(The following story by Sally Gray appeared on the Marysville Advocate website on May 27.)
MARYSVILLE, Kan. — When Union Pacific conductor Rob Pinnick, Marysville, was getting ready to go to work Monday evening, the skies were threatening and storms were in the forecast.
“I’ll try to forget about it or I’ll be a nervous wreck,” he said.
Pinnick had good reason to be wary. On Saturday night his train was struck by a tornado during violent storms in southern Nebraska. He and engineer Dick Sutton, Blue Springs, Neb., were not injured, but 26 of the 29 cars on the train derailed.
The train was hauling commodities, including fruit, Pinnick said.
The train left North Platte about 4:35 p.m. Saturday and was stopped on the main line about 5 p.m. a little past Maxwell, Neb., for tornadoes ahead. Later Pinnick and Sutton were notified that they could proceed, but they were told to watch conditions carefully.
Everything was OK until the train reached the Marysville branch near Fairfield, Neb., Pinnick said. The train had gone about 40 miles on the branch and was in a thunderstorm when Sutton said “we should slow down,” Pinnick said.
“Before I could comment, the tornado hit us,” he said.
The train was going 26 miles an hour and stopped in eight seconds.
Twenty-six cars were derailed by either the tornado or the movement of the train, Pinnick said. The engine stayed on the track.
The tornado hit about 6:30 p.m.; Pinnick said he didn’t see it.
“I thought we were just in a thunderstorm,” he said. “The sky was bad.”
He said he was scared and didn’t know what was going to happen. He and Sutton got down and into the nose of the unit to try to get away from glass.
“I wondered if we would tip over,” Pinnick said.
They saw the train was off the track and called the dispatcher “and told them not to run any trains past us because we were all over the place.”
All train traffic then was stopped.
More tornadoes were sighted all over southeastern Nebraska, and Pinnick said he didn’t feel safe for several hours.
A transmission line was down in front of them, and because the cars were derailed in back of them, no one could get to them to pick them up. They waited in the engine for several hours until Kevin Harmer, manager of train operations in Marysville, drove there from Marysville, about 100 miles away. Pinnick and Sutton had to walk back along the track about a half mile to Harmer’s truck.
Pinnick said they could see the tree damage that marked the storm’s path.
Mark Davis, UP spokesman in Omaha, said one of the tracks was reopened at 2:35 p.m. and the second was opened at 7:15 p.m. Sunday.
He said that when a tornado is spotted, trains in the area are stopped. The warning about the tornado was coming into dispatchers just as the it hit the train, he said.