Passengers had boarded the train at the Grapevine station for the 1:30 p.m. departure to the Fort Worth Stockyards. At about 2:30, the train was making its way through the Hodge Yard in Fort Worth, a few miles short of the Stockyards, when the train went through a rail switch.
“We switched from one rail to another, so as you go through a switch, we were only running about 7 miles an hour,” said P.W. McCallum, executive director of the Grapevine Convention and Visitors Bureau, which operates the Grapevine Vintage Railroad. “There was fairly nothing unusual about that.”
The first few cars of the train went through the switch fine, but the car about midway through the train and the last car on the train both had a set of wheels come off the rails, he said.
“It’s so subtle that the people on board don’t even know that you’ve slipped a couple wheels off of the rail,” McCallum said.
The engineer realized the problem and immediately stopped the train, McCallum said. Within 15 minutes authorities with the Federal Railroad Administration were on the scene to inspect the train. Charter buses were called to take the passengers back to the Grapevine station so they could return home.
McCallum said about 166 passengers were on board at the time. He said they were reimbursed.
“I guess the biggest disappointment was that people didn’t get to go on to the Stockyards and spend a few hours there and get the round trip,” he said.
The incident could have been caused by the changes in the weather, McCallum said.
“Steel, when you have big strips of it like rail line, it's amazingly flexible. Today there was a lot of sunshine bearing down on the metal, and my guess is it expanded just enough to open up and cause a little issue like that,” he said.
Officials plan to work to get the train back on the track and determine exactly what caused the issue, McCallum said. The train will return to its station later tonight and will be checked out again in the morning before the next departure for the Stockyards. Barring something such as a broken wheel, the Dec. 31 vintage railroad schedule should not be affected, he said. The Dec. 31 trip is the final excursion of the season before the trains go out of service for six weeks for regularly scheduled maintenance.
The last time something similar to this happened was back in 1996, McCallum said. At that time a set of wheels came off the tracks during the summer when the heat caused the track to expand.
“We constantly brief and train over things like this, and fortunately its been more than 20 years since something like this happened," he said.
