LOWER SAUCON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — A National Transportation Safety Board investigator has filled in town officials on additional details of last weekend’s incident collision and derailment involving three Norfolk Southern trains, saying a total of nine railcars derailed in the incident, WFMZ-TV reports.
Ruben Payan, who is leading the NTSB team looking at train operations, signals, and train control, mechanical systems, and human performance, spoke to the township council at a meeting Wednesday night, March 6, about the incident that sent locomotives, diesel fuel, and plastic pellets into the Lehigh River on Saturday [see “Three-train NS accident in Pennsylvania …,” Trains News Wire, March 2, 2024]. The incident happened quickly, he said: an eastbound train stopped at a signal was rear-ended by an intermodal train, derailing three intermodal cars into an adjacent track; less than a minute later, a westbound train hit those cars, sending the locomotives of that train into the river and derailing six cars.
Previous reports had not offered a count on the number of cars involved.
Three of the six derailed cars from the westbound train were empty but contained ethanol and butane residue, he said, but were not breached and did not leak any fluids. Payan said “minimal” diesel fuel entered the river.
Payan, asked about monitoring systems, said the trains were operating with positive train control, but that at a speed under the system threshold, “the system no longer maintains train separations.” Asked about claims on social media that softening of the roadbed from water runoff was a cause of the incident, Payan said track was not a contributing factor.
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