(The Associated Press circulated the following article on October 17.)
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — A weekend fire destroyed a wooden bridge along the Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern railroad’s main line near Midland in western South Dakota and 11 cars went off the track, Kevin Schieffer, DM&E president, said Monday.
Train service has been suspended for the next few days, he said.
A section of track was damaged but the sequence of events leading to the accident is not yet known, Schieffer said. A full investigation will take some time, he said.
About 50 spans of the wooden trestle bridge over the Bad River burned in the Saturday fire. Schieffer estimated the length of the burned-out section to be less than a mile.
Several options for a fix are possible, but the entire bridge and its approaches will need to be rebuilt, he said.
“There are a lot of decisions that need to be made in the next 24 hours,” said Schieffer.
The accident shows the need for the DM&E’s plan to extend its line to Powder River Basin coal fields in Wyoming, said Schieffer. That project also involves upgrading the existing line in South Dakota and Minnesota so the DM&E can haul coal to power plants in the Midwest and Northeast.
DM&E wants to build about 280 miles of new track and upgrade 600 miles of existing track. The project will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
While the line east of Pierre is in fairly good shape, that’s not the case in western South Dakota, where the track is old and needs significant work, said Schieffer.
“What needs to happen is that whole railroad out there needs to be fundamentally rebuilt as a brand new railroad,” he said. But there isn’t enough traffic on the line to support that kind of investment, said Schieffer.
“That’s one of the reasons we’ve pushed so hard on our Powder River Basin project,” he said. “That gives us that sort of revenue base.”