(The following story by Scott Sandlin appeared on the Albuquerque Journal website on March 17, 2009.)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A railroad company was found blameless and was awarded nearly $200,000 in damages stemming from a crash at a railroad crossing near Los Lunas that killed two people.
The drivers of a pickup truck and a dump truck were killed instantly Nov. 1, 2006, when a freight train over a mile long going about 63 mph hit their vehicles as they were parked on railroad tracks. Carol Duran, a dump truck driver, and Robert Valencia, a salesman for LaFarge Southwest Inc., apparently were talking beside the dump truck and could not see the train coming, investigators said.
BNSF Railway sued the victims’ families and LaFarge Southwest, a company providing gravel for the construction site adjacent to the tracks.
A jury heard two weeks of evidence and was in the third week of trial before U.S. District Judge M. Christina Armijo when it returned a verdict March 10, finding LaFarge 75 percent at fault. Duran, an independent driver in a 46,000-pound, fully loaded dump truck, was found 25 percent at fault. The jury found Duran to have been acting on behalf of LaFarge.
The jury awarded damages of $197,863 — every penny the company had asked for, said John Thal, attorney for BNSF. The jury did not award damages against the estate.
Thal said LaFarge will be responsible for damages to the head-end locomotive and two trailing locomotives because the jury found the company failed to train its drivers on safety procedures.
The main engine was severely damaged by the impact of the crash, he said, which occurred as the freight train headed from Winslow, Ariz., to Belen and rounded a bend from an escarpment in the remote area. Squinting into the early morning sun, the engineer saw what he thought was an abandoned truck on the tracks, sounded a whistle and put on the brakes. It was too late to avoid a crash.
“It’s a miracle it didn’t derail the train,” Thal said.
LaFarge and the estates of the victims’ families filed counterclaims against the railroad and El Paso Natural Gas Co., which had contracted for the construction of a pipeline protection station by the tracks within the railroad right-of-way.
Armijo dismissed the claim against EPNG before trial. The Duran claims were settled prior to trial.
Thal said the railroad and its employees are “truly sympathetic for the losses of the families.” He said it also has had an impact on the train crew.