Crews worked all night Wednesday to restore rail and vehicle traffic through an intersection in Roy after a UTA bus was destroyed when it was struck by a train Wednesday morning.
One of two Union Pacific Railroad tracks was back in operation by 3 a.m. Thursday, according to Roy police, but the intersection at 4800 South and 2700 West streets remained closed to vehicle traffic later in the morning. The street may be reopened late Thursday, police said.The 9:30 a.m. crash sent the empty bus cartwheeling into an embankment, narrowly missing an adjacent house.
The bus driver tried several times to restart the stalled bus, according to UTA spokesman Bill Barnes, then jumped off when the northbound train approached the crossing.
The driver was alone on the bus and was not injured. Nine nearby homes were evacuated when Roy firefighters arriving at the scene found some of the derailed freight cars were carrying containers of potentially lethal potassium cyanide and sulfuric acid.
None of the containers ruptured, Roy Fire Chief Stan Robins said, and residents were allowed back into their homes about three hours later.
He estimated between 200 and 300 gallons of diesel fuel spilled from the engines and will have to be cleaned up.
The crash destroyed the UTA bus, a 1987 model worth about $220,000, Barnes estimated, and derailed a dozen container freight cars. It also caused a fire in the two front diesel locomotives that was extinguished by arriving firefighters.
Neither of the two crewmen aboard the train was injured, a Union Pacific spokesman at the scene said.
The bus driver, Josephine Rangel, is based out of the Ogden terminal, Barnes said, and has been driving for UTA about a dozen years. Rangel was tested for alcohol and drugs after the incident, a procedure that Barnes said is routine after any accident. She declined to be interviewed.
Barnes said Rangel was westbound at the crossing and had stopped for one train, then proceeded into the crossing. How the bus stalled is unclear, Barnes said, but Rangel stayed with it, trying to get it restarted and moving.
A Roy animal control officer, Ben Reeves, was behind the bus in a line of traffic and decided to offer assistance.
"I pulled around her when I saw she was sitting on the tracks, then drove across the crossing and parked on the other side. I was walking back to see if I could get her some help, maybe get some equipment from the city shops to get her off the tracks, when I heard the whistle of the next train coming," said Reeves.
"I told her a train was coming and she'd better get out of there. She grabbed her purse and jumped off the bus.
"Then the train hit it, and it was the biggest bang you ever heard," Reeves said.
Don Duncombe lives two house away from the crossing, on 4800 South, and said the train sounded like one of the heaviest he'd heard in the five years he's lived next to the tracks.
"After awhile, you can tell the difference in trains. Some of them are heavy, some are light, some have a flat wheel," said Duncombe.
"I was talking on the phone when I heard this one coming and thought it was one of the heaviest sounding trains I'd ever heard. Then I heard the crash and looked out the window to see those freight cars piling up, stacking up on their ends and falling over," he said.
"I was afraid they were going to buckle and come into the house. I called 911 and was so scared when the operator asked where I lived I couldn't remember my address," Dun-combe said.
Duncombe said there has been one fatality at the crossing, a young boy who rode his bicyle into the side of a passing train and was killed.
"Those trains go through here too fast," Duncombe said. "Sometimes they come so fast they're already at the intersection and the crossing arms are still coming down."
Rangel knew a train would be coming shortly and had radioed the UTA dispatch center of her plight, Barnes said, and UTA in turn contacted the railroad to warn them of the blocked tracks. But it was too late to stop the train, he said.
A Union Pacific spokesman at the scene said 80 to 100 trains daily use the tracks, the railroad's main north-south line. Trains were being held up in several states, waiting for the tracks to be cleared, he said.
Crews on Wednesday afternoon were using bulldozers equipped with winches and steel cable to drag the cars and scattered freight off the damaged tracks, and other repair crews were standing by, waiting to replace the broken and skewed rails.