SINCLAIR, Wyo. — At least 15 cars derailed in an incident Monday (June 9) involving two Union Pacific trains, Cowboy State Daily reports.
The incident was reported about 9:30 a.m. A Union Pacific representative told the news site in an email that cars on two trains had derailed near Sinclair, and that there were no injuries.
Carbon County Fire Chief John Rutherford told a Cowboy State Daily correspondent that the derailment stemmed from the “catastrophic failure” of a wheel bearing on a tank car. Most of the tank cars carried a fuel additive not listed as hazardous, Rutherford said, that had already started to evaporate. Sinclair, about 7 miles east of Rawlins, Wyo., on UP’s Laramie Subdivision, is the home of a major oil refinery for the company of the same name.
Big ten last month Sinclair refinery this month. This is the second time in 2 months that an AAR 111 went off the rails. The cause of both of these accidents is bearings seizing up on these cars and then the axle breaking from the journal box and the wheel dragging on the ground damaging the track and also the ballast around it. Now the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains service unit have three bad order tank cars and Hyster had to go out there to put them back on the rails. Congress needs to talk to the Transportation Department and they need to adapt standards so that we can phase out the 111 and replace these cars with the newer AAR 117s if this is not fixed soon we are going to have more derailments with these cars and more broken journal boxes and axles as these cars go through their maintenance facilities.
ThaT phase out was already mandated after the East Palestine incident. Not only for Class 111 tank cars but for certain classes of wheel sets as found on tanks and enclosed hopper cars. The exact same failure happened near Houston on a covered hopper car last week. You can see as it happened on Trains Live.com