Mayfield Community Still Cautious About Freight Derailments
By Hank Silverberg
CORRESPONDENT
Nine months after five cars of a freight train derailed and overturned near the Cobblestone community in Fredericksburg, residents are still expressing concerns about a potential accident involving hazardous materials.
It was a quiet Saturday night last July when the derailed cars struck a sound wall, collapsing four garage buildings.
No one was injured.
An investigation determined that human error left the train unsecured on a side track. That allowed the parked train to roll down a small slope and derail when it hit a split-point-derail device.
That device worked properly, taking the cars off the track before it merged with the main line, but the accident’s location so close to a sound wall produced over $105,000 in damage.
Now, Randy Marcus, the Director of CSX’s State Relations, tells members of the Mayfield Civic Association that such an incident cannot happen that way again.
At a meeting on Thursday night in the Mayfield neighborhood, Marcus said the split-point-rail device has been moved a half-mile south of its previous location, to the other side of the Blue and Gray Parkway, where the track grade is more level and where any future derailment initiated by rogue rail cars would not be close enough to any buildings to do any damage.
The railyard has about two miles of track.
Marcus called the accident on July 20 a “1-in-100,000” event, and he said rail cars with hazardous material will never be stored on the rail yard track for long periods of time.
The train in July had been stopped there because of a maintenance problem.
Four City Council members and about 50 residents were at the meeting. Several members of the public expressed concern that there was no overall safety plan put in place for the community in case of a hazardous spill.
Council member Chuck Frye said that is something that needs to be looked at, and he was glad the meeting produced an “open dialogue” on the issue, which he says does not happen when the City Council discusses such events.
Marcus promised to keep the community up to date on changes to the railyard track. But when asked, he did not know if the new split-point-derail device was equipped with an electronic signal or alarm that would go off in the event of a derailment.
In July, the first reports of the derailment came from a citizen’s 911 call. Fire Chief Mike Jones said his firefighters were there in just two minutes because of the accident’s proximity to the firehouse.
He said the department gets a call at 7 a.m. on any morning when freight cars might be stopped at the rail yard, but he did not know if that was the case on that July 20.
Chief Jones said some kind of a signal would be helpful, even if it went through the CSX dispatcher in Florida first.
The July 2024 incident was only the second time in the last 25 years that a train has derailed in Fredericksburg. The previous event was in 2014.
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