(The following article by Gabrielle Birkner was posted on the Greenwich Time website on December 8.)
NEW CANAAN, Conn. — Railroad tracks made slippery by the weekend snowstorm caused a Metro-North train carrying no passengers to slide off the tracks early yesterday.
No one was injured.
The New Canaan train station was not damaged when the front end of a train car slipped off the tracks at 6:36 a.m., said Officer William Marabella of the New Canaan Police Department.
Dan Brucker, a spokesman for Metro-North Railroad, said, “A train literally slid, like an automobile slides, and bumped — it didn’t smash, it didn’t crash — into the bumper” blocks.
Bumper blocks, made of wood or concrete and often held in place by metal beams, prevent trains from derailing at the end of the track.
New Canaan police arrived at 6:37 a.m. and remained at the site for about three hours while Metro-North investigated.
Metro-North canceled three southbound trains, scheduled to depart New Canaan at 6:30, 7:30 and 8:27 a.m. Trains leaving New Canaan were running by 10 a.m., and the partially derailed train car was back in service by noon, Brucker said.
“This is a very rare occurrence, and it is why we have bumper blocks,” he said.
Karen Campe of New Canaan was on the way to the grocery store about 10 a.m. when she noticed a crane, a police car and Metro-North service vehicles at the train station.
“It looked like the front of the train had gone . . . about six feet beyond the steel beams, which I took to mean the end of the track,” said Campe, whose husband commutes to work on the New Canaan line. “At that point it was clearly something that had already happened, and that they were in the process of fixing.”
The train skidded because of “slip and slide,” a condition caused by ice and snow buildup the tracks, Brucker said. It also is common in autumn, when wet leaves make the rails slick.
It was the only major problem on Metro-North lines as a result of the winter storm that buried the region over the weekend, according to Brucker.
Friday evening’s commute ran smoothly, he said. On Saturday, Metro-North trains ran on a Sunday schedule.
“It was quite reliable, ” he said. “We ran with some 10- or 15-minute delays, which wasn’t bad considering the storm. If there’s any good news, the worst of it occurred during the weekend. We were able to use fewer train cars and it gave us time to get things cleared up.”