Sibley, Iowa– A state highway was blocked for three to four hours after a reported fire in a locomotive on Wednesday, October 12, 2022, near Sibley.
According to Sibley Fire Chief Ken Huls, at about 7:20 p.m., the Sibley Fire Department was called to the report of a locomotive fire just north of Highway 9 and Old Highway 60, two miles north of Sibley.
The chief says when they rolled up, there was no fire. He says the engineer told him there had been a malfunction inside the engine, and it had been pushing flame out of the exhaust. Huls tells us it was not a locomotive in the front, but a helper engine in the middle of the 12,000-foot train. (That’s 2.2 miles.) He says the fire department went over the locomotive with their thermal imager to make sure there were no remaining hot spots.
Huls says the biggest problem was that the back half of the train was blocking Highway 9, and the locomotive was immovable. He says the head end of the train went on to Worthington, Minnesota, where they left the front half of the train and then the head-end locomotives backed all the way back to the scene to pick up the rest of the train. In the meantime, Huls said he called the Department of Transportation Traffic Management Center in Ankeny to tell them they would have to set up a temporary detour for Highway 9, which he said involved L40 and Northwest Boulevard for three to four hours.
Huls says no injuries were reported. He says it’s unknown specifically what caused the flames, except a malfunction in the locomotive’s engine. No damage estimate was available.
He says the firefighters who responded were on the scene for about 20 minutes.
