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Thursday, October 30, 1997

UP freight rear-ends trainload of rock

NAVASOTA, Texas (AP) -- Union Pacific detoured trains around a busy corridor while about 100 workers cleaned up a derailment caused Wednesday by a predawn collision that injured one of the engineers.

The railroad expected to have one of the two tracks reopened by nightfall, spokesman Mark Davis said from the scene. About 15 trains use the corridor daily, he said.

Davis said the accident took place about 4:20 a.m. when a southbound freight ran into the rear of a train loaded with rocks. There were no dangerous spills, he said.

The 62-car freight train was headed to Houston from North Platte, Neb., when it rear-ended a train that was stopped to switch out carloads of gravel, Davis said.

"There were 26 rock cars on the main line when they struck it," Davis said.

Both locomotives from the freight ran off the rails, he said. A minor diesel fire was quickly extinguished. One of the rock cars and 10 cars from the freight also jumped the track, Davis said. Of those, five were empty. Others contained tallow, soybean meal, wheat, corn syrup and chlorine gas, he said. None of the cars leaked, the spokesman said.

The engineer of the freight train hurt his hip, but the conductor was unhurt, Davis added.

Railroad investigators were talking with the crew and would download information from the engines' event recorders -- simpler devices than the "black boxes" on airplanes.

"We have no word on the speed of the freight," Davis said. However, the train loaded with rock was standing still.

The derailment blocked all but two of the major roads through Navasota, a community of about 7,000 located 60 miles northwest of Houston.

The collision touched off criticism from Texas Railroad Commission head Carole Keeton Rylander. "Today's collision is the 18th serious Union Pacific accident in Texas since June 22," she said. "Texans are tired of UP saying things are getting better when they're not."

Since it merged with Southern Pacific last year and became the nation's largest railroad, Union Pacific has faced federal probes into safety and service problems.

Three collisions over the summer that killed seven people prompted a federal probe into the railroad's safety measures. It found fatigued train crews and a fear among employees about reporting safety concerns.

Four crewmen were injured Saturday when two Union Pacific trains collided in southwest Houston.

In a separate incident in Overton, Neb., Union Pacific officials said a broken track caused a Tuesday derailment of eight grain cars of a 98-car train loaded in Ashland, Iowa, and headed to the West Coast.

No injuries were reported. But it added to problems caused by a grain car shortage, said Larry Lenning, manager at DeBruce Grain in Lexington. "It's affecting me because I can't get cars in here," Lenning said Wednesday. "This is just going to compound the problem we already have."