CSX freight train bound for Avon slammed into a runaway line of cars from the Avon rail yards early today, sending dozens of cars off the tracks and injuring two rail employees.
Derailed train cars lie sprawled near the CSX tracks on the Westside this morning after a freight train collided with a line of runaway cars from the Avon rail yard. - Matt Kryger / The Star
How a train yard works:
Though not all the accident details were immediately available, reports indicated the runaway cars may have been rolling downhill from the “hump” of the busy Avon Yard.
Avon, according to the city of Indianapolis economic development website, is a “major classification” rail yard that handles 1,400 to 1,800 cars per day.
In many such yards, trains are assembled car by car, by pushing each one to the top of a small rise, or hump, with a yard engine. At the top of the hump they are uncoupled, and then allowed to roll downhill and au
this comes from down sizing and limiting the amount of workers on the railroad i know money is always the issue but there still spending it on the clean up
I Know a man who is a retired con-fail cop now you talk about how bad csx is or other railroads the con-fail was so bad in the 80s that this man was called to every derailment. he would answer his phone where and how many/ meaning were was it and how many on the ground. 3 times a day sonetimes he go from one derailment to the next see him every other day. but we dont remeber them. wasnt that a conrail engineer who pulled in front of the fast moving amtrak and is doing time now??? its amazing its only csx doing wrong
well…i dont know if that was CSX’s yard that the runaway cut came from. i mean if not, then this wasnt CSX’s fault and therefore one really cant say THEY derailed the train
Aside from someone forgetting to set enough hand brakes, how could this happen? 112 cars is a lot to have rolling around uncontrolled. The runaway set was bigger than the train it hit.
I thought yards were set in a bowl. Obviously this one wasnt.
Can you imagine being the yardmaster or the terminal supervisor and having to make the call on this one?
Thankfully no one was injured.
Another board indicated they were running trains up from Avon to the Crawfordsville line then east to the mainline. Google maps only shows a NW quadrant Y to the Crawfordsville line. Is that how they kept things moving…with a reverse move and a pilot on the end?
Ed, a “bowl” shape is the ideal design–by no means is it mandatory, or universal (Proviso is on a steady downgrade out the other end, too).
You may take this as rantings from somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because when it comes to Avon (and CSX, to some extent) I don’t. But I question the fact that a 112-car cut would be rolling out of the hump to begin with. That sounds like a lot of cars to be in a classification track, or even to be put over the hump at once. Were we to have 112 cars for the same destination, the last thing we’d want to do is tie up the hump with it–get it right over to the departure yard when it’s ready to move.
There shouldn’t be any time at all when a cut of cars any fraction of this size, detached from power, wouldn’t have a sufficient number of brakes on it. As BaltACD says, this is a human failure of some sort. So I doubt that the railroad itself is to blame–their training programs, perhaps, or a management team that encouraged shortcuts. But neither of those things, whether or not they’re responsible, will have to take the blame ultimately. It comes down to individual or crew responsibility.
Is the idea that “CSX is more dangerous than other railroads” fact or fiction? I see it mentioned over and over again, but can’t seem to find any hard evidence (not that it is easy to find). However, one piece of evidence that the “anti-CSX” crowd often touts is the recent $350,000 fine levied on CSX by the federal government for safety violations. It is even cited in the Indianapolis Star article covering this accident. But at the bottom of the artice it states this:
In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2006, CSX paid a total of about $1.9 million in safety-related penalties, according to Steve Kulm, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. Figures for 2007 were not available. Kulm said other large railroad companies that paid fines in fiscal 2006 included BNSF Railway, with $1.6 million in penalties; Union Pacific, $2.5 million; and Norfolk Southern, $840,000.
So if the $350,000 fine is supposed to be a big deal, what about the fact that UP paid more in fines in 2005-06 and BNSF just about the same? Oh well, I’m off topic anyway, but this issue always seems to come up.
Pasadena, your raw figures are undoubtedly correct. Now cook them with the relative size of the railroads. I’d say BNSF comes out looking the best, and CSX the worst. Both of the western railroads haul more than double the tonnage of their eastern counterparts, and probably have higher factors of track mileage on which things can go wrong.
With all the spilled diesel fuel you can probably bet there will be a big fine associated with this one, especially if there is a city well anywhere nearby.
It’s downtown Indianapolis itself that sits in a “bowl”. According to a guy I work with who used to work for the railroad here a few years back, a “cut” of cars can actually roll all the way from Avon yards east to downtown Indy. In fact he said this happened once in 1999. No damage was done, but it did happen…
