Since a train carrying molten sulfur derailed near the Littleton Downtown Light Rail Station in January, life seems to be back to normal.

Light rail is running. Freight lines are running. I guess many people haven’t thought about the derailment in some time.

But we’re still left with a lot of unanswered questions about what happened. In fact, the sheer lack of information about this accident and, as it turns out, the December 2007 derailment a mile south of the most recent one, is downright disturbing.

When the rail cars were piled up like Legos two months ago and light rail service was suspended awaiting repairs, we didn’t expect answers right away. We’re not unreasonable. We know there is more to accident investigations of this sort than meets the eye, so some patience on our part was in order.

In the meantime, we figured that an easy place to start understanding train accidents in this corridor was explaining what happened in December 2007 and that’s where I start getting concerned.

No one we initially asked could remember what caused that 2007 accident. It seems like the specifics of the investigation slipped everyone’s mind, ours included. So we started looking into it.

Since then, we’ve been on a pinball’s ride of phone calls to one railroad or another, sent chasing information on this Web site or that Web site and still have come up with nothing. We’ve talked to a number of people at Burlington Northern/Santa Fe and Union Pacific, the two lines involved in the 2007 accident and have been told no one knows what happened.

The kicker started to unfold Friday, when we were directed to Federal Railroad Administration’s Web site to find the accident report.

We went to the site and found that the accident report was still pending. In other words, nothing slipped our minds. No one has forgotten. The cause of that 2007 accident simply doesn’t exist in any documented form.

But it’s bigger than that. Littleton’s accident was only one of 22 accidents with reports listed as pending. That’s out of the 85 accidents investigated across the country that year. Twenty-six percent of the train derailments that occurred that year are still unexplained.

And it gets worse.

The site lists 94 accidents during 2008. Every one of them still is listed as pending. Not a single one has been explained.

Railroads get a lot of heat from people about noise and simply being in the way when civilization expands to the edge of the tracks. Most of that criticism is undeserved in my book. The railroads, in most cases, were here first and that counts for a lot in these cases.

But the lack of information we’re getting about these accidents is simply not good enough — not when rail cars carrying the likes of molten sulfur are passing through populated areas and within spitting distance of passenger rail lines. There must be a sense of urgency in these matters, not for the sake of heaping blame on people, but to understand what happened so it isn’t likely to happen again.

We’ll keep at it and update you from time to time about what we find. But while we do that, help us out by raising this issue with people who are in a place to move things along. Together, maybe, we can learn some things and maybe make a few changes to the way business is done.

Jeremy Bangs is the managing editor of Colorado Community Newspapers.