CLEVELAND, May 29 — A BLE member was killed and three other train crew members were injured in a fiery head-on collision between two Burlington Northern Santa Fe trains near Clarendon, Texas, on May 28.
Brother Gayland Shelby, 61, was killed when the westbound freight train on which he was the engineer collided with an eastbound coal train about two miles west of Clarendon. Brother Shelby was a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, joining BLE Division 871 in Slaton, Texas, on Sept. 1, 1989.
Witnesses said the death count would almost certainly have been higher, but bystanders and rescue personnel dug conductor Bruce Patterson out from beneath a burning coal car.
Patterson, 57, was flown by Lifestar to Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo, where he was listed in stable condition late Tuesday.
The two other crew members — Rodney Torres, the 34-year-old conductor of the freight train, and Ronald R. Gordon, the 51-year-old engineer of the coal train — were also taken to Amarillo and listed in stable condition. Brother Gordon is a member of BLE Division 574 in Amarillo, Texas. He joined the BLE on Dec. 1, 1976.
An Amarillo television station reported that one of the injured was expected to be released from the hospital Tuesday evening.
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 Emergency personnel carry an injured train crewmember to a waiting ambulance following a head-on collision near Clarendon which killed a BLE member. |
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Rodney Stutes of the BLE’s Safety Task Force is on the scene investigating the crash along with members of the National Transportation Safety Board. Among other items, both parties are expected to spend part of today studying downloads of locomotives’ event recorders.
The collision happened about 9 a.m. on a single-track stretch of railway.
The coal train was headed from Wyoming to Texas, while the freight train was headed to California from Kansas.
Texas Department of Transportation workman Mike Ritchie was installing a road sign along the highway when he heard the brakes of the coal train screeching and then the collision.
“We heard them hit, so I looked up and there was just fire everywhere,” Ritchie said. “I saw this huge fireball shoot up maybe 200 feet in the air.”
Ritchie said the impact sounded like thunder, and the resulting fireball put off enough heat that he and his partner could feel it from their location almost a mile away.
The momentum of the two trains, both more than a mile long, caused massive damage to the locomotives.
Joe Faust, regional director of public affairs for BNSF, said the freight train, more precisely known as an intermodal train, weighed 5,546 tons, while the coal train weighed in at 15,843 tons.
The force of the impact crushed the leading locomotives on the two trains and tossed around the cars like toys. One of the locomotives was ripped away from the chassis and pushed back from the wheels, while another was tossed on its side. It quickly ignited.
 Firefighters hose down the burning wreckage of two trains that collided west of Clarendon, Texas. |
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The derailing cars ripped up the tracks, pushing one 20-foot-long section up through a coal car, leaving the track sticking straight up into the air.
The accident derailed 22 coal cars, including about a dozen that were neatly stacked side-by-side by the force of the impact. Three of the freight cars were derailed as well.
Rescue crews from nearly a dozen local towns rushed to the area and found the accident scene covered in flames.
“It was just chaos,” said Clarendon Fire Chief Delbert Robertson.
The flames were being fed by diesel fuel, which is difficult to extinguish, so firefighters had to call for trucks from Pampa and Amarillo that could pump fire retardant foam, Robertson said. The flames were brought under control in about two hours.
(The Amarillo Globe-News contributed to this report.)