Some of you know that I drive for a railroad contractor as a shuttle driver. I pick up engineers and conductors at their trains and take them where they need to go.

Two of my regular guys are dead and one is critical in the hospital.

The cause appears to be a combination of railroad stupidity/carelessness and driver idiocy.

A train was parked on the yard side of the mainline tracks, with just one car-length of space between it and the crossing, causing vision of the mainline tracks to be obscured. This is apparently a common situation there, but WHY?

A van (Chev. Suburban) driver picked up the crew in the yard to take them to their hotel. He went to the crossing... and pulled out in front of a loaded freight train going 47 mph.

WHAT THE EFF HAPPENED???

Didn't he have his window open to listen for the oncoming train? Amtrak is quiet, but freights aren't.

Was the driver talking to the crew and just not paying attention?

Why didn't he use his radio and ask the train crews in the area if anyone was approaching the crossing, since he couldn't see to the south?

The crossing is a private (RR) one, so the trains don't legally need to blow their whistle as they approach and cross (like they have to do at public crossing); but they had to have seen that there was a stopped train right up to the crossing -- they are ALLOWED to use their whistle as they see the need. Were they too stupid/lazy/inattentive, what?

Those three crew are/were smart and very safety-conscious -- did the driver stop at the sign and just punch the accelerator? The approach is very short, and if he did, there wouldn't have been enough time for the crew to react and yell, "STOP!", much less for the driver to react.

So, one driver and two crew dead. One good man in the hospital with a brain injury, two broken vertebrae, multiple broken ribs, punctured lung, internal bleeding and maybe more. The only good news here is that, although he isn't talking, he is responding to doctors' commands to move his arms and legs.

I promised I wouldn't cry anymore, I promised, I promised... Where's the Kleenex?

Authorities identify three killed, one injured...

Sue

wow! I am so sorry Sue. I'd be pretty shaken if somebody doing a job exactly the same as mine suffered that fate. Talk about a split second changing everything. Keep your head up out there!

So very sorry for your loss, Susan.

So tragic and, it seems, preventable.

From the looks of that van it is amazing anyone survived.

That sucks. My BIL is a conductor out of Seattle. Your link put DW at ease in case the news reports it down here.

My condolences, Susan - a tragic accident indeed...

I'm so sorry. I hope the survivor pulls through.

A popular motto is 'Failure is not an option'. The problem is that with humans failure is inevitable. If there is some way of screwing it up, given enough people and time, someone will screw it up.

The keys are to design systems that are resistant to common human failings of inattention and sloppiness, and to build in safeguards so that no single failure, or even a few, causes a huge loss. Humans get complacent, bored, and sloppy. After the first few hundred time carefully checking, and not finding any hazard, it is easy to assume the risk is more theoretical than real. Safety procedures stop being a habit. People get hurt.

A good example is a procedure BellSouth used to use. They made it policy that drivers would place a safety cone behind the service truck after parking. They made it a potential firing offense to not do so. A lot of employees were outraged at being forced to do something so inane. I mean, exactly what good would a plastic cone do?

As it turned out it was an effective safety technique. The cone helps keep people from parking too close to the rear of the truck. But the big payoff was that having to walk behind the truck to retrieve the cone forced people to observe what was behind the truck immediately before backing out. In effect it forced them to check their blind spots. The number of accidents involving people backing into people and things dropped. The company saved money.

That's awful Susan, my deepest condolences to you and to the family and friends of those railroad people (I come from a family deep in railroaders back into the 19th century).

I was almost scratched from the big game one night in 1986, on my first job out of college one of my tasks was customs/immigration entry on barges, full of softwood lumber on rail cars, coming down from Vancouver Island and docking at Harbor Island in Seattle. This barge arrived around 2am, I went aboard with a customs officer and did the clearance paperwork. Tired, I started driving away, crossing the rail tracks once to get to the access road; but so tired, when I took a right and started across the tracks again, I heard a loud horn and screeching and saw the light directly to the right of my tiny little Corolla - the freight tender was pulling the rail cars off the barge and was just a few feet from my car as I crossed immediately in his path. No railroad crossing, no lights, no warning - this was Harbor Island, you're just supposed to be careful, and I wasn't. A few moments later I would have been dead, as luck had it I passed in front of the train with inches to spare. I guess that was my one warning in life, and I took it - I've never taken any RR crossing for granted again.

I'm really sorry Susan. I had several friends who run trains for CSX up along the east coast. That business chews people up and spits them out battered and broken...at best.

-Blast

That's terrible, Sue. So sad for your loss. I've spent years building safety training for companies, and you never know when it works -- only when it doesn't.