(The following article by Greg Clary was posted on the White Plains Journal News website on March 25.)
HAVERSTRAW, N.Y. — Federal rail officials agreed yesterday that last month’s CSX freight train derailment occurred after quick-freezing water settled across the tracks and forced the rails out of alignment.
“It’s an issue that happens from time to time,” Steven Kulm, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration in Washington, said of freezing near a tunnel. “It’s like on a bridge on the highway, where water freezes more quickly. I don’t want to make it seem like the railroad was negligent.”
The FRA’s statement came on the same day that a senior county emergency official accompanied CSX officials on a special track inspection of the West Shore rail line, finding no problems other than a lingering concern over how such future incidents might be handled.
A small CSX freight train derailed Feb. 19 as it ran north through Haverstraw, spilling nearly 200 tons of aluminum silicon pebbles, which weren’t classified as hazardous materials. The accident, north of the Haverstraw Tunnel, caused a partial evacuation of a nearby neighborhood and closed Route 9W and surrounding roads for hours.
Rail company officials conducted yesterday’s inspection and tour to help allay local fears about track conditions. They expect to meet with a large group of county and local officials April 6 to discuss future emergency procedures.
“They’re inspecting the rails, that’s for sure,” said Dan Greeley, the deputy head of Rockland’s Office of Fire and Emergency Services, as he rode in a multimillion- dollar car built to take tiny measurements of everything from the distance between rails to the rail bed’s stability.
“It was an unusual situation,” Greeley said, referring to the quick thaw and freeze that allowed ice to expand the tracks near the Haverstraw Tunnel and the train cars to slip off. “But why did we have so many mishaps in such a short time?”
The February derailment was the third in six years along that stretch of the river line. The largest accident, in 1998, took place before CSX bought the line from Conrail.
Greeley said the lack of good communication between the train crew and incomplete information about what was on the train hampered the emergency effort.
CSX officials acknowledged yesterday that they still don’t know why the train’s crew uncoupled the engine from the hopper cars and drove more than three miles into West Haverstraw until they found a police officer.
The lack of a centralized location to report the incident may also have confused matters, company and county officials said, and that will be taken care of as quickly as possible.
“The remaining issue is the one of communication,” Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef said. “We want to sit down with CSX and first responders from Rockland so that anything involving the railroad, including sitting trains, will be phoned into a central place and then given out to local departments. We don’t want them looking for the number of the Valley Cottage mayor because they’re not going to find one.”
Railroad officials tentatively plan to meet with emergency and other county and local officials on April 6 to review the accident and figure out ways to improve communication and response.
Vanderhoef said he was satisfied the railroad was working to increase safety along its 23 miles of tracks in Rockland.
“They’ve walked the entire line,” Vanderhoef said. “They’ve done this special testing. They’ve offered an awful lot for us to work with, a lot more than Conrail ever did.”
CSX took over the line from Conrail as part of a $5 billion deal. CSX runs about 33 freight trains each day through Rockland County on the West Shore Line.
The company has modified its inspection procedures since the Haverstraw derailment, to ensure that sections with tunnels will be inspected every other day during December, January and February.
Officials said yesterday that the walking inspection showed that only three of the 75,000 railroad ties needed to be replaced and had been. None of those locations, they said, constituted safety concerns because surrounding ties were in good shape.
Yesterday’s inspection was conducted in what railroad officials refer to as a “track geometry car.”
The 80-ton special car is pulled by a locomotive and loaded with lasers, sensors and computers, among other devices designed to measure minute changes along the entire track structure.
“Think of it as as an EKG of the track,” CSX official Ron Bright said, conjuring images of a heart patient with wires attached to his chest. “There’s a lot of data here.”
The car took measurements every 12 inches along the 18-mile ride and recorded them on computer readouts not unlike a doctor’s office printout or a lie detector.
The measurements are to identify areas where rails are no longer spaced correctly or the roundness atop a rail has worn away. The results can require maintenance within 48 hours, slower train speeds or an immediate line shutdown. A variance as small as one-eighth inch can trigger a repair.
Yesterday’s inspection showed no problems, but John Casellini, a CSX regional vice president, said a similar inspection on the day of the accident certainly would have exposed the point at which the train derailed.
The track geometry car rides through Rockland about three times a year, part of 50,000 miles of rail the company inspects.