Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Sergio Serna, 12, and his brother Alfonso, 8, were among the neighbors who came out to see the derailment of a Southern Pacific train.

Train derails near Pollard Road

Cars carrying coal jump the track

By Clarence Cromwell

Six cars of a 58-car coal train jumped the Southern Pacific railroad tracks at about 5 p.m. May 12 and tore up a stretch of track near Route 85 and Pollard Road before the train was brought to a halt.

No one was hurt, but the mishap left the railroad with a half-dozen crunched-up coal cars. Damage was limited because the train was traveling 8 mph at the time of the accident, said a railroad employee at the scene who would not give his name. The speed limit for that stretch of track is 10 mph.

The wreck started when a half-dozen cars, each weighing 103 tons, skipped to the left and began running on the railroad ties and gravel, rather than rails. The cars were situated roughly in the middle of the train.

Jordan Bailey, who lives nearby, on Calle Marguerita, witnessed the accident.

"I was watching the train go by from my kitchen window," he recalled, "and it started to stop, and the [dust] was rising so I came out and it was lying over like this."

The rear-most derailed cars yawed at a perilous angle, supported by the couplings to other cars. The frontmost derailed car came to rest on the bridge over Pollard Road, near the intersection of Pollard and Route 85.

The damage, even at 8 mph, awed neighborhood residents who wandered out to the tracks after hearing the grinding roar.

Once they left the rails, the cars plowed up railroad ties and snapped them like matchsticks. The wheels of the one tilted car dug so deep in to the rail bed that they couldn't be seen. The rear chassis of one car was snapped off when another car rear-ended it. And some of the railcars' belly doors were ripped open on the ground or by twisted rails and began spilling coal along the tracks.

Train wheels, acting like can openers, sliced a half-inch-thick sliver of rail at least seven feet long from one piece of track and another entire rail became bent into a now-immovable loop that jutted from under the train at a 45-degree angle to the ground.

Southern Pacific work crews and a private firm spent the next day trying to re-track the coal cars with the help of bulldozers and cranes.

Southern Pacific did not respond to inquiries about the derailing.

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