AVON, Ind. — Two locomotives and six cars of a CSX Transportation train derailed at the railroad’s Avon Yard near Indianapolis on Tuesday, triggering a small fire and spills of lube oil and diesel fuel.
CSX said there were no injuries, and the leaks did not impact any water supplies, the Indianapolis Star reports. The derailment occurred about noon. The cause is under investigation
Drone footage from the Wayne Township Fire Department showed tank cars and loaded container cars among those involved.
I’m not familiar at all with Avon or its operations, but if the two SD-40’s pictured on their side were hump power, pulling a hump drag, which could essentially be an entire 10k-12k ton train with the air bled off (which means there’s no brakes on the cars), and this hump drag collided with another movement, even at 10mph, that tonnage will just keep shoving until it stops, as opposed to how most “trains” with the air buckled between cars will go into, or can be put into emergency, all the brakes on all the cars apply relatively quickly and it really doesn’t roll very far, at 10mph.
Looks to me as though engines or possibly cars on the middle track (beyond top of picture) knocked over the two CSX engines and one car on right, and the overturned tank cars knocked the stack train cars on the left off the track and tore up the middle track.
Wonder if all the used cross ties could have been a factor? They are stacked very high around here.
There is more to this story. When you think of a yard derailment, you think slow speed, a few cars off the rail, nothing too major.
Look at the displacement of the cars. Look at the locomotives on their sides. The drone footage doesn’t provide enough detail. What you can see is there was enough speed and force to jack knife tank cars and spill steel coils.
Something isn’t right in Indiana.
I don’t know about this case, but a lot can go haywire at 10 mph.
“When things go bump in the night”….good to hear there were no injuries.
Fuzzy math on the number of cars that went “on the ground”.