Western Railroad Discussion > SP Ammo train? 1960's?

I have been hearing some talk of a SP "Ammo train" that blew up in Roseville yard sometime during the 60's. Is there any truth to this? Information is appreciated.

Scott

Yes, it's true. In the late 60s or early 70s, a boxcar loaded with bombs for the Navy caught fire in that yard. There was lots of damage, but I don't think there were any deaths.

When UP rehabbed the yard a few years ago, work crews discovered dozens of unexploded bombs that had apparently been buried on the site. UP cleared the area and called in outside experts to deal with the situation until it was safe to resume work.

Yes, the OGRVY in late April, 1973 blew up inside Roseville yard. There was a cut of DODX bomb cars in the middle of the train. Most reports suspected hot brakes caught fire, some reports say the wooden crates that the bombs were in rubbed together coming down the mountain and started the fire. In any case, the middle of the yard had a few craters and was out od service for a few days and many bombs were found under ground when the yard was being rebuiit by the UP.

There was a great photo of the top of one of the boxcars about 150 feet in the air after one of the explosions.

Without warning, in the morning of April 28, 1973, 18 boxcars loaded with bombs began detonating in the Southern Pacific Railroad yard at Roseville, Calif., about 18 miles east of Sacramento. The yard at Roseville was a classifying yard used to make up trains carrying ammunition.

More than 6,000 Mk-81 bombs loaded with tritonal were involved in the explosion. Their destination was the Naval Weapons Station, Concord, Calif. for further shipment overseas to Southeast Asia.

The train arrived at the Roseville Yard entrance at 0605 and was staged in the westward department yard by 0630. Since the train was too long for the yard, the forward cars (which are the ones that exploded) were placed on a track well separated from the remaining three cars, which were loaded with more than 1,000 bombs. These three cars were saved with only minor damage. The bombs were securely blocked and braced and in perfect condition.

At about 0740, two people saw smoke rising in the vicinity of the ammunition cars. One witness said the smoke was black at first, then turned white, followed by flames rising from the end of a boxcar. Immediately after seeing the flames, the witness heard a low-order detonation, followed shortly by a massive high-order detonation at 0803.

Major explosions continued from that time to about 1030, with smaller explosions continuing until 1605 the following day.

Approximately 350 people were injured—some seriously by flying glass. About 5,500 buildings were damaged in varying degrees. Heavy damage to buildings and residences occurred as far away as 6,800 feet from the center of the explosions. Even buildings as far away as three miles had slight damage. One hundred sixty-nine freight cars were destroyed. A locomotive and 98 others were damaged.

Although the Roseville disaster was spectacular and caused millions of dollars of damage, no one was killed. This was remarkable, since people have been killed in less spectacular mishaps involving transporting explosives.

We can’t even say what caused the Roseville explosion, since most of the evidence was destroyed.

As a direct result of the Roseville explosion, spark shields above railcar wheels and non-sparking brake shoes were required. In 1974, Congress passed the Transportation Safety Act, which brought together numerous regulations by various agencies into one publication. Also, the law placed responsibility for shipping hazardous materials on everyone, be it the shipper, carrier or receiver.

Another result was the increase in better and more effective training to implement the provisions of these new regulations. Rail, truck and air carriers conducted courses and seminars, primarily to train their own employees. The trade associations, such as the American Trucking Association and Manufacturers Chemical Association, instituted training courses for all people involved in the movement of hazardous materials. These courses are still on-going.

Here is a link to another version of the story as well as a photo and video of the explosion.

http://www.sacbee.com/static/archive/ourtown/history/railbombs.html

When California authorities faced cleaning up bombs left from a 24-year-old train wreck, they called in Sacramento District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

It was 7 a.m. on a Saturday in 1973 when a train pulling 103 cars arrived at the Southern Pacific switching yard in Roseville, Calif. Its cargo included 7,056 Mark 81 bombs. They were loaded on 21 Department of Defense freight cars at the U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot in Hawthorn, Nev., bound for Vietnam via Port Chicago near Pittsburgh, Calif.

Each bomb weighed 250 pounds and contained 90 pounds of explosive. The explosive, Tritinol, is made up of TNT and aluminum flakes. It's one of the most stable explosives used in military ordinance, and the bombs were not armed during shipment. That means that they did not have the two fuses necessary to explode them.

But explode they did.

A fire on one of the rail cars set them off. To this day, no one knows what caused the fire or how many bombs blew up. But after 18 hours of explosions, Army munitions teams recovered 1,200 unexploded bombs scattered around the area and collected another 300 bombs from rail cars. Aerial photographs from that time show a railroad smoldering and piled with twisted track, shattered cars, and scraps of metal from bomb casings. Much of the debris was buried in the 10-foot-deep craters left by the blast.

Fast forward to October 1997. Construction on a $130 million remodeling project at the switching yard is under way. Backhoe operators unearth a Mark 81 bomb. Bomb disposal experts from Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., are flown in by the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department to dispose of the bomb. They dig a pit, put the bomb in, and blow it up.

Next, the Union Pacific Railroad (UPRR, now owner of the yard) hired a geophysicist to conduct magnetometer tests of the construction area to look for more bombs. None were found. Four days later, after the UPRR, Sacramento County Sheriff's Department, and the geophysicist said they didn't expect to find more bombs, eight were found at the western end of the switch yard near the community of Antelope, Calif.

Unexploded ordnance (UXO) experts returned from Moffett Field and, along with the Sheriff's Department, put the bombs in pits and built berms around them. Then the County Sheriff evacuated 300 to 400 homes near the rail yard, and at 2 a.m. blew up the bombs. The explosions shattered windows, cracked walls, and rained shrapnel through the roofs of nearby homes.

Controversy also rained down with the 2 a.m. fireworks. People were upset about the handling of the bombs, so UPRR, the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal EPA), and Sacramento County asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for help. Sacramento District was the contact for the Corps.

Enter the UXO busters -- A.R. Smith, the district's UXO guru from Fort Ord, Calif.; project managers Mike Metro and Linda Finley-Miller; UXO specialist Jim Walker from Los Angeles District; plus experts from Corps Headquarters and the Huntsville Engineering and Support Center.

Working with the railroad, county, and state, Smith and Metro developed a plan to check the construction site for bombs and to let the railroad safely continue with its construction. UPRR selected CMS Environmental Inc. of Tampa, Fla., to survey the site and do the excavation to remodel the switch yard.

"One of the challenges was finding the bombs buried with tons of scrap metal from the 1973 explosion," Finley-Miller said. "The magnetometers the contractors used are state-of-the-art, but they can't tell the difference between a buried 250-bomb and an axle from a railroad car."

"Fortunately, the Mark 81 bombs were shipped without fuses," said Smith, who spent 30 years as a UXO expert in the Army before joining the district's Fort Ord office. "Without the two fuses needed to detonate each bomb, it takes a great deal of pressure to set one off."

"A.R.'s personality was the key to reassuring the people living around the rail yard that an expert was on the job, and that his first goal was to ensure their safety," said Jim Taylor, Public Affairs Office. "In public meetings, agency conferences and with news reporters, A.R. explained how the excavation and bomb removal would proceed. When he assured residents that he would do everything in his power to see that no bombs were detonated in the railyard, people took him at his word. Everyone quickly learned you can rely on A.R.'s word. At every meeting, people would ask, Is A.R. here yet?' As soon as he arrived, there was a collective sigh of relief."

The area the railroad needed to excavate was 1,000 feet long and 180 feet wide. Under the watchful eye of either Smith or Walker, CMS had 14 UXO technicians, 14 heavy equipment operators, and one magnetometer analyst working in the survey and removal operation. The contractor used magnetometers to check for metal, then carefully removed soil in six-inch layers until 2.5 feet were removed. Then, more magnetometer surveys were made, and another 2.5 feet of soil was removed.

This process was repeated until the excavation reached 12 feet. Aerial photographs taken in 1973 show that the deepest craters were only 10 feet. The additional two feet excavated was a safety precaution.

On Dec. 22, they found a bomb. This time it was safely put in a crate and stored in a bombproof bunker built at the site. On Dec. 15, they unearthed another one. It, too was safely stored until they both could be hauled by special truck to Sierra Army Depot near Susanville, Calif., for disposal. By Dec. 22 excavation work was done, and everyone went back to their duties.

Then on April 21 a bomb rolled out of an excavator unloading soil dug outside the original search area. Fortunately, Smith was in Sacramento on other business, and Finley-Miller got him on his cell phone, just as he was leaving town. The Corps responded in less than an hour of receiving the call from Sacramento County.

More hastily called meetings, news briefings, and careful excavation followed, as did four more bombs. These went to a disposal site in Louisiana. The excavation is complete, and no more bombs were found.

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You bet. They were still finding bombs when they re-built the yard a few years ago. That was the big one.

There was another one not too long after that at Oxnard. A train was making a pickup and had Rose Rd blocked. There was a phone company truck at the gates when this box car that was on the crossing blew up. It blew the doors off and the roof was torn. The guy in the phone truck survived because the door landed on his windshield and took the brunt of the blast. The car was waybilled as Mty Brass Casings. Well they were casings alright but were not Mty. SP did a good job of hushing it up. We carried all kinds of bombs and shells on the Coast during the "Vietnam Conflict".

Nudge

I was never convinced that Roseville was not a gift from our home grown Viet Cong. They were long past anti-war to completely advocating victory for our enemy. "Ho, ho, Ho Chi Min, NLF is going to win."
Most of those 5th columnists are now democrat activists.
Some of the final cleanup at Roseville was using the ground penetrating radar that is also used to look for burried bodies and such.

On the morning of the Roseville train explosion, my girlfriend, her mother and I were on our way to Squaw Valley to ski. We got through just before CHP closed Interstate 80.

It was amazing. The sky was filled with smoke from horizon to horizon.

While I was in Korea, I saw 2 ammo dumps blow up, and our A&P platoon blew up 10 carloads of ammo when we retreated out of Wonju. Spectacular fire works.
My only question about bomb disposal - why don't they steam the charge out and burn it? Of course, blowing things up is a kick.