Dick Henson awoke Saturday morning close to 3am. Rain had been pelting their home for close to 24 hours and was still coming down. But it wasn’t the rain that woke him up but the flashing lights coming through the blinds of his home which is off of a seldom used road. Walking out to the porch he saw emergency equipment and wreckers. At first he thought it to be a crash until he realized a train was in his lower pasture on it’s side and the crew being rescued from flood waters. Never had he seen water so bad. By the next morning he could see the locomotives and over sixty railcars on their sides. It looked like a huge lake. The railroad tracks were suspended in midair in at least five different points with no road bed under them.
He learned the train crew on the way to Houston had gone over a hill and were going into the watershed when they realizes they were in water. By the time they shut the train down it was too late. As it sat for a minute , it toppled over.
Since then crews have been working to restore service to the heavily traveled track. First digging and placing large rock under the track area and the area next to it. After that they started hauling hundreds of truck loads of rock in by truck from Oklahoma. One worker said that with the track down the trucks were their train. Once a pas can be made next to the track crews will move in a crane and attempt to set the locomotive which weighs over 100 tons back on the tracks.
In addition HAZMAT crews are on the scene attempting to clan up the spilled diesel from the 4,000 gallon tanks on each locomotive.
Close to five miles down the road another area is being set up to stock pile over 4000 tons of rock being trucked from Oklahoma also. Once the track is partially operational they will road rail cars from the stock pile and move it the five miles to the crash site.
Between Friday and Sunday the Corsicana area received more than 24-inches of rain.
This section of track goes through Bryan College Station, through Navasota and runs along highway 290 in Houston.
