(The following article by Ron Colquitt was posted on the Mobile Register website on December 1.)
MOBILE, Ala. — Twenty-eight railroad cars loaded with coal derailed about 9 a.m. Sunday alongside U.S. 31 between Atmore and the Canoe community in southwest Escambia County, authorities said.
No one was injured, Escambia County Sheriff Grover Smith said.
“We were lucky with the location,” the sheriff said Sunday evening.
He said the railroad tracks where the crash occurred are lower than the U.S. 31 roadbed adjacent to the tracks and that kept the wreckage enclosed.
Some of the cars slammed into the banks alongside the rails, some crumpled into other coal cars, and some ended up sideways on the tracks, he said.
Smith said the cars that derailed were in the middle of the train.
Jane Covington, CSX Transportation spokeswoman, said Sunday afternoon the train and tracks are owned by CSX, which has its headquarters in Jacksonville, Fla.
The cause of the derailment had not been determined late Sunday, she said.
“Most of the coal cars were crumbled up,” said Max Smith, who came upon the crash about 1 p.m. Sunday while visiting his mother in the Canoe community. “Some of the coal cars went into the banks alongside the tracks.”
He said the derailment occurred in a “wide open” area of the countryside and was not near a crossing.
The wrecked coal cars covered about a 150-yard stretch of train track, said Max Smith, a resident of Hurtsboro, Ala.
Max Smith said some of the coal cars had left the tracks and overturned, some were sideways on the track, others were upright but off the tracks and others crumpled when they rammed into each other.
Some of the coal cars were “piled up and coal was everywhere … and some were like sardine cans the way the were squashed together,” Max Smith said.
Like Sheriff Smith, Mobile Register photographer G.M. Andrews, who went to the site, said the derailment occurred in a low area of the tracks.
“A good many of them (coal cars) were perpendicular to the tracks, crossways on the tracks. Some were badly mangled, and two or three of them were on their sides and others were upright.”
Heavy duty cranes were being brought in to remove the wrecked coal cars, Andrews said.
“Coal covered the tracks in places, and they’ve got bulldozers getting it off the tracks,” Andrews said.
According to Andrews, the crash occurred about four miles east of downtown Atmore.