(The Virginian-Pilot posted the following article by Gregory Richards on its website on March 21.)
SUFFOLK, Va. — Trains began rumbling through here at 1:20 a.m. Tuesday, less than 24 hours after a coal train derailed near Suffolk Golf Course.
The mishap dumped tons of coal and halted traffic on Norfolk Southern Corp.’s main rail corridor in and out of Hampton Roads.
The Norfolk-based railroad’s locomotives and freight cars were no t expected to start moving again on this stretch of track until 7 a.m. Tuesday. But debris – including crumpled coal cars piled one on top of the other – was moved off the tracks quicker than expected and new rail sections were installed smoothly, said Norfolk Southern spokesman Robin Chapman.
At 2:10 a.m. Monday, a 148-car coal train was passing through at 40 mph when 37 cars left the tracks. There were no injuries at the remote crash site, about a mile off Holland Road. It did, however, knock down power lines, leaving 1,089 Dominion Virginia Power customers in the dark for about an hour and a half.
The derailment’s cause is still being investigated, Chapman said.
Workers scrambled Monday to put the busy double rail line back in service. The coal cars had to be pushed off the track and into an adjacent field, as did roughly 3,400 tons of coal. Much of the coal remained in the cars after the accident but had to be dumped so the gondolas could be moved.
Overnight, crews replaced 858 feet of damaged track with prefabricated sections of rail and ties so trains could pass through, though much slower than before.
Four crawler excavators and two bulldozers busily pushed the coal into a big pile Tuesday so it could be easily loaded into dump trucks and hauled away. To accommodate th e heavy coal trucks, crews beefed up the narrow dirt road leading to the derailment with a thick layer of stones. The truck s were supposed to start removing the coal by this morning, said Jeff Barnes, a Norfolk Southern environmental operations engineer.
Also Tuesday, specialized equipment went over the new track again and again, grading the ballast rock and adjusting the pitch of the track so it properly follows the curve of the rail line.
Soon, the newly installed track, which is bolted together, will be replaced by welded rail, allowing trains to move through faster, Barnes said. Crews also will tear apart the smashed coal cars so they can be sold for scrap.
“When this is done, you won’t even be able to tell we were in here,” Barnes said. “This place will look like a park.”