WASHINGTON — At least one locomotive appears to have suffered significant damage in a fire late Monday night at Amtrak’s Ivy City Maintenance Facility in Washington, D.C.
DC Fire and EMS Department, in posts on X.com, reported responding with units including foam equipment to a fire possibly involving diesel fuel at the yard about 11:10 p.m. Nearby threatened equipment was moved, but the fire department says “some train cars were damaged by radiant heat.” Photos from the fire department show P42 No. 161, the Phase I heritage locomotive, surrounded by flames and later showing visible external damage.
No injuries were reported.
An Amtrak spokesman said late Tuesday in an email to Trains News Wire that the cause of the incident was still under investigation but no additional information on damage was yet available. .
— Updated at 9:45 p.m. CT with Amtrak comment.
It’s possible it developed a fuel leak at one of the fuel line connections. In the past these units had several fires from fuel lines working loose. A notice was put out that at every engineer change the new engineer was to inspect these fittings before proceeding. The fittings were marked so that it was possible to tell if they were loosening. The fire I’m most familiar with is when one went up in flames during the station stop at Elyria, OH.
There may be several weeks before all the details become available. What was the source of the fire? That was a rather large fire making it appear that it was diesel fuel that was helping the burning. Why if so? Was 161 located at the refueling pad? BTW a good reason to not refuel 40 & 41 at the WASH platform as some have proposed.
There are a lot of Amtrak locos that get refueled at WASH in a 24-hour period. Any MARC? “IF” this fire was at the refueling pad wonder if a deluge system has ever been considered such as the navy has on their aircraft carriers? I seem to remember that one of the capital projects was upgrading the water mains at the maintenance facility due to water pressure (AKA volume) problems. If fire at refueling pad it may be damaged so that refueling cannot be done until repairs are made.
Additional. as hot as the fire was the CAT wire above the fire might need replacing?
In this situation depending on where fire was and how hot would yard crews just couple up other equipment and drag the equipment out of danger? If brakes set, then some wheel sets may need changing or truing.
arson most likley or motor problem
No! Not the Phase 1 heritage unit!