You are going down the street and come upon more high rail trucks than you can shake a stick at. Then meet a line of very stern looking FRA, TSA and BNSF agents, a Hulcher truck, a BNSF police car and the County Sheriff.
The Transportation Security Agency inspectors are just making sure it was not sabotage I guess. Hulcher had all their side boom caterpillar tractors on trailers staged in a field off the end of the runway at the Southwest Houston Airport near by. The derailment is about in the middle of this view on Google Maps. https://www.google.com/maps/@29.5030381,-95.49406,1463m/data=!3m1!1e3 This is as close as I could get to the side boom cats parked on airport property.
You need to be wearing the "uniform of the day" - khaki trousers, black shoes, dark blue windbreaker, sunglasses and, for the full effect, a hard hat and orange safety vest.
A rather sparse local news report: http://abc13.com/news/crews-cleaning-up-after-train-comes-off-tracks/1676953/
Yeah, cleanup is not very newsworthy. Some day somewhere a final report will be filed stating a broken rail, broken wheel or something like that caused it. It did not take them long to get trains rolling on the panel track and they are about done replacing that with welded rail again.
I went by today on my morning bike ride. I heard a train going through but missed the engines. They were sounding the horn with short blasts every few seconds. I guess this is due to the slow order on that section because track workers are still present cleaning up. They were collecting ties and loading them out. There was still a little debris left from the wrecked hopper cars. Looks like the workers had been eating well. There is a BBQ grill on the right by the truck side frames in the second photo.
Pretty much finished up by this morning. I rode my bike by and found a mobile welding high rail truck doing some work and a street sweeper. They still have to get the sound wall replaced where the overturned hoppers knocked it down.
Not much of news interest unless anything related to a hazmat material spills, then it's a front page event.
We need to go back to one governmental agency and the railroad officials investigating the accident. I'm tired of seeing my tax money squandered in this fashion. Remember we...the taxpayer...pay for these fine services. Sputter, cough, sneeze all while muttering expletives I can repeat here.
