Train Blaze Quelled At Rail Rendezvous

By Andrew Gorosko

A six-locomotive freight train, which was hauling a load of crushed stone through Newtown toward Danbury on the night of Friday, June 13, caught fire while enroute, requiring a Newtown Hook and Ladder fire crew to rendezvous with the train off Church Hill Road to put out the blaze.

Hook and Ladder Fire Chief Dave Ober said June 16 that while traveling through Botsford a member of the train’s crew noticed that one of the six locomotives on the Providence and Worcester Railroad train had caught fire. The train crew alerted firefighters to the blaze about 10 pm.

The Housatonic Railroad line and local streets intersect in only a few places. It was decided that the train would stop on the section of track lying near Sonics and Materials, Inc at 53 Church Hill Road, just north of the former train station. A fire hydrant is situated along the driveway leading to that section of track.

While it was traveling with its crushed stone cargo, a turbocharger on the locomotive’s diesel engine blew out, resulting in diesel fuel entering the engine’s exhaust system, causing the engine to burn and smoke, Chief Ober said.

At the head of the train, three locomotives were pulling the load of stone. At the train’s tail, three other locomotives pushed the load, as needed. The locomotive that caught fire was the third locomotive on the train. The amount of fire damage is undetermined, Chief Ober said.

The fire was confined to the locomotive’s exhaust system, he said. Firefighters used a dry chemical powder to extinguish it, he said. About 21 Hook and Ladder firefighters went to the incident with three fire trucks. There were no injuries.

Firefighters put out the fire fairly quickly, but the fire call proved to be a long incident, Chief Ober said. In course of fighting the fire, diesel fuel had gotten onto fire equipment, requiring that the equipment later be thoroughly cleaned.

Although such railroad fires are relatively rare, a similar train fire occurred in December 1999. In that incident, a diesel locomotive owned by the Housatonic Railroad, which was hauling lumber, caught fire in the daytime, while traveling from Hawleyville toward the borough.

In that case, the train’s engineer drove the train to the area near the Sonics and Materials plant, where it stopped and firefighters extinguished air filters that had caught fire.