(The Press-Enterprise posted the following article by David Danelski and Duane W. Gang on its website on August 29. Tim Smith is the BLET’s California State Legislative Board Chairman.)
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A runaway string of locomotives was traveling about 80 mph when seven of the nine engines flew off the tracks Saturday night in San Timoteo Canyon, a union official said Monday.
While the Union Pacific train was still gathering speed, the two crew members climbed back among the locomotives in an attempt to stop it with handbrakes, said Tim Smith, state chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
The crew members were in the lead locomotive, according to a Union Pacific spokesman, when the trailing seven derailed. The first two locomotives stayed on the track.
Neither crew member was seriously hurt.
Union Pacific did not confirm Smith’s account of the derailment or release any information Monday about how the accident happened.
Smith said his account is based on conversations with a union official who had investigated the accident in person. That official, Larry Law, declined to be interviewed Monday.
Company spokesman Mark Davis said he hadn’t heard the information in Smith’s account.
“I haven’t heard any of that detail,” Davis said. “And any details of the actual occurrence is still under investigation and I can’t release it.”
The engines derailed on a curve at the lower end of a nine-mile, mostly gradual downhill stretch of track, near Live Oak Canyon and San Timoteo Canyon roads, where the train speed limit is 40 mph.
San Timoteo Canyon Road is expected to remain closed from Alessandro Road east to Redlands Boulevard until Thursday night as the wreckage cleanup continues, California Highway Patrol officials said Monday. More than 6,000 vehicles use the road daily.
The train was traveling from Tucson, Ariz., to the Colton yard. The first two locomotives were pulling the other seven, Smith said.
At some point, the crew lost braking capability, he said.
“They realized they had to stop the train with hand brakes,” Smith said. “It didn’t work.”
Smith’s account is consistent with an initial report Union Pacific provided to state emergency officials. The report by the company’s railroad police to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said the train “somehow broke loose” and “free rolled” before it crashed.
Davis acknowledged in a telephone interview that the term “free rolled” means that no brakes were being applied to wheels of the train.
Smith, the union official, said the report is clear.
“It means they were rolling without friction,” Smith said. “They didn’t have brakes.”
Davis, however, cautioned that the report to the state was preliminary and has since been found to contain inaccuracies. The railroad company is not expected to have a conclusive answer about the cause for up to two months, Davis said.
Davis said three of the locomotives were destroyed. During the cleanup, expected to continue into the middle of this week, heavy equipment will lift the wreckage onto flatbed trucks to be hauled to the Colton rail yard, he said.
Tracks running east and west through the canyon were open to train traffic on Monday.
Two trains with at least 100 cars crawled through the site Monday afternoon as Union Pacific workers prepared to remove two locomotives that had careened down an embankment and into the San Timoteo Creek channel.
Excavators and bulldozers cleared a road north of the tracks and east of Live Oak Canyon Road to help crews reach the locomotives, including one that caught fire after the derailment and was still smoldering the next day.
Crews removed trees and other vegetation surrounding the two locomotives.
A Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board official began trying to determine the extent of environmental damage to the creek, where diesel fuel spilled.
Carl Bernhardt, an engineering geologist with the water board, said the agency will work with Union Pacific and the private contractor the railroad hired to clean up contaminated soil.
Removing the wrecked locomotives, though, continues to be the top priority, Bernhardt said. Once they are gone, officials can better assess the environmental damage, he said.
Union Pacific clean-up crews told officials at the scene that they would scoop out and remove any contaminated soil.
Only a narrow stream is flowing down the creek bed, but workers still placed booms across the water near Live Oak Canyon Road to catch any diesel fuel.
Bernhardt said no contaminants have been detected floating in the creek. The spill could have been worse if the creek carried more water, he said.
“It gives us a little bit more time” to finish the clean-up, Bernhardt said.