(The following story by Donna Hilton appeared on the Siftings Herald website on May 25.)
ARKADELPHIA, Ark. — A freight train crashed into the rear of another one Monday afternoon at Gurdon, sending box containers into a ditch and debris flying through the air.
No injuries were reported.
The accident occurred at 2:30 p.m., Mark Davis, a spokesman for Union Pacific, said. A train traveling east from Long Beach, Calif., to Memphis, Tenn., had stopped on the tracks at Gurdon. Another eastbound train, traveling from Dallas to North Little Rock, struck the stopped train, he said.
The impact caused the locomotive of the moving train to go up onto a flatcar at the rear of the other train, knocking containers off into a ditch. The containers were loaded with packages of hair nets, bird feeders and tires, Davis said.
Train traffic continued on the other set of tracks, he said, but some debris from the crash damaged box cars on another train.
The crash also caused minor damage to the tracks in that area, which will be repaired. Workers were to be at the site today to remove the locomotive from the flatcar using a crane, Davis said.
Clark County Sheriff Troy Tucker said the engineer and train personnel needed help exiting the locomotive.
“The entrance and exit is near the front, and it was damaged,” Tucker said. “Due to the damage, they couldn’t get out of the train.”
Gurdon firefighters helped “rescue” the train’s personnel using a ladder, he said.
Jim Burns, director of the Clark County Office of Emergency Management, was on the scene in case the containers were loaded with hazardous materials. “A train accident normally causes some cars to be shaken up. We wanted to make sure there weren’t any hazardous materials on them,” Burns said. “We were fortunate that it wasn’t more serious than it was.”
The topic of conversation at the scene was where the locomotive came to rest, Burns said. “Every railroad man there, some of them with 30 years of experience, said they had never seen anything like that before. It looked like that engine was put on top of the flat car on purpose.”
Investigators from Union Pacific will continue to look into the cause of the accident, Tucker said.
Train officials will check to make sure the signals were working properly and also check the trains’ on-board computers.
“The computers will tell them how fast the trains were going, when they sounded their whistles, lots of things,” Tucker said.
Tucker agreed with Burns regarding the accident. “We were very fortunate,” he said. “There was no haz mat (hazardous materials), no leakage and no one got hurt.”