Posted on 05/25/2013 3:14:26 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
The National Transportation Safety Board said it had dispatched a team to investigate the train crash.
Two freight trains collided at a rail intersection in rural southeastern Missouri on Saturday, triggering the collapse of a highway overpass when at least a dozen rail cars derailed and struck a support pillar, authorities said.
None of the seven people hurt in the fiery crash two train workers and five people who had been in the two cars on the overpass suffered life-threatening injuries, Scott County sheriff Rick Walter said in a statement.
"One train T-boned the other one and caused it to derail, and the derailed train hit a pillar which caused the overpass to collapse," Sheriff's dispatcher Clay Slipis said of the pre-dawn crash near Chaffee, about 15 miles southwest of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
The collision of the BNSF Railway Co and Union Pacific trains also sparked a fire when diesel fuel leaked from one of the train engines, Slipis said.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it had dispatched a team to investigate the train crash.
Union Pacific said its train had been primarily carrying auto parts from Illinois to Texas when it struck the side of another train, and that a Union Pacific engineer and conductor were lightly injured, according to spokeswoman Calli Hite.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Republican budget cuts did this, too - I’m sure of it. /s
Bush’s fault.
It’s Sequester’s fault!
Not only that but why do I get better reporting on what is happening here from foreign news than from US news?
Never mind/s
That'll be very helpful, I'm sure.
Probably Obama can use this to delay rebuilding the bridge for years and years, using the best green technology and rewarding one of his donors with the contract.
..and raise cash to implement Obamabcare
Good grief!!!;
The Muslims don’t even have to blow our infrastructure up in order to shut down our civilization;
It’s disintegrating all on it’s own - with a little help from corrupt politicians and inept Americans!
How do you T-bone a train???
I can see one not cleared the switch...
Alkaid
We can no longer rely on concrete columns to support any type of roadway. It’s just too reminiscent of plantation house porticos.
Instead we’ll use sky hooks attached to clouds with Dem pixie dust.
There's a diamond (tracks crossing and not merging)there. The diamond is directly under the highway overpass. Apparently the BNSF train was crossing the diamond and the locomotives and most of the cars had crossed. This should have put a restricted signal on the UP track for the west bound UP train that should not have cleared up until the BNSF train was clear of the diamond interlocking.
Here's the spot (assuming it loads). UP is the E-W track and BNSF is the N-S track. You can see the signal towers if you zoom in, and the report at another source said the BNSF train was hit about 8 cars behind the locomotives meaning it had already entered the interlocking and that should have tossed a 'red' on the UP signals. What really happened is not known at this time, but either there was a signal failure or the UP train blew through a red light...
First the bridge collapse in Burlington, WA by the over-sized tractor trailer. Now we have a second with a couple of trains taking out the bridge.
Trouble runs in threes so I am waiting for the third!
It’s called a diamond interlocking. Two railroads cross each other at right angles. They’re not common in the part of the country where I live, but I’ve seen them out in the Midwest.
Oops — you beat me to it, NoCmpromiz!
Did they miss the ‘Caution: Beware of road hazards’ warning sign?
Thanks, never saw that before.
Hey, wait a minute! Wasn’t Obama’s Stimulus supposed to fix aging roads and bridges? What happened to “shovel-ready” jobs? Eh? Oh yeah, it all went to the public employee unions...
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