(The following story by Adam Smeltz appeared on The Wichita Eagle website on June 8.)
WICHITA, Kan. — The driver in the Chevrolet El Camino just wasn’t paying attention, he told Wichita police, when he drove through a crossing arm and into a train’s path near K-15 last week.
He survived; the El Camino’s front end didn’t.
Then, on Thursday, a Union Pacific train in Peck rolled into a truck stuck on the tracks. A couple of weeks earlier, in Bonner Springs, a 10-year-old died when a train hit him on a railroad trestle.
In the hopes that he’ll be the last, about 20 local and state police are spending four hours in special training in Wichita today.
Union Pacific, following a program that dates to the mid-1990s, is putting police on trains near roadway crossings between 8 a.m. and noon. Wichita police, Sedgwick County sheriff’s deputies and Kansas Highway Patrol officers are among the participants.
“It’s to give officers a different perspective, to see what it looks like from the cab of the locomotive,” said senior special agent Jay Holman of the Union Pacific Railroad police.
“Motorists quite routinely try to go around the crossbucks (arms),” said Sedgwick County Sheriff Gary Steed. If there are no crossing arms, he said, they try to beat the train.
Those maneuvers can quickly turn deadly. Loaded trains, weighing thousands of tons, often need a mile or more to stop.
Police have said they respond to several train-vehicle crashes in Wichita every year. Last year, officials statewide responded to 57 wrecks at highway-railway crossings, said Ed Pavey, director of the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center.
Pavey said 28 people were injured and three people died in those crashes.
Holman said he’s expecting almost two dozen officers and some politicians at today’s session, which will roll through the 21st Street and Murdock Avenue crossings. Two locomotives and one business car will make the trip.
And police will be equipped to stop any errant railroad-crossing motorists they might encounter.
“People tend to comply a lot more when there’s police around,” Holman said.
“Nobody likes to get a ticket, but it’s one of those things that stick in somebody’s memory…. They tend to follow the law afterward.”