nearby farmland and forced the evacuation of homes.
“We were very lucky. This could have been a passenger train,” Battalion Chief Walter Martin of the Amsterdam Fire Department said as he watched CSX cranes pull the mangled cars from the tracks.
Once the cars were pulled from the tracks, O’Connell said CSX would repair the rails and hoped to have service restored by this morning.
Amtrak suspended most upstate service and bused 917 passengers whose trains were stranded on either side of the derailment. The effort was intended to allow the passengers to connect with trains in Syracuse and Rensselaer, said James Turngren, Amtrak’s district superintendent for the Empire Corridor.
The derailment affected some service between Rensselaer and Albany on Wednesday because cars and engines that normally would have made up those trains were trapped on the other side of the state, Turngren explained.
While the railroad was hoping to run most morning trains between Rensselaer and New York City today, some trains would be canceled. Turngren said the railroad was in the process of calling as many customers with reserved seats as possible to update them on schedule changes.
Turngren said Amtrak hopes to resume all regular service by Saturday.
The derailment occurred in an industrialized section of Amsterdam, just east of the Route 30 bridge that connects Amsterdam to Interstate 90.
Steve Terleckey and Mary McDowell were working in the office at Terleckey’s firm when the train derailed. Despite the proximity to the crash, they both said they didn’t realize that the sound they had heard emanated from the derailment. Trains routinely pass unnoticed.
Terleckey said he thought what he had heard was the sound of the train slowing down. “It didn’t sound terribly different,” he said. They resumed work but then someone came in to tell them a train had derailed outside, McDowell said.
“I went out to have a look. What a terrible mess,” she said.