Derailed freight closes two key routes
Pointwork ripped up and cement wagon lands in river near Carlisle.
THE derailment of a cement train at Petteril Bridge Junction, south of Carlisle, on the evening of October 19, resulted in two of the loaded wagons falling down an embankment, with one ending up in the River Petteril. There were no injuries to rail staff.
GB Railfreight loco
No. 66739 Bluebell Railway was hauling train 6C00, the 17.15 Clitheroe-Carlisle New Yard when seven wagons derailed. The derailment was ¾mile from Carlisle station at the point where the Settle & Carlisle line joins the Tyne Valley (Newcastle-Carlisle) line, leaving both routes blocked.
Services to and from Newcastle were terminating or starting at Wetheral or Haltwhistle, and those over the S&C at Appleby, with onward bus connections to Carlisle. LNER was due to run scheduled diversions over the Tyne Valley line on October 22, but the engineering work on the East Coast Main Line north of Newcastle was cancelled to allow Network Rail to focus on getting the two lines reopened as soon as possible.
The incident occurred at around 19.55 and has caused substantial damage to the track, pointwork, and lineside equipment as well as dislodging masonry from a bridge over the river. Because of the damage, Network Rail said it would be more like weeks than days before the lines reopened.
With the derailment occurring at night, the site was sealed off until RAIB inspectors arrived the following morning to begin their investigations. Until RAIB released the site, the derailed train could not be moved, and so recovery and repair work could not begin.
RAIB said that initial evidence indicated that the derailment was almost certainly a result of a wheelset with false flanges encountering a set of switches that are part of the junction. False flanges are associated with flat spots on wheels that have stopped rotating while the vehicle is running.
THE 18.1km railway bridge connecting Russia with Crimea was seriously damaged on October 8 following an earlymorning explosion that also destroyed part of the adjacent parallel road bridge.
Following its occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian government built fixed links from the Russian mainland over the Kerch Strait to the peninsula, which is otherwise not connected to Russia. The double-track rail and dual carriageway road bridges, the longest in Europe, cost about $3billion and are known simply as the ‘Crimean Bridge’. The road bridge opened in
May 2018 and the rail bridge in December 2019.
The exact cause of the explosion, which reportedly killed three people, has not been revealed – although the Russian government has blamed Ukrainian forces.
The Ukrainian government welcomed the damage to the bridges, which occurred close to its Crimean side, but did not admit it had caused it.
However, since the invasion of Ukraine in February, the Ukrainian government has made it clear that the bridges – which are being used to supply Russian forces – were in its sights, and that they must be dismantled.
The explosion left sections of the westbound road bridge collapsed into the water below and also triggered fires on a freight train heading from Russia to Crimea. Seven tank wagons caught fire and damaged the rail bridge they were standing on.
Helicopters were used, along with firefighting trains sent from both ends of the bridge to extinguish the fire. Russian officials said rail traffic resumed on October 9, using only one track as the other remained covered in debris.
Rail staff killed at work
In a press conference with Polish national rail company PKP on September 20, the head of Ukrainian Railways (Ukrzaliznytsia, or UZ), Oleksandr Kamyshin, said 244 UZ employees had been killed while at work, with another 425 seriously injured since the war began, and that the UZ system continued to be shelled or attacked daily.
Mr Kamyshin also expressed his thanks to rail operators in Europe for helping to transport millions of women and children refugees in the weeks immediately after the Russian attack began, as well as transporting humanitarian aid into Ukraine and freight, especially grain, out of the country.