Freedom Rail clears brush, fixes Hunt County derailment

Freedom Rail continues to perform rail maintenance, including cutting brush in Saltillo and replacing crossties in the Royal Oak community of Hunt County. 

DERAILMENT

“Operations are going well. Unfortunately we had our first derailment this past month near Royal Oak,” Freedom Rail senior vice president Jeff Lederer told the Northeast Texas Rural Rail Transportation District (NETEX) at their monthly meeting on Oct. 1. 

“Fortunately, it gave us the opportunity to install 50 ties into a curve that badly needed it,” Lederer told the group. “Also fortunately we found that before it found us and was damaged 60 feet underground. We weren’t going very fast and there was no damage to the cars or the rail.” 

Lederer stated that the problem which caused the derailment near the Royal Oak community was “wide gauge, where the rail was wider than 56.5 inches.” According to the Linda Hall Library, gauge widening is caused by years of weather temperature and pressure changes on the metal tracks. 

Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) locomotive inspector and operating practices inspector were on-scene and gave the Royal Oak location the go-ahead after repairs, Lederer reported. 

BRUSH CLEARING

Freedom Rail also presented to NETEX on the state of their brush clearing operations in Saltillo. Lederer showed the group a picture of the Highway 67 area, also known as Crossing 3534.

“As you can see from the before and after picture, that is 20 hours of work for three-quarters of a mile with a shredder,” Lederer said. “We were literally having to go into the air and cut the trees.” 

Lederer told the group dense overgrowth was “a problem on the entire railroad.”

“We’re going to have to address this through both chemicals and cutting at some point,” he said. “There’s a lot of trees and a lot of grass out there, but we’re working through this… we’ll get it corrected and it’s just something we’ll have to deal with.”