SAGINAW (WWJ) No one was injured when a northbound grain train derailed along the river while coming through Saginaw, officials said.
Mark Rosner, Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Lake State Railway, told WWJ five cars and two locomotives derailed on Sunday, November 24th, around 1:30 p.m. in the area of Niagara and Van Buren.
The CSX train, coming from The Village of Breckenridge about 30 miles west of Saginaw, contained no hazardous materials and carried only corn; Rosner said.
Cleanup efforts are underway.
“The first thing we do is we start vacuuming out the rail cars filled with corn so we can pick them up,” Rosner said. “We’ll be doing that tonight, tomorrow morning. We have a company coming in with some specialty equipment to pick up the cars and get them back on the rail.”
Saginaw County Central Dispatch 911 said in a social media post around 2 p.m. that all railroad crossings within a mile south of Niagara and Van Buren would remain closed for “several hours” while crews cleaned up the scene.
Rosner told WWJ the investigation into the cause of the derailment will take “several days" or "weeks” as investigators comb through data on the locomotives’ black box recorders to determine what happened.