Just goes to show this is still a dangerous business. My thoughts and prayers are with their family members and coworkers.
It is an unbelievable failure of so many people and entities to not be able to keep two trains apart on a fixed railroad track. Incompetence reigns surpreme in this industry, and nobody cares except the family members of the deceased.
Again,simple mechanical derails,protecting the signal boards,would have prevented this accident,Richard wotkun
I grew up in Liberal, KS which is about 50 miles NE of Goodwell, so I know this area very well. This line is arrow straight from Guymon all the way into New Mexico and the land profile is mostly flat.
There is a passing siding at Goodwell, with the east switch I think fairly close to where the trains collided, so most likely the westbound was supposed to take the siding, since eyewitnesses said the westbound train was moving very slowly.
I don’t know why one of the engineers didn’t stop thier train if they could see the other train coming and maybe start backing up until the opposing train’s engineer finally figured out what was going on and stopped his train.
I suppose we can’t really second guess what happened since we weren’t there.
Prayers to the family of the lost crew-members.
You have one railroad track and two trains. You really ought to be able to keep the two trains from crashing into each other somehow.
This is 2012 and the insurance companies still cover this risk. I wonder how many wrecks there would be if the insurance companies stopped insuring stupidity.
Mr.FREADHOFF JR. maybe you should proof-read Mr.Hays comment,before acusing he of a political bias,I belive he wrote OMAHA, not Obama,as for the Teamsters inference,anyone who has worked in T&E for the last 30 +yrs would know there is no love lost between the then B&LE and the UTU unions,and most of the issues were at the top of both unions at the feet of the international officers.We who worked together,side by side,helping each other thru those long nights daily as you rightfully noted, never could understand why our unions weren’t both more united; which would do more for our cause than the position the internationals took.
We will never know who or even what was at fault for this tragic occurence. The engineer-drugs? distracted? asleep? the track-a mislaigned switch? dispatch error? a signal problem? Let’s not jump to conclusions until the NTSB had completed its investigation. We only have the eyewitness account. I’d like to ask if those trains had some sort of radio communciations; Maybe that would have helped prevented this from happening.