(The following story by Cosby Woodruff appeared on the Montgomery Advertiser website on October 31.)
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The decision to take a far too-heavy train across a just-repaired bridge was the likely cause of a 2007 train derailment that sent parts of NASA’s space shuttle crashing into a west Alabama creek bed, according to a federal report.
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The May 2, 2007 accident injured six, caused four cars to derail and dropped rocket boosters for a NASA space shuttle into a creek bed.
The Federal Railroad Administration reported that the accident resulted after a severely overloaded train was sent across a bridge that had just had its buckled track repaired.
Meridian & Bigbee, the company operating the train and the railroad involved in the accident, declined to comment on the report, citing pending litigation.
“We are confident the Meridian & Bigbee is a safe railroad,” Railroad president Jerry Gates said.
The report questioned the company’s safety practices in the days and hours before the accident. Still, according to FRA spokesman Warren Flatau, the railroad did not violate any operating regulations by taking an overweight train across the bridge.
But the report said there was no question the bridge was overloaded.
Although the normal weight of a train car is 263,000 pounds, the space shuttle parts were on eight rail cars, with weights ranging from 462,880 pounds to 505,600 pounds, according to the report.
The two locomotives pulling the train, normally the heaviest part of a train, weigh about 400,000 pounds each. The report said the space shuttle cars each had eight axles, double the normal number, to distribute the weight over a greater space. But it said that wasn’t enough to prevent “a severe load condition to the bridge.”
It was enough of an overload to cause the bridge supports to rotate under the train’s weight, dropping several cars carrying space shuttle parts into the creek bed. That collapse pulled the rails away from other supports, which caused the train’s locomotives and a passenger car with five people on board to fall into the creek bed in a secondary collapse, the report said.
The train’s engineer and the five employees of the company that makes the space shuttle parts — ATK Launch Systems — were injured, some of them critically, in the accident.
According to a lawsuit filed in Marengo County, where the accident took place, the six people have filed suit against Meridian & Bigbee and a number of other defendants.
Rex M. Smith, Jeffrey B. Bitner, Brian D. Nelson, Sandra Smith, Gulia Bitner and Debbie Nelson are plaintiffs in a suit against the Meridian & Bigbee Railroad, its parent company Genesee & Wyoming and two other rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Kansas City Southern. Rail contractors Railworks Track Services, Inc., Balfour Beatty Rail, Inc. and Davies Rail and Mechanical Works also are listed as defendants in the suit.
The suit, and any others that might be filed, are likely the only action Meridian & Bigbee will face. The company does not face any enforcement action from the federal government, according to Flatau.
The FRA will take no action, he said, because taking the train across the bridge — even if it was too heavy for the bridge — did not violate any federal regulations.
“We don’t have bridge regulations,” he said.
Recent legislation calls for the FRA to develop rules for bridges, but Flatau said that did not mean a similar accident in the future would lead to enforcement action.
Although overloading the bridge was the major cause of the accident, according to the report, the fact the bridge had just been repaired may have exacerbated the problem.
“The accident was caused by the rotation of several of the timber bents of Bridge 48.8, owing to their initial out-of-plumb condition and the lack of longitudinal bracing under a train that exceeded the nominal capacity of the bridge,” the report said.
On April 29, 2007, three days before the accident, the engineer on a different train noticed buckled track on the bridge near Myrtlewood, and the railroad closed the bridge for repairs, according to the report.
A day later, a railroad track engineer inspected the bridge and began temporary repairs to get the bridge back in service. A bridge contracting company joined the repair effort on April 30, 2007 and worked until May 2 to complete temporary repairs.
At 7 a.m. May 2, an unnamed railroad general manager gave permission for a group of four locomotives, each with six axles, to cross the bridge to test the repairs, according to the report.
Railroad officials, including an unnamed roadmaster, watched the test as the locomotives crossed the bridge at 5 mph and determined the bridge was structurally sound for train service.
The roadmaster relayed his opinion to the general manager, who determined a train numbered S100-29, carrying space shuttle solid rocket boosters and other parts, would be the first train to cross the repaired bridge.
But that train weighed almost twice as much, leading to the derailment.