Same train goes by over and over
DECATUR — Anyone who happened to travel west on Roller Avenue found themselves stuck at the crossing there for over an hour on June 8 as a northbound Kansas City Southern coal train was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Decatur.
The saga began around 4 p.m. when a whistle was heard near the crossing across from the TNT truck stop. A visitor recounts waiting for the train to appear around the curve just before the Third Street crossing.
“I stopped at the Decatur Depot to watch a train go by when I noticed that the northbound train headed by Union Pacific 7468 rounded the bend and stopped,” the visitor explained. ” After about five minutes, the lead locomotive sounded a short blast on his air horn and began to move.”
Usually, trains running downhill north of Decatur travel around 30 miles an hour, the speed limit in this area. But this train was a little different. Its top speed through the depot area was around five miles an hour, much slower than normal.
Earlier in the day, a large contingent of work vehicles and maintenance personnel was working on the tracks between the Simmons plant and Decatur city limits. Logic dictates that there was trouble on the line, a sun-kink (twisting of the tracks due to extreme heat) what rail management call a “slow order.” Alas, no. It was something else, something more complicated, as the visitor explains.
“It seemed like 20 minutes for that long 130-car train to get through Decatur,” said the visitor.” Then as the last four cars were about to clear the depot, a series of loud bangs were heard up the line and the train came to a halt about 10 cars short of the crossing.”
The bangs the visitor heard were the couplers on the 130-car train running together hard as the train came to a stop.
“It was stopped for about 15 minutes when I noticed some activity around the back of the last car,” the visitor said. “I started back toward the end of the train when a conductor appeared behind the last car. He was setting the siding switch and then radioed the train to begin moving onto the Decatur siding.”
The reason for the trains backing onto the siding was that two of the rear cars had some sort of mechanical malfunction and the conductor had to cut those cars on the Decatur siding to be picked up by the Siloam Springs yard trains for repairs.
As trains make their way to their destination, there are a series of defect detectors spaced 30 or 40 miles apart depending on the railroad’s preferences. The locomotives and cars have a computer plate on the lower sides. These plates read the number of axles, length of the train, number of cars, and defects like hot wheels, brakes, or dragging equipment. As the train passes the detectors, it gives the status of the train.
Should the train have no problems, the detector simply reports “No Defects” and the train continues on. If there is a problem like hot brakes, the detector reports the car number to the train crew, who will stop and inspect the cars. In the case of UP 7468, the detector found two defects that required cutting the cars from the train.
Now here is where this story takes a bizarre twist.
After the last car cleared the siding switch and the conductor reset it for the mainline, the train backed all the way back to just south of TNT to pick up the remainder of the cars and one locomotive it had to uncouple due to the defects. That meant that the train rolled back through Decatur a second time, all 130 cars and five locomotives.
As the lead, now the trailing, locomotive disappeared around the bend, all was peaceful once again. Then the sound of the same train whistle pierced the air 15 minutes later as Union Pacific 7468, now with its full complement of cars and six locomotives (minus the two broken coal cars), moved through Decatur for the third and final time.
It is very rare to see the same freight train pass through Decatur within a two-hour period. For the visitor and those motorists and pedestrians annoyed by the inconvenience caused, this event illustrates that the Union Pacific and Kansas City Southern railroads are committed to safety even if it means a long wait at a crossing.