(Syracuse.com posted the following article by Jim Read on its website on February 18.)
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — CSX accident investigators have returned to their Florida headquarters, where they will try to piece together the circumstances that led to the death of a company employee in Manlius early Sunday.
John W. Sneddon, 36, of Sackets Harbor, died when he was struck by a moving boxcar about 12:34 a.m. in the CSX rail yard off Fremont Road, police said.
The Onondaga County Medical Examiner’s Office said Sneddon’s death was accidental. An autopsy performed Monday showed he died from a blunt force injury to his torso caused by the blow from the boxcar, a spokeswoman said.
CSX investigators will try to reconstruct what happened, Gary Sease, a company spokesman, said Monday. They will use information gathered from interviews with employees working early Sunday, measurements taken in the yard and diagrams made of the scene.
Manlius police also are investigating.
The work usually takes a few days, Sease said.
Investigators will send their findings to the Federal Railroad Administration, which will review the report and can ask the company to do more investigative work.
“FRA and CSX have the same goal here,” Sease said. “That’s to determine what happened.”
Sease said he is unaware of any investigators from FRA visiting the Manlius accident site.
There were no witnesses to the accident, and this makes the investigators’ work more difficult, Sease said. For safety reasons, rail yard employees work in pairs and stay in contact with each other by radio, he said.
Sneddon was a trainman. His partner was a conductor. Trainmen are responsible for switching the boxcars. Sneddon’s partner, whom Sease would not identify, was operating a locomotive, using it to push incoming boxcars along the tracks to build new trains.
Sease said Sneddon’s partner realized something was wrong after he received no reply when he called for Sneddon on the radio. He went to look for Sneddon and found him along some tracks.
Sneddon was a member of the United Transportation Union, which represents trainmen, conductors and some engineers, said Richard McVeen, the union’s general chairman in Syracuse. He, too, is awaiting the results of the investigation.
Sneddon’s partner was operating the locomotive using a remote-control device, McVeen said. It’s a technology opposed by the union representing engineers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, according to the union’s Web site, www.ble.org.
Sneddon’s partner, whom McVeen also declined to identify, has been deeply affected by the accident. “He’s very torn up about it right now,” McVeen said. “I don’t want anybody to bother him.”
Sneddon, a retired Army captain who served in Somalia, was stationed at Fort Drum in the early 1990s, his family said. R.D. Murphy, a base spokesman, said the base only has records for those members of the military on active duty.
Sneddon worked safely. “He was excellent,” McVeen said. “He was 100 percent safety-conscious of everything he did.” Union members have been in touch with Sneddon’s family, offering support, McVeen said.
Sneddon is survived by his wife, Sandra, and a 4-year-old son, family members said.
Longtime employees said Sunday they could not remember when there had been another fatality in the Manlius yard, Sease said. Staff writer Mike McAndrew contributed to this report.