Fatality that happened at Wartrace, TN in March.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/RRD18FR004-prelim.pdf
I certainly don’t want to minimize the loss, but this is more of an industrial accident involving railroad equipment than a railroad accident (ie, crossing collision). We had a fellow killed here the other day when the pole he had supporting a raised dump box broke and the box trapped him. You didn’t hear about that either. It barely made the local news.
Hopefully learning will come of this.
My thoughts to his family and his co-workers.
Model 46 machines are nice machines, but something doesn’t quite make sense in the limited reporting so far. Seems to imply travelling mode while attempting to make repairs on a electro-mechanical hydraulic limit switch (and there are multiple on a ballast regulator, including on the drive mechanism.) Did the guy get snagged by the wing/spreader box or run over by the travelling machine that should have been de-energized/LOTO addressed?
Being that there is nobody as a witness, reconstructing what happened is going to be difficult or impossible.
Ditto on the thoughts and prayers.