MARQUETTE, Iowa About 25-hundred gallons of diesel fuel leaked from a train’s tank this morning after it was punctured by a rock.
The Iowa Chicago and Eastern Railroad train hit the rock west of Marquette in northeast Iowa about 6 a.m.
Workers didn’t realize their was a hole in the tank until it was emptied, stopping the train near Guttenberg.
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources says the tank slowly emptied over a 28-mile stretch of track.
Some diesel sheen could be seen at train crossings, and a small amount leaked into Bloody Run Creek, a coldwater trout stream. The D-N-R says the sheen dissipated from the creek by early afternoon.
Fuel spills can be really serious ,and at times very expensive to mitigate, and or remediate. Some years ago, a driver for a company I was working for hit a racoon on SB I-65, 7 mi. north of the [then new] Lebanon Jct. T/S. The racoon severed his fuel crossover line[ equalizer line btwn two tanks] and left a trail of fuel down the asphalt surface ,and into the truck stop, due to a lack of parking spaces, the driver circled the lot until the fuel ran out, with him stopped in the middle of the graveled lot. Remediation of the fuel spill, repair and repaving of the highway, and an asphalt cap on the truck stop lot came in around $100K, plus .
If the railroad crossed any streams that were navigatable or fed into navagitable waterways, it will be very expensive to mitigate and document, not to mention a juristictional circus.
Sam
Must’ve hit leftovers from a rock slide- the ROW west of Marquette up to Postville runs through a narrow valley with steep sides. I’m surprised the crew didn’t notice. That’ll have the tree-huggers up in arms- they fought it tooth-and-nail when US-18 was rerouted down through there and around McGregor.
The tanks are not all that flimsy – on the order of quarter to half inch steel – but on the other hand, they aren’t made for lifting engines, and a sharp rock in the wrong place at the wrong time will go right through that…
Say, I’ve got a great idea, why not fill great big tanks with thousands of gallons of fuel and attach them to the outside of giant locomotives a few inches above the roadbed with no protective shields around them, isn’t that a great idea??? do you think the railways will go for it? ? ?
Is there any type of engine that has a warning system/device to alert the crew that the fuel tank has been ruptured or damaged in any way. I can’t think of any such device. You would think with all the high tech stuff in todays world, somebody would have thought of this already. Then again, how many times do you hear about a ruptured fuel tank other than in the case of an accident.
considering that all the fuel gauges are on the outside the only thing that they could use would be a fuel flow meter on the computer which would show hey we are using more fuel than we should be.
Equipment does exist to detect leaks in fuel (and other) storage tanks. The only way it can work, though, when you think about it, is to measure the amount of fuel in the tank, measure the amount of fuel which was supposed to be taken out (via a fuel flow meter or somesuch) and compare it with what was in the tank a while back. The arithmetic is simple. The implementation is very very difficult indeed, even on stationary underground tanks (which is what it was developed for) where the temperature is reasonably constant and the tank doesn’t move or jiggle around (better not, anyway!). Even on aircraft, where the pilots are rather concerned (or should be) about how much fuel is left, implementation of this sort of thing is rare. On a locomotive? I doubt that the cost would be worth it, even though cleanup of a spill such as this is very expensive.
Yeah…
It’s called your nose…
You can smell the stuff if it leaks in any quantity, even under way the fumes and stench will get in the cab.
Personal experience…hit an refrigerator left on the tracks in a curve…didn’t think we did any damage to the locomotive, (we have hit worse) and we were hauling a long coke train, so we kept right on moving.
Took about a minute or two for the smell to get our attention…stopped and looked, something off the icebox, or something it had managed to jam into had put a small, 1/2’ or less cut in the bottom of the tank…and somewhere in that small gash a pin hole leak, which was a dripping fuel.
The air flow under the tank was whipping it into a mist that was sheeted down the side of the tank and up on the walkway…you could smell the thing from quite a distance.
I have seen locomotives sitting on the tank in a derailment…and seen tanks get hit/sideswiped by other locomotives with no leaks…these things are tough, a lot thicker than you think, and they do have extra material on the bottom of the tank…plus internal structures and baffles to prevent collapse.
The folks that build these things are pretty smart, the put the fuel tank somewhere where, if it does rupture, it leaks down and away from the ignition source and the crew.
And it aint like railroad tracks are sparkling clean anyway…
There really thick, and strong, but then again anything can break…
I’ve even seen one that was patched with Duct tape! Then again it wasnt in service at the time (thank god! LOL)