Western Railroad Discussion > Fire Disruption for BNSF -Pittsburg CA

After a grass fire, a fire broke out in an underground natural gas line vault along the BNSF/UP lines in Bay Point, CA late last night. The fire was burning totally underground, and required the evacuation of an entire neighborhood and a shut down of the rail lines since that time. Still not open as of 1030 AM today.

This is the BNSF Stockton Sub that hosts the Amtrak San Joaquin and the UP Tracy sub which hosts the LRJ46 local. For rail fans, the exact location of the fire is right where the former SN track starts to curve out and goes down into the ditch used to cross under the SP & SantaFe.

Not sure what BNSF did with the early morning ZNBYWSP, unless UPS trucked the containers to Mariposa. I don’t think the train is sitting out there. There is an east bound train out of Oakland just now holding near Maltby in anticipation of the line opening in the next couple of hours.

Not sure what Amtrak is doing. Looks like eastbound 710 ran as far Martinez this morning. Maybe using buses between Martinez and Stockton? 711 and 712 are showing service disruption so I don’t know if they ran at all part way.

Gary

Posted from iPhone

San Joaquin trains have been detouring via Sacramento.

This is a Chevron natural gas pipeline. One of several parallel pipe lines that runs along this corridor. The above ground pipeline markersindicate at least three separate pipe lines. The gas was shut off last night, but it takes hours for the gas to vent out. The intent was to pump nitrogen in to purge the line of all flammable gas, but it was not working as fast as expected. They have to let the vault cool enough to be able to go inside to inspect before they intended to let people back in or open the tracks. No update as of 1120AM.

Gary

Posted from iPhone

Interesting how they worked around the track outage. If everything I’ve heard on the radio was correct, they ran the eastbound Z train and held it at Vine Hill in Martinez, where I couldn’t see it this morning. The crew went dead about an hour ago and it had earlier been moved it up to Maltby. They then ran a eastbound baretable behind it then an eastbound stack train up to Vine Hill behind it where both have gone dead now. Interesting that the stack track was big enough to run as 3 x 2.

At 1:05 PM Chevron crews are inside the pipeline vault making an inspection, but everything is still on hold until they are done. Could be another hour or two according to the latest update.

The crew van sounded like it was out with multiple crews, to patch eastbounds and westbounds.

Update: track released about 2:15PM. The z train is moving but will have to be recrewed at Pittsburg.

Gary

Posted from iPhone



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/18 14:49 by SN711.

Last night a drone with infrared camera measured temperatures inside the vault in excess of 400 degrees.   Crews were able to enter the vault today when temperatures dropped below 100 degrees.