A photo from Franklin County’s government website shows a CSX Railroad train emerging from the historic Cowan Tunnel, the scene of an incident recently when a train’s pusher engine decoupled from the rest of the train with the engine still active, but stalled in the middle of the tunnel.
—Photo provided
Worst-case scenario side-stepped with train stuck in tunnel
Posted on Saturday, July 30, 2016 at 8:42 am
STAFF WRITER
philip j. lorenz III
Cowan, Tennessee
In a lighter, vein, the following scenario might have brought a call for ghostbusters, or their reality-based counterparts.
A rapid response by the Franklin County Sheriff’s department, Cowan firemen and CSX personnel to an incident in the historic Cowan tunnel may have averted a much worse-case scenario recently.
Chuck Stines, with the Franklin County Sheriff’s department and a member of the Cowan Fire Department, said a train going through the tunnel “went into emergency mode and caused the train to come uncoupled and it lost communication with a helper engine located in the middle of the train.”
The engine had about 2,500 gallons of fuel on board.
“The helper engine was located approximately 600 feet inside the tunnel running near the first vent hole,” Stines said. “It was a coal train. We had to do an emergency shut off of the train and ventilate the tunnel of fumes and check air quality so workers could get inside to do repairs.”
CSX officials had contacted the Cowan Fire Department around 10 a.m. and the responders went to the Cowan Tunnel to assess the situation.
Stines, and around nine others, CSX personnel and firemen, wearing protective clothing and oxygen tanks, took monitor readings of the air inside the tunnel near where the engine was located.
“Potentially, (the tunnel) could have been filled with carbon monoxide,” said Stines, who acknowledged that there was also a possible risk of a fire or explosion.
Since the train was still energized when personnel arrived on the scene, Stines and the other first responders “cut off” the power.
“There’s an emergency shut off – we’re training to know what to do,” he said. “We got in there and cut the train off, it stopped the engine from running.”
He said the original vent holes built into the nearly 2,000-foot-long tunnel during its construction around 1850, allowed the fumes to dissipate to a safe level.
The team had calculated the amount of time it would take for carbon monoxide and other gasses to reduce to a level safe for the CSX workers to enter the tunnel, conduct repairs and move the engine down the track where it could be recoupled to the train to resume service.
“We used a gas meter and checked on the parts-per-million and the air quality, once we figured it was safe – when the machine told us it was safe – they were allowed to go in,” he said.
Stines said the CSX workers fixed the engine inside the tunnel and “drove it on out.”
Right before team responded to the call from CSX, Tommy Myers, the Cowan Fire Department’s chief, had notified Kathy Binkley, the director of the Franklin County Emergency Operations Center in Winchester.
Reflecting on the experience, Stines said, “That’s the first time we’ve really dealt with something like that, with a train stuck in the tunnel.”