DENVER—A light-rail passenger train derailed after a coal train on a parallel track derailed early Tuesday and spilled its load as a storm hit metropolitan Denver during the morning rush hour, reducing commuters to a crawl. No injuries were reported in the accident, authorities said.
The light-rail train, part of the Regional Transportation District, was delivering passengers from the southern Denver suburbs to the downtown area when 25 cars out of the 106-car coal train derailed, spilling debris onto the light-rail tracks, Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said.
Railroad officials were trying to determine what caused the derailment but the storm delayed the arrival of investigators and heavy equipment for moving the coal, Davis said.
Crews planned to work through the night to pull the cars off the tracks, scoop up the coal and truck it away, police Sgt. Trent Cooper said. He expected the tracks to be cleared by 5 a.m. Wednesday.
The cause of the derailment still isn’t known, Cooper said.
Nearly 30 freight trains travel between Denver and Pueblo daily. RTD spokeswoman Daria Serna said two light rail stops in Littleton were affected by the collision. Passengers were taken by bus from a Littleton stop to one in neighboring Sheridan, where they could ride to downtown Denver.
Two light rail cars were damaged when they struck the coal, but Serna didn’t know the extent of the damage.
The storm moved into Colorado overnight, delivering from 3 to 6 inches of snow along the foothills of the Front Range, and up to 3 inches in north-central Colorado, the National Weather Service reported.
The Wolf Creek ski area in southwest Colorado was reporting 23 inches of new snow Tuesday in the past 24 hours, and Silverton Mountain was saying it had 18 new inches. An avalanche briefly closed U.S. 160 over Wolf Creek Pass. State transportation officials said no cars were trapped.
Typical commute times in metropolitan Denver were doubled as snowplows worked to keep the highways and streets clear.
The statewide snowpack level was 114 percent of average Tuesday, according to data from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. While river basins in southwest Colorado were more than 150 percent of average, northwest Colorado was still below average.
