(The following article by Brian Chasnoff, Patrick Driscoll and John Tedesco was posted on the Express-News website on October 20. Terry Briggs is the BLET’s Texas State Legislative Board Chairman.)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Union Pacific officials said Thursday that an engineer braking too fast likely shoved 17 boxcars off tracks near the Five Points area, smashing two homes and rousing local leaders to renew demands for rail safety.
But the finger-pointing is far from over on who or what is to blame for Tuesday’s derailment near Aganier Avenue and Hickman Street.
And regardless of the cause, local officials are more worried about the future.
“In the end there was a pretty bad train wreck that could have killed a bunch of people,” Mayor Phil Hardberger said. “Apologies and explanations are good and proper, but we can’t have any more accidents.”
UP officials said the train’s engineer, using a braking system that relies on the engine to slow down, much like downshifting a car, applied too much force. The momentum of the 10,270-ton train bunched up cars in front, forcing some to jump the track.
“We have already reinforced our procedures to assure that our engineers use the proper amount of braking in this type of situation,” UP President Jim Young said in a letter Thursday to Hardberger and County Judge Nelson Wolff.
A longtime UP employee, who’s familiar with details of the wreck and asked not to be identified so he could keep his job, said the train crew was young and inexperienced.
“These kids are coming up so fast,” he said, adding that with UP losing many experienced workers who have reached retirement age, newcomers are tasked with too many responsibilities too early.
The engineer, Rudy Fuentes, who’s been in the job for two years and four months, is being held out of service pending an investigation, said Terry Briggs, chairman of the legislative board in Texas for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“It’s very typical of the railroad to jump to the conclusion that the employee is entirely at fault,” Briggs said.
The wreck wouldn’t have happened if UP hadn’t put more than half the train’s weight — 6,500 tons — in the rear 40 cars, Briggs said. It’s better to put loaded cars up front, he said.
UP officials, without going into details, said weight distribution was not a problem.
“This is a proper train makeup for a train like that,” spokesman Joe Arbona said.
Company officials also disputed suspicions that poor tracks may have played a part in the wreck. It happened as the train was leaving an area where the speed limit had been reduced to 25 mph because of track maintenance, but they said travel was still safe.
“When we find an imperfection, we immediately reduce the speed limit to a safe operating speed until we make repairs as required,” Young said.
But ahead of the accident site was a stretch of track with a permanent 20-mph limit that the engineer had to slow for.
A “black box” event recorder on the locomotive shows he hit the brakes while going 24 mph and got down to 21 mph after going 1.22 miles when the cars derailed.
“We don’t think the track was involved here,” spokeswoman Kathryn Blackwell said.
Nevertheless, a UP conductor, who asked for anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he’s seen tracks there with crumbling ties and protruding spikes.
“The company already knew it was a bad track,” he said. “Some of the tracks, they are so old.”
Federal and state inspectors are finding more than twice as many defects with UP’s 6,388 miles of tracks in Texas than they did a decade ago.
So far this year, inspectors checked 17,298 items — everything from UP tracks through cities and switching yards to record keeping — and found 6,322 of them had defects, according to data from the Federal Railroad Administration.
That means 37 percent of what was looked at didn’t meet federal standards.
The rate of defects was just 14 percent in 1996 and as low as 10 percent in 1997.
The ratio has steadily risen from 26 percent in 2004, when a string of major wrecks in San Antonio killed five people, leaked poisons and led to a federal clampdown on UP training and testing of local crews.
UP wrecks in Bexar County, including major and minor incidents, dropped from 25 in 2004 to 18 last year.