March 30, 2002 In Jersey City, 2 Trains Derail Within 5 Days By RONALD SMOTHERS NEWARK, March 29 — A freight train derailed in Jersey City this morning — the second derailment in five days at the same spot — and Conrail police said that vandalism might have caused both incidents. There were no injuries, damage to the tracks or hazardous-material spills in the derailments, each of which sent up to a dozen freight cars tumbling down the same embankment near the Newark Avenue trestle of the Conrail tracks. "Both circumstances were strikingly similar and there is nothing to suggest that theft was the motive," said James McGeehan, a spokesman for Conrail, which is investigating the derailments. "It just looks like malicious vandalism." He said that because of the heightened security growing out of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the freight carrier had notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation about each derailment — something he said it would not ordinarily have done. Special Agent Sandra Carroll, a spokeswoman for the Newark office of the F.B.I., said the office was awaiting additional police reports to determine whether it would get involved in the investigation. The first derailment occurred about 4:30 p.m. on Monday, Mr. McGeehan said, when someone apparently pulled a pin in the couplings between two cars and tampered with the air-braking system on one of the cars of the train loaded with freight. A computerized system alerted the locomotive operator to the problem, and then automatically triggered an emergency braking procedure. The sudden stopping of the train, which was moving at about 20 miles per hour on the River Line South en route to Camden, caused the freight cars to go off the tracks and down the embankment, where some were upended, Mr. McGeehan said. The other derailment occurred about 1:30 a.m. today when nine cars loaded with trash bound for a Virginia landfill cascaded down the same embankment. The cars showed signs of tampering similar to those in the Monday derailment. In both incidents, traffic on the freight route was delayed for about eight hours while heavy cranes were summoned from as far away as Pennsylvania to remove and right the derailed cars. Mr. McGeehan said the trains were going slowly enough that someone "could have jumped it" and caused the damage that triggered the derailment. Someone could have also boarded the train as it stopped for one of the many signals along the route. Such vandalism, he said, is not uncommon, especially as trains pass through urban areas, he said. Investigators discounted theft as a motive, noting that thieves are often very sophisticated and efficient in breaking into moving freight cars and using pickup trucks to haul cargo away. Both trains originated in the giant CSX and Norfolk Southern switching yard in Selkirk, N.Y., near Albany.
I'VE BEEN TO JERSEY CITY MANY TIMES. GOT DRUNK THERE ONCE. I'M NOT SURPRISED. WATCH OLD EPISODES OF "COPS" AND YOU'LL SEE HOW IT'S DONE!
