(The following article by Lindsey Stockton was posted on the Eastern Arizona Courier website on December 6.)
PIMA, Ariz. — An Arizona Eastern train derailed about five miles west of Pima en route to Bowie from Globe at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
The train was headed east carrying 700-pound copper anodes when a rail broke beneath the second car behind the locomotive. The anodes were coming from the Phelps Dodge copper mine in Miami and heading to El Paso, Texas, where the company has a refinery.
The cars came off the track farther down on the trail because the vehicle could not immediately stop.
“Once the rail breaks, you can’t just stop the train,” Paul Pusley, roadmaster for Arizona Eastern Railway Company (AERC), said. “Trains go a little way before they can stop because there is a lot of weight pushing on them.”
The rail broke due to the age of the track, something AERC is diligently working to fix, General Manager Forrest Brecht said.
“We are replacing the ties and rails as quickly as we can, both financially and physically,” he said. “We have replaced 30,000 new ties in the last year.”
The company has a certain amount of capital dollars available for projects such as this. AERC analyzed the track and selected the worst spots to repair first. Depending on the amount of money available, repair crews replaced ties in order to make the track safer.
Accidents like this one happen two or three times a year, and the company’s cost of cleaning up and repairing the track is great, Brecht said.
Repair crews were on site Wednesday morning, working until about 7 p.m. that night to fix the track. Crews came back Thursday morning and worked another 12 hours to complete the project.
Trains were put on hold for the two days of repairs because it is the only track that runs from Globe to Bowie. The track reopened at 5 p.m. on Thursday.
The derailment did not affect operations of Phelps Dodge, Kimball Hansen, mining communications manager for Phelps Dodge, said.
The company transports copper via train and truck in case of accidents like this one. No one was injured in the accident.