Small town, big collision: Collegedale remembers train derailment one year later

The Southern Accent published this article online in December 2023 as a multimedia narrative (it incorporated photos, videos, and audio recordings). The article was also included in a special print issue of the newspaper investigating and commemorating a local train derailment that occurred one year prior. I served as lead writer of this project, enabling me to win the student's award for best news writing at the 2024 Society of Adventist Communicators Convention. The Associated Church Press also awarded the Accent for this project's excellent in-depth coverage, a highly competitive category—the Accent was the only student-run publication among its competitors.

(Photo by Ron Cabacungan)

When McKee Foods Security Manager Steve Littell heard the train sound its horn as a 135-foot-long concrete beam stopped over the railway, he knew it would be no ordinary lunch break. Prior to that fateful moment on Dec. 20, 2022, Southern Adventist University’s campus had been relatively quiet. Most students had gone home for break. Christmas was just five days away.

Parked on campus, near the old Duck Pond, Littell had watched workers remove a stop sign at the Apison Pike/University Drive intersection to create space for large construction materials on their way to the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s (TDOT) Apison Pike improvement project. He had observed the first of two semi-trailers carrying a concrete truss beam drive safely across the nearby train track to deliver its cargo.

However, it was on that day, one year ago, that Collegedale experienced its first train derailment in recent memory, the impact of which rocked the small college town of 12,000 residents, resulting in injuries and millions of dollars in damage. Residents such as Littell, who has since retired from his McKee position, recounted their experiences with students in the F23 Investigative Journalism class at Southern Adventist University.

Detecting Impending Danger

As the time neared 12:30 p.m., Marc Walwyn, a local attorney, was driving east on Apison Pike alongside the track, nearing the intersection. He had already picked up his daughter from school, and the two were running an errand. When Walwyn saw the second truck transporting a concrete beam preparing to cross the track, he pulled out his phone to take a video. He thought footage of the beam traveling down the street and across the track would be fun for his son to watch later.

Kelly Covington, a resident of Greenbriar Cove, a Collegedale retirement community, was walking along the Wolftever Creek Greenway toward the university campus, as she did nearly every day. She was on the underpass running beneath the railway as the truck traversed the track.

Wright Brothers Construction Co., the company operating the Apison Pike improvement project, detained cars to allow the truck driver to turn into the lane of oncoming traffic and clear the track, according to a police report on the incident. Jorge Luis Cruz-Vega, the driver from the Starrette Houston Trucking Company, LLC, turned left on Apison Pike and began crossing the railway.

Cruz-Vega told police that workers with Wright Brothers directed his front escort, hired by Starrette Houston, to proceed across the track to the next intersection to block traffic coming from the right, and a Wright Brothers employee said they would block oncoming traffic on the bridge across the track, according to the police report. Cruz-Vega’s lead escort vehicle arrived north of the railway.

“This load is 167’ overall length. I must use the oncoming traffic lane to make the right turn at the end of the bridge,” Cruz-Vega stated, as written in the report. “The contractor … got out of his pickup on the bridge to hold traffic and waved for me to proceed across the bridge. I started driving across the railroad tracks, there was no train coming. No alarms and the cross arms where (sic) up.”

Less than 100 feet from the crossing, Walwyn began filming. He said there seemed to be confusion among the transport crew leading and trailing the semi-trailer as to whether or not the driver should cross the track or stop.

The crossing signals began flashing.

 Sonya Lewis, who was driving the rear escort vehicle, alerted Cruz-Vega via radio that the crossing arms were coming down, according to the police report. His oversize load was still on the tracks as an approaching train blasted its horn.

As Covington strode into the light on the other side of the underpass, her ears detected danger.

“My father-in-law was a railroad engineer, so I know distress signals on a train,” she said. “ … I heard that train just laying on the horn, beeping, beeping, beeping, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, something’s about to happen.’ So I took off running and went back underneath [the track].”

Capturing the Moment

Walwyn lifted his phone once again to the car window.

“I brought the video down because I thought I was finished, and then I heard the train wheels, and the noise got louder,” Walwyn said. “Then I realized something horrible [was] going to happen.”

For Littell, the outcome was inevitable. Watching from the Duck Pond, he braced for the impact as he watched the semitrailer start and stop intermittently over the tracks. The train horn blared with urgency as he dialed 911.

Jamie Heath, assistant chief of police for the Collegedale Police Department, later watched dash cam footage taken inside the lead engine where a conductor and engineer were working.

“They’re raising alarm bells. … They both wrap their arms around each other and just kind of lay behind a [barrier] on the floor of the engine and just waited,” he said, describing the two railroad employees’ actions seconds before impact. “You just saw them. That’s kind of sobering to watch, you know, to watch that happen.”

The train moved at 30 miles an hour, with a weight of 4,538 tons excluding power units, according to a report Norfolk Southern filed with the Federal Railroad Administration.

And just as Littell and others expected, the collision occurred.

Marc Walwyn, driving along Apison Pike, videoed the train collide with the beam. His video began circulating online and was used by various news outlets.

At 12:31, the train rammed into the semi-trailer, and the lead engine destroyed the beam, dragging remnants of concrete and two towing dollies along the track. Three engines and 10 cars skidded off the rails, slamming into one another, landing between the railway and Tucker Road. Some overturned. Metal and concrete remains scattered violently above the Wolftever Creek Greenway. Debris slid along rocks, raising a billow of dust that blanketed the chaos. The lead engine stopped about 10 feet away from where Covington stood on the Greenway in a state of complete shock and worry.

Several hundred feet away, Southern student James Templeton was certain someone was injured as he watched the train make impact with the concrete. He had been walking across University Drive to eat lunch at the Village Market before the crash occurred.

Camera rolling and in utter disbelief, Walwyn captured the lead engine’s collision with the beam.

“What a mess, Priscila,” he exclaimed, words drawn out in shock. “Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.”

Priscila is the name of Walwyn’s wife, who was actually out of town the day of the derailment.

“I had called out for her, just as a reaction to the accident,” he said.

Walwyn described watching the crash and derailment as an out-of-body experience. While filming, he was certain the semitrailer would move or he would wake up from a bad dream.

“You see crazy things happening on television or in videos all the time, and it’s bizarre when you are the one seeing it and capturing it,” he said.

In the police report, Cruz-Vega described what happened from his perspective:

“After I started crossing the tracks, a white pickup truck pulls up to my truck head-on and blocks me from fully crossing the railroad track. I start blowing the horn for the truck to move. The alarms start sounding and the cross arms start coming down and hit the bridge beam. I start trying to pull forward and the pickup to back up, but the train was to (sic) fast and hit the beam before I got completely across the tracks. After impact I jumped out of my truck to run and check on the train engineers to see if they were okay.”

The lead engine stopped moving about 10 feet away from Kelly Covington after skidding off the track. The engine stayed on after derailing.

Littell doesn’t think the train would have derailed had the beam never caught on the greenway walking bridge running beneath the track connecting Apison Pike to Tucker Road.

“[The train] was just dragging that beam down the tracks, not even slowing down really,” he said. “But when the concrete beam got caught on the bridge that’s on Tucker Road, the train just stopped right there. That’s what derailed the train. Otherwise, it would have just kept dragging it down the rail bed.”

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that the train was led by three locomotive engines pulling 52 cars, and the concrete beam weighed 106,000 pounds and cost nearly $35,000. The total weight of the truck and its load was 185,000 pounds, according to the police report.

Calling for Help

“I was actually dialing 911 as the train hit,” Littell said. “I didn’t see it actually impact the beam, but I saw the big cloud of concrete dust and everything. And then the train and beam came from behind the trees.”

The Accent obtained audio recordings of  911 calls made within minutes of the collision from the CPD via a public records request.

“What’s the location of your emergency?” a dispatcher asked Littell when his call came through.

“It is at Apison Pike and University Drive,” he responded. “A train just hit one of the members for the new bridge TDOT’s putting in. The train has derailed.”

“You said it hit somebody?” a dispatcher asked twice after what seemed like a brief disconnection between the two.

“No, it hit one of the big concrete construction things. … The engine hit a concrete beam, and it is now derailed.”

Littell shared his name and number.

“Alrighty, thank you for calling,” the dispatcher replied. “Looks like we’re getting a lot of calls about it.”

Covington called 911 seconds after coming face to face with the lead engine.

 “There has been a horrible accident where the train has derailed,” she exclaimed. “[I] don’t know anything other than that, other than I would be shocked if the engineer is alive. … There is train everywhere.”

Another caller greeted a dispatcher with, “Hi, there was a train wreck down near the Duck Pond in Collegedale.”

“Where at?” the dispatcher asked.

“Uh, in Collegedale near Southern Adventist University.”

The dispatcher sent the caller a link allowing her to share her live camera, and the caller apparently began shooting video.

Rushing to the Scene

At 12:31 p.m, Heath was in his office when he heard a call come through his radio about an accident near the train track at the Apison Pike/University Drive intersection.

“The radio [call] first came across, if I recall, as just a normal crash there at the railroad intersection, which we will get different crashes in different areas, so that’s no big deal,” Heath said in an interview. “But when they came across and [initially] said ‘train versus car’ or something along those lines, I was like, ‘Ok, well, that [could] be bad.’”

Anticipating the need to shut down roadways surrounding the accident, Heath got into his vehicle and drove toward the scene of the derailment.

“[I] didn’t realize the scope of what it was until I topped that hill and was coming down into the valley there and saw the carnage that it was,” he said. “It was insane.”

 According to Heath, the Collegedale Police Department was the first governmental agency on the scene of the derailment, but they were not the first responders.

“Actually, if I recall, there were McKee workers that were first on the scene and were getting into the rail cars and helping the railroad workers out at great risk to themselves,” he said.

Heath remembers overturned train engines and cars bending the rails lining the track.

“It would just take for them to snap, and that iron rail snapping back like a rubber band is not gonna cause great things to happen,” he said.  

Looking for the Crew

Littell, who once worked for the Tri-Community Volunteer Fire Department and served as a Collegedale police officer for a year in the 1980s, was concerned that the train engineers were hurt badly by concrete debris or the engine falling on its side. He drove down Hickman Drive after contacting the police and parked in the McKee Employee Services Center parking lot. He arrived at the scene within minutes of the crash and checked to see if the engineers were okay.

“ … I climbed up on the engine, and about the time I was looking down in the engine, somebody yelled that [the engineers] were on the other side of the tracks in the grass,” he recalled. “One guy was walking around and the other guy, his hip was hurting him.”

Covington was still on the phone with her dispatcher when she saw the two men exit the engine.

“Were ya’ll on that?” she asked in disbelief.

Covington said witnessing the train derail was the most shocking moment of her life. Adrenaline running high, she felt as if she were watching a slow-motion scene on television, even as her instincts drew her toward the overturned lead engine.

“Your immediate reaction from being a human being is to go, ‘Ok, how am I going to help these people?’” Covington said. “ … I thought, ‘Am I gonna have to do CPR on somebody? Am I gonna have to try to get them out before something explodes?’ I mean, you know, you start to face your own mortality.”

Relief washed over her when the two men walked away from the wreckage. She hugged them both.

Not long after the engineers exited safely from the engine, Emergency Medical Services arrived, according to both Covington and Littell.

Scattered alongside other train engines and cars, the overturned lead engine leaks diesel fuel and oil into Wolftever Creek.

“[McKee] then actually designated me as the main contact for the railroad, TDOT, and everyone that was involved in that accident for the duration of it,” Littell said.

Public Works Director Eric Sines was driving home for lunch, about to turn onto Apison Pike from Sanborn Drive, when he saw a large dust cloud above the track.

“My first thought was, ‘Why is TDOT out here cutting the road at 12:30 in the afternoon?’” he said. “And then I get closer, and I go, ‘Oh no, that’s a dust cloud because it has derailed, and that’s just the dust from all the rock that got blown out from the derailing.”

Sines turned his vehicle’s emergency lights on and drove closer to the scene. By the time he arrived, the engineers had exited the lead engine.

“The engine was still sitting there running, wide open,” he said. “Didn’t shut off. It was just dumping diesel fuel and oil into the ground and the creek.”

Sines called his foreman and requested that he start regulating traffic.

Police body-cam footage published by Fox17 shows police officers asking the locomotive engineer to turn off the engine.

“I wouldn’t know how to do that,” he responded. “I’m still fairly new.”

Walwyn said several drivers got out of their cars and ran toward the wreckage to try and help those involved, while others just took photos.

Assessing the Damage

The body-cam footage shows several police officers interacting with witnesses and firefighters. Emergency vehicles line Apison Pike and Tucker Road. The live engine hisses. Those near the water could smell the running diesel, Covington said. Eventually, instructed by the conductor, the engineer shut the engine down, according to the Fox17 article.

Collegedale police and witnesses survey the damage caused by the train derailment. The lead engine was still on when first responders arrived and can be heard hissing in the background of this video.

After witnessing the scale of the accident, the Tri-Community Volunteer Fire Department contacted the Hamilton County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. Amy Maxwell, the agency’s public relations and crisis communications manager, was in her office when she received the call.

“When I got onto the scene, I was so overwhelmed with what I saw,” she said.

Debris was everywhere. At the time, she was certain someone was severely injured.

However, the conductor and engineer only sustained minor injuries. First responders transported them to local hospitals.

Maxwell said several mutual-aid companies arrived on scene within 25 minutes of the fire department’s call. Alongside the Collegedale police and fire department, the Hamilton County Hazardous Materials (HAZMAT) team and Chattanooga Fire Department worked to secure clean-up for the area, Maxwell stated. Southern Adventist University’s Campus Safety department also worked with first responders to collect information and help regulate traffic, according to Janell Hullquist, director of Marketing and University Relations.

Cleaning Up the Mess

Matt Mundall, fire marshall for the Tri-Community Volunteer Fire Department, said cleanup crews were able to contain all diesel fuel and oil coming from the locomotives within the first hour following the derailment. At the same time, Norfolk Southern workers removed contaminated dirt and leveled the ground in order to replace the broken track, he added.  Railroad company officials investigating the incident said first responders handled the situation exactly as they should have, according to Mundall.

“Had this happened before the schools went on Christmas break, or had there been a large hazardous material leak, the response and hazard to the community would have been much worse,” he added.

First responders coordinate cleanup efforts on the scene of the train derailment. Firemen, police, Public Works employees and other emergency responders worked together to manage traffic and prevent environmental damage at the accident site.

In the aftermath of the derailment, Walwyn’s video of the collision began circulating online and was posted by various large market television stations, like KTLA in Los Angeles, SKY News in London and NBC News. He sold video rights to a couple of news companies, such as Storyful, which shared it with even more outlets.

Collegedale Mayor Morty Lloyd, who had been sworn into office just two weeks prior, was in a state of total shock watching Walwyn’s video online while visiting friends in Apison. A couple hours after the accident, he met Norfolk Southern representative John “Ben” Carden on the scene. Carden and other railroad officials brought Lloyd up to speed, transforming his shock into a mixture of relief and worry.

“I was greatly relieved that there were no fatalities, and no railcars with toxic chemicals were involved,” Lloyd wrote in an email to the Accent. “However, I was deeply concerned about the amount of diesel fuel that was leaking into Wolftever Creek. [The officials] assured me that they were doing everything possible to prevent environmental harm.”

As reported in a previous Accent article, Marion Environmental performed remediation after the derailment, and Collegedale has not seen any adverse effects to its environment caused by the spillage, according to Sines.

Getting Back on Track

Norfolk Southern workers repair the train track. The railroad company worked overnight to fix the railway after the derailment. Trains were running through Collegedale the next morning.

Norfolk Southern worked through the night to fix the train track, while McKee employees took coffee and Little Debbie snacks to the site, hoping to lift spirits and warm those working in the cold, according to Littell.

After the derailment, McKee notified its employees via text message about road closures so they knew how to travel to and from work, he said. Within  24 hours of the derailment, the company was expecting about 170 trucks in and out of its facilities. Having roadways blocked adjacent to its warehouse meant potential delays in deliveries that could disrupt the company’s distribution chain and cause problems for wholesalers who deliver products to stores.

“The derailment crew’s main goal was to get that track open as quickly as they could,” Littell said. “They kind of just put stuff wherever they could. They would block the main road that all of [McKee’s] trucks would use in and out of Collegedale. …We were very concerned about on-time delivery for our products.”

However, by working closely with TDOT and Norfolk Southern, McKee was allowed to access one lane of Apison Pike, which was opened solely for the corporation’s trucks, according to Littell.

Like Mckee, Norfolk Southern was also eager to resume business operations. According to Sines, the railway running through Collegedale is a main north-south line connecting Knoxville and Atlanta. Littell said, according to the Hamilton County Emergency Operation Center (EOC), Norfolk Southern loses $1 million each hour the railway is down.

Kellam said Norfolk Southern had its response team on the scene to assess damage and bring equipment before the fire department had completed its responsibilities.

“The environmental impacts were managed very quickly, though, and the rail was replaced overnight,” Kellam said. “There were trains moving down that track again within the first 15 hours, which is quite an impressive feat by the railroad.”

Ingrid Skantz, vice president for Marketing and University Relations at Southern Adventist University, said administrators are thankful that the derailment had minimal impact on  the university, “only causing some traffic disruptions following the event.”

“A text alert message went out to campus making people aware of the situation and asking them to stay clear of the area, with a follow-up email to Southern employees providing more details,” Hullquist wrote in a statement to the Accent. “If classes had been in session when this particular derailment happened, this would have been the same impact and response (with the addition of students also receiving the email).”