(The following story by Eileen Kelley appeared on the Cincinnati Enquirer website on January 8.)
QUEENSGATE, Ohio — Everything ended safely after two tanker cars carrying 263,000 pounds of liquefied propane derailed and toppled over Wednesday morning, forcing road closings and evacuations.
Gest Street and the Eighth Street viaduct were closed most of the day, along with a handful of businesses within a half mile of the derailment in the Queensgate rail yards near Gest Street.
Six rail cars came off the CSX track about 9:30 a.m. and four of them toppled over.
By 4:30 p.m., both of the cars carrying the liquefied propane had been righted, Gest and the viaduct reopened and workers returned to businesses.
The cars did not leak.
Firefighters remained cautious throughout the day. The gas, which is similar to butane, is heavier than air and therefore sinks to the ground, but it can travel and find an ignition source, said Capt. Michael Washington, a spokesman for the Cincinnati Fire Department.
Three boxcars in the train derailed. Two carried paper; the other was empty.
The 125-car train had just pulled out of the Cincinnati station and was on its way to Tennessee when the cars derailed, said Garrick Francis, a spokesman for CSX out of Jacksonville, Fla.
Francis said investigators had no immediate idea about what caused the cars to come off the track.
He said the manner in which the train was being driven, the tracks and the cars themselves will all be thoroughly reviewed.
Because of the derailment, Hamilton County did not test its emergency sirens at noon as it does the first Wednesday every month for fear that it would cause panic as news of the train derailment spread.