East Rochester train derailment photos

Last night, soon after the derailment. Several train cars hanging off the Lincoln Road overpass.
















This is the morning after. Crews worked before sun up to remove the wreckage on the overpass.














Shots from by the water tower






















































































Pics from Maple St













































all pics (c) 2006 Joanne Brokaw all rights reserved

East Rochester Train Derailment

I was in the kitchen washing the dishes and David was in the living room watching TV when a CSX freight train derailed, sending several cars off the overpass onto Lincoln Road and the rest of the train over a three block area.

It started like any other train passing. A low rumble, some shaking of the house. You get used to it when you've lived 15 years three blocks from train tracks. But when the shaking got louder and louder, and lasted longer and longer, and when the lights flickered and then went out, we knew something bad had happened.

David saw a flash of light through the front window, which made him think "plane crash." I joked that maybe someone bombed the Ginna Nuclear Plant in the next town and we were seeing the radiation fallout. But it was clear that something was definitely wrong.

We went outside, where neighbors up and down the street were meeting on the sidewalk, not an unusual event. Whenever a transformer blows we often meet to see who has power.

Our neighbor across the street, Doug, was heading out to see what happened. "Sounds like a train crash," he said.

David and I went back in, threw on our winter clothes and headed out, meeting Doug again. He'd come home to get his camera and suggested we do the same. (I had already thought of that.) "The train jumped the tracks," he said. "You're never going to see anything like this again."

Walking down Lincoln we could see emergency vehicles on the scene. And hanging off the Lincoln Street overpass were about 6 train cars. They were piled on top of each other, ripped apart, and hanging from the overpass down onto the street below.

Up above, the train tracks run across the street from houses on Maple Street. Some homeowners literally had trains in their front yard. Power lines were down everywhere.

Turning right, we walked down E. Chestnut near the water tower, where a line of train cars had spilled off the tracks and onto the business parking lots that lined the street.

Turns out that a CSX train with 13 cars had completely derailed. Miraculously, and I mean that in the very literal sense of the word, no one had been hurt.

Lincoln is one of the two road that go under that train tracks in ER. It's a well-traveled road for cars, and a well-walked street for kids and residents who want to go from one side of the town to the other.

Up on Maple, people park their cars right along the tracks, which are just a few dozen feet from the homes.

It was difficult to take pictures last night so I planned to go back this morning to get a shot of the cars hanging off the overpass. But at about 2:30 this morning I heard metal crunching and train cars being screeched; the train derailment company was already on the scene. There was concern that the overpass might be damaged and that the cars hanging off were unsteady, so they wasted no time at all moving the wreckage.

And wreckage it is. I walked down to the site at about 9:30 this morning, and while you can't get near the overpass, if you walk to the water tower you can go right up to the pile of overturned railroad cards, twisted train wheels, and upturned dirt.

By cutting through our old backyard on Chestnut (across Lincoln), you can get right up to the scene on Maple. Several cars were damaged; one completely crushed.

Again, it's a miracle no one was hurt.

Amtrak was already running test trains over the tracks and there was thought the road might be open by this afternoon.

I have some pics I'm going to try and post ...