Wheel bearing faulted in train wreck

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A failed wheel bearing on a train car caused a derailment that sparked a chemical fire and forced residents of a small town in Kentucky out of their homes for just over a day, including most of Thanksgiving, according to CSX railroad.

The accident happened Wednesday afternoon north of Livingston. A spokesman for the railroad said Monday crews were able to restore the tracks over the weekend and trains resumed running through the area before midday Sunday. All 16 rail cars involved in the derailment have been removed from the site, and crews removed the spilled molten sulfur and 2,500 tons of impacted soil and replaced it with clean material, CSX said.

A spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration said the investigation is ongoing and the agency doesn’t typically release any preliminary findings.

Bryan Tucker of CSX said the bearing that failed didn’t get hot enough to trigger an alarm from the last one of the railroad’s trackside detectors that the train passed, so the crew didn’t get any warning before the derailment. A wheel bearing has to be at least 170 degrees hotter than the ambient temperature to trigger an alarm.

The train traveled about 21 miles after the last detector and was two miles away from the next one along the tracks. Across all of CSX’s networks in the eastern United States, those detectors are an average of 14.9 miles apart, but on less-traveled tracks that don’t include passenger traffic the detectors can be farther apart. Tucker said that was the case here.