Railroad loses coal load at East Talkeetna crossing

Early Saturday morning this past weekend, the Alaska Railroad lost part of a load of coal from their southbound train.

Wendy Lindskoog, Railroad spokeperson, says they don’t remember the last time there was a failure of the trap door on one of the coal cars.  She says there are two, almost fail safe, mechanisms that stop such a disaster from happening. Train personnel caught the spill and stopped the train before all coal was lost.

However, Saturday just happened to also be the scene of a very well attended event in Talkeetna and over 150 people saw the coal scattered along the tracks from the old depot to the new summer depot and have questioned the spill.

Lindskoog says the method used to clean up the coal didn’t work as well as they had hoped.  The remaining bits of coal will stay scattered until it works its way back into the earth.