AUSTIN — Harry Stewart had rounded the curve when he saw a man crossing the railroad tracks, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
“When he turned and started walking in the ties in the same direction that we were going, that was a dead sign that we were about to hit him,” said Stewart, a Union Pacific railroad engineer.
He said a quick prayer, blew the horn and applied the brakes, a futile gesture considering the train needed a mile to stop.
The man, about a quarter of a mile away, didn’t respond and was killed seconds later. He had been wearing headphones at full blast, Stewart said.
The collision, which occurred about a year ago in a Fort Worth suburb, was Stewart’s fourth in his 29-year career. Stewart was already a member of Union Pacific’s peer counseling group, a team that helps employees work through traumatic on-the-job experiences.
“The first thing is the trauma that you experience — your mind doesn’t want to let you believe that it’s happened,” Stewart said. “Each moment that passes, you are searching and trying to figure out why this person has lost their life in front of you.”
Stewart spoke with peer counselors immediately after the accident. The program, a fixture in the railroad industry, was created to help employees and their relatives cope with trauma, said Mark Davis, a spokesman for Union Pacific, the nation’s largest railroad company.
This week, Union Pacific peer counselors began helping two colleagues who were involved in a fatal accident in Round Rock on Sunday.
The engineer and conductor watched as two Lampasas girls tried unsuccessfully to outrun their train. Davis declined to release the men’s names.
Last year in Texas, Union Pacific trains were involved in 407 accidents, resulting in 86 deaths and 192 injuries. Nationally in 2001, the company recorded 4,145 incidents in which 928 people died and 1,559 people were injured.
Railroad employees who have been on the job for at least 10 years have a 50 percent chance of having a fatal incident, Stewart said.
The chance of witnessing a fatal accident rises to 100 percent for employees of at least 20 years.
“From the very first time that you see them, you frantically blow your horn, trying to will them out of the way right then,” Stewart said.
He said that every time he drives his route, Longview to Fort Worth, he thinks about the man who died.
“It’s like it happened yesterday,” he said. “I would say that it is a feeling of sorrow because you know that at that particular spot, on that given day, someone lost their life.”
Stewart said he felt anxious, depressed and helpless after the accident. He took three days off work.
“Tears will come from your eyes; I don’t care who you are,” Stewart said. “It is something that you will have to deal with because this memory is now yours for the rest of your life.”
Employees handle the impending moment of impact differently.
“The engineer will apply the brakes, and if they’re going slow enough, there’s been cases where conductors will literally try to get out and get people out of the way,” Davis said. “There are times when, especially if you’re going to hit a tractor-trailer, something that could possibly derail the train, there are times when they put on the emergency brakes and hit the floor.”
Some employees become angry, others sad, especially when children and teens are involved, Davis said.
Some are unable to return to work, and others look for administrative positions within the company.
Peer counselors try to show employees that they did everything they could to avoid the accident and that they are not at fault, Stewart said.
“It is very important to know that,” he said. “You don’t really want to take the blame for something that you had no control over. In order to be hit by a train, a person has to be basically trespassing, because railroad property is private property.”