Railroad Series – Chapter 9 : Fatalities

Over the 17 years I spent working on the railroad there were a number of fatalities at work but the first one is the most memorable. The poor victim was the System Crane Operator who was required to ride in his crane while in transport between Los Angeles and Portland. Normally the crane was attached to a slow moving Work Train but for long distances they would put the crane in the middle of a regular train. He was killed when an oversize boxcar hit the tunnel walls in the year 1973. The train only went about 100 feet before it ground to a halt but that was enough distance to cause a cave in on the crane and crushed the poor operator to death.

The process of clearing the cars and then rebuilding that last 100 feet of tunnel took almost a week to complete but the worst part was the first day when we faced the gruesome duty of removing the crane and the corpse. The tunnels just south of Ashland Oregon were not full size and there were sensors along the track before each tunnel that were meant to alert the train crew if an oversize car came through but in this case they just assumed it was the special crane car they were taking through and they ignored the warning signal.

In the post-Accident Investigation aka, Post Mortem it was found there were many chances to prevent this accident. The first question was why the oversize car was with the crane in the first place. The crane had been scheduled to go through Klamath Falls which has full sized tunnels but they made a last minute change that turned out to be fatal. If the crane had been locked down at the other end of the car it would have made all the difference. If the oversized car had been on the other end of the crane car. If the sensor alarm routine had been followed according to the rules. They changed a lot of the rules after that starting with no more operators riding in the crane. Each fatality brings a new change in the rules so it keeps getting safer but the fatalities have not stopped.

I never knew the name of that first guy but the second person to get killed was a welder named Marcel Chacon who died instantly by a runaway push car that rolled for 17 miles silently down the same hill near Ashland. The next fatality was a guy named Gonzalez who stepped in front of a passing train followed by a fellow named Mathews who fell off the end of the work train and then there was the gang truck roll-over that only had one fatality but injured all of the other 17 workers onboard.

There were so many accidents they had a Safety Meeting every morning before work where each employee had to sign a form saying they had read the Rule of the Day from the Book of Rules. After a fatality the Safety Meetings were a little more serious for a while at least. That is the subject of the next chapter in the Railroad Series: Safety Meetings.