The loss of diesel fuel from the locomotive has been relatively minor and is now fully contained, without danger to Bull Run, the brook that runs through the ravine.
Amtrak Vermonter service will operate normally in both directions on Friday, Oct. 9, making all scheduled stops between Washington and St. Albans.
A New England Central Railroad (NECR) freight train passed through the area at 7:15 a.m. Thursday morning as recovery workers gathered along Bull Run Road, which parallels the brook, and at least three hefty cranes made their way down into the ravine to grapple with the locomotive.
Don Murphy, vice president of mechanical at Genesee & Wyoming, which owns the NECR and was on the scene to oversee the recovery operation for his company, told VTDigger that “very little” diesel fuel had spilled out in the derailment. “Nothing in the creek, thank God,” he said.
Murphy said Plan A, at this juncture, is to haul the 68-foot locomotive eastward across the brook with the cranes and then pull it up to Bull Run Road, at a point about a quarter-mile from its junction with Route 12A. If that operation overcomes the challenges posed by the steep, densely wooded terrain, the locomotive could be parked along the dirt road until more help arrives in the form of an oversized lowboy trailer currently on its way to Northfield from New Jersey.
The trailer will take the disabled locomotive to location where it will be “rerailed,” or set back on railroad tracks. Murphy said he didn’t know where that might happen, but a bridge clearance would prevent delivery of the 18-foot-high load to the area of the Amtrak Montpelier station, to which all the train’s cars have already been taken via the NECR rails.
If the locomotive cannot be carried out with the cranes, it will be dismantled on site as scrap and taken out bit by bit. “It’ll come out, either way – in pieces or whole,” Murphy said. “Whatever it takes to clean [the area] up and get it back to normal without harm to the environment – that’s how long it’ll be.”
Murphy said as many as 60 workers have been on the job at the site, including personnel from Amtrak’s police department, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), two firms specializing in derailment recovery, and Williston’s Environmental Products and Services, which specializes in emergency spill response.
Affected landowners in the area “have been like saints,” he said, in their willingness to allow heavy equipment to be transported through the wooded area.
Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board meanwhile continue their inquiry into what caused the derailment, which injured seven. The NTSB report will likely take months to finalize, but all information to date has pointed to a rockslide as the cause of the derailment.
Ted Unkles of the Department of Environmental Conservation said about 300 gallons of lubricating oil, antifreeze and other fluids were removed Thursday, but that a final examination of the fuel tank was not yet possible. He said that as much as 900 gallons of diesel fuel may have spilled.
Booms, or oil spill barriers, have been set up in Bull Run to absorb any fuel that escapes into the watercourse. No diesel oil has yet been detected in the booms, according to Unkles.
While the forces of nature, in the form of a rockslide, caused the derailment, Unkles said, nature in the form of a large tree stopped the locomotive as it slid down the embankment, bringing it to a stop before reaching the brook and perhaps preventing a much more troublesome spill directly into the water.
