According to news coverage, the victim’s suit claimed UP was negligent because the train should have been able to stop, if its headlight had been bright enough to illuminate the victim on the tracks from 800 feet away, as required by federal law.
Another point cited was the claim that the engineer failed to make an Emergency application of the automatic brakes after the engineer recognized the victim was a person on the tracks who was not moving.
On our trip last Saturday, we were forewarned of a snowmobiler who had gotten his sled stuck in a switch (shouldn’t have been on the tracks in the first place, but that’s another story).
He was lucky on two counts. First, we were forewarned by radio of the issue. Second, the automatic protection for a crossing about 100 feet from where he got stuck had been taken out of service, requiring us to stop and flag the crossing.
We’d have been slowing for our station stop in a couple hundred yards, anyhow, but where he was stuck was on the main, and on a curve with limited visibility. Were it not for circumstances, the track speed there is 30 MPH. He’d have been picking up the pieces he could find of his sled.
As it was, he may have had to go home and change his shorts…
Please, oh please, oh please let him turn out to be an ARTA supporter…
This wasn’t even on the track coveted by the sledders/ARTA. It’s not going anywhere any time soon. He could have taken a different route, or just stayed off the tracks, but, no…
.
I was looking at a news report for the pedestrian vs BNSF freight train incident. Time was 11:30PM, location was D street crossing in Encinitas (adjacent to downtown and numerous bars). Time and location makes me suspect that alcohol or other mind altering substances were involved. I have not seen any followup reports on this incident.
Nothing on the Medical Examiner releases page, though they seem to have a significant delay built into their process lately. Crossing has gates and lights, right south of the Encinitas Coaster station. Alcohol would be a smart money bet, given time of incident, Saturday night and all that. These late-night weekend incidents have been relatively common over the years.
So, with the landslide troubles in San Clemente halting Amtrak trains, one would expect a reduction in pedestrian fatalities on our county’s railroads. Well, over this weekend, a Sunday morning strike on the Sprinter line was the second fatality after an early-morning event Saturday on board Camp Pendleton when a BNSF freight encounterred a pedestrian.
Shaking my head once again.