Photo of the Week: Derailment

If you follow the railroad industry news at all, chances are you heard about a major derailment last weekend, in a place called Plevna, MT.  Last Sunday afternoon, a merchandise train, operating on the Hettinger Subdivision, derailed and caught fire.  The derailment occurred about two miles west of the small (pop. 158) town of Plevna, in eastern Montana.  A total of fifteen cars went on the ground, fourteen of which were carrying denatured alcohol, which is a fuel additive more commonly known as ethanol.  The derailment sparked a fire, fueled by the the leaking alcohol and the dry prairie grass.  Eight of the alcohol cars burned, and five of them exploded.  There were no injuries from the derailment or the fire that followed.  No evacuations were necessary, although the highway, which parallels the tracks, was closed for several hours Sunday afternoon and evening while firefighters and railroad personnel worked to contain the fire.

The night when all of this went down, I was working in the Glendive yard.  It was a pretty slow night, because the roundhouse had no power ready for any trains, and they were really backed up.  The only thing we had to do as a result of the derailment was gather up some cars, loaded with prefabricated track panels, and assemble them into a train.  Despite being backed up and busy, the roundhouse did manage to find a couple of SD40-2's for the panel train, so it could be sent down to the derailment site as soon as a crew was rested.  They estimated that 1,100 feet of track had to be replaced.  On Monday afternoon, after I was off work and caught up on sleep, I decided to head down to the derailment site with my sister, who was in town visiting, to see the aftermath.  It was only an hour from Glendive anyway.

When we got to Plevna, we found that the prairie was burned as far as you could see, starting right at the west end of town.  As we continued west, we came over a hill, and all of a sudden, it looked like a war zone.  There were railroad cars and parts of railroad cars scattered all over the hills, and everything, including the cars was black and charred.  One of the cars were still burning, and there were people everywhere trying to get things cleaned up and under control.  The rest of the train had been moved, and was no longer in the area, so all that was there was railroad vehicles, emergency crews, and the remains of smashed and burned railroad cars.  Of course, the black backdrop of the burned prairie made the whole scene look even more dramatic.

I had forgotten my camera in Forsyth, so I snapped a couple of pictures with my phone instead.  The one below shows most of the scene that we saw from the nearby highway.

The rest of the pictures can be found on our Facebook page, and are accessible to people without a Facebook account, by clicking here.  Additionally, someone did manage to be in the area when the whole incident occurred, and took a video of the fourth car exploding, which is on YouTube and can be viewed here.