The Day After the Trash Train Derailment, a Short Fire Truck Parade in Maplesville, AL

The second train derailment of the day occurred at Maplesville, AL. On Thursday October 1st 2026 a Norfolk Southern intermodal train carrying dozens of containers of trash from New Jersey on route to a landfill in Alabama derailed in Maplesville at 9:55 a.m. The containers came within feet of homes on either side of the tracks. If you want to see what the mess originally looked like do a Google search on it. The container cars were jack knifed all over the place. 40 to 50 cars are estimated to have been in this wreck by local police. The railroad says that 8 cars were involved. The inaccuracy is due to terminology and not miscounting. Each "car" is a tandem set of 3 permanently connected well cars. Each car shares a set of trucks with the car next to them. So instead of 3 cars with 12 axles you have one articulated car with only 8 axles. This reduces weight and friction. Each of the three connected well cars can contain two stacked 40 or 50 foot containers or multiple 20 foot containers. So from the ground it looks like a lot of cars, which it is. When we arrived on the scene the cars had been unceremonially been pushed into a pile mostly on one side of the tracks so track repair could begin. While this mess doesn't look nearly as bad as the jack knifed cars covering the street seen in the news videos, the mountains of trash were quiet foul in the hot sun. I was two blocks away and it smelled as bad as walking the streets of New Orleans in August when the trash cans start heating up. They haven't even started cutting up the cars yet. They can't get to them for all the trash. We can see some of the containers are still in their well cars lying in the ditch not far from a bridge over a creek. It's really hard to take in all of the mess in one shot. It's like a landfill full of trash just fell from the sky and landed in a small town. I went to another train derailment a couple years ago, also in Alabama, in the middle of nowhere, where the same train, yup, full of garbage derailed over a hill making an equally huge mess. Why does it have to be the garbage train again? There wasn't much work going on here other than trash pickup. I don't imagine they will be calling in crews to cut up the cars for at least a week. As you can see two yards of private residences were totally full of trash, containers resting feet away from the corner of their house, their swimming pools right next to mountains of trash. I tried to take in as much as I could of the mess but it's just everywhere. When I arrived a short NS freight was passing through at extremely slow speed. I couldn't find a suitable place to setup in time to get that. Mostly black gondolas. It could have been a MoW train. In the background you can hear constant sirens. It's not for the train derailment. On this day for whatever reason the town of Maplesville was having a Fire Truck parade. Their second annual parade the signs said. It wasn't much to get excited about but people were lined up for miles in lawn chairs to catch candy I guess. I waited around for a bit hoping another train would come through but most traffic had been rerouted or delayed. The only thing moving on the rails was a high rail truck. So after another quick pass over I packed up and drove four hours back home.