How is flooding in Missouri and southern Illinois affecting railroads and Amtrak? According to the news, several rivers have overflown beyond their banks. Today, CNN showed an aerial overview of flooding and the truss bridge that was shown looks like a railroad bridge with tracks clearly visible.
I received a message from a friend in Southern Illinois who said that both locomotives of a Union Pacific coal train derailed because the tracks had been washed out from the flooding, and both crew members were injured; but he didn’t know how seriously.
As is so typical of such incidents, the local news media concentrated on the fact that diesel fuel had spilled instead of reporting on the crewmembers’ injuries.
The bridge shown on CNN is the BNSF bridge over the Meramec River at a point within about a mile of the Mississippi. It’s a solid bridge, but it’s at the point of the highest flooding on the Meramec. That’s the old River Line of the Frisco. The line runs behind my house and there was a normal amount of traffic yesterday, but none today. (Sunday) Possibly it’s because of Easter, but I can’t find out because I no longer know anyone on the BNSF. They run a lot of coal to the Rush Island power plant in Ste. Genevieve County.
Out near the Chrysler plant, BNSF’s line in Valley Park is underwater so I doubt there is any traffic there, This is their main St. Louis-Springfield line.
These rivers go up fast and back down fast so I don’t think there will be a lengthy interruption of service like in 1993. Amtrack runs on the UP line across Missouri which is on high ground so there shouldn’t be any problems with them. In fact UP’s line, when it was MoPac, had some interesting traffic during flooding because they gave trackage rights to all the other railroads which flooded. You could see M-K-T, Rock Island, and Frisco all at the Kirkwood Station.
I’m not going out to scout, because this is the time when the gawkers get in the way of the volunteers and the rescue crews. I wish they would just throw all the gawkers into the water.