(The following story by James Thorner appeared on the St. Pete Times website on December 1.)
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — One of the two trains that collided head-on in Pasco County on Monday might have run through a signal light in heavy fog, investigators say.
The crews of both trains did see each other moments before the crash, and slammed on their emergency brakes but it was too late. One man, a conductor who leaped from his train at the last moment, was killed.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that signals and tracks at the accident scene appeared in good working order. That leaves the possibility that human error, abetted by the weather, caused the crash of the two CSX freight trains shortly after 2 a.m. Monday.
“One of the things they mentioned was the amount of fog there was,” NTSB spokesman Terry Williams said after interviewing CSX employees. “That’s what stood out.”
The National Weather Service in Ruskin confirmed fog was in the area of the crash after midnight.
“It could have been locally very dense in particular areas,” forecaster Tom Dougherty said. “Visibility could be a quarter-mile or sometimes down to 100 feet.”
Once the trains saw each other, they started to brake. The conductor and engineer of the northbound train, hauling 60 cars of rocks from Miami, leapt for their lives, according to Pasco County rescue workers.
They didn’t jump far enough to avoid being trapped under crumpled and flipped rail cars. Conductor C.J. Jones was crushed to death. Engineer E.E. Anderson survived with broken bones. Both men are from the Miami area.
The position of Jones’ and Anderson’s train could be key to the crash. Their train had just merged onto a short stretch of common track, placing them on a collision course with a 136-car train operated by engineer G.M. Whitehead II of Lake Butler and conductor W.E. Taylor of Bartow.
Whitehead and Taylor were preparing to put their train onto a track that veers right to Tampa. Anderson and Jones were in their path.
Both trains were on the proper track, CSX spokesman Gary Sease said. It was a question of timing. One of the trains should have waited clear of the other.
Train signal lights in the area could have been obscured by the fog. The lights are controlled from a computerized console in Jacksonville.
CSX, the nation’s third biggest railroad in terms of mileage traveled each year, has had many head-on collisions over the past three years, though none was in Florida.
The company accounts for about 14.5 percent of the rail miles traveled each year, but was responsible for 29 percent of the headon collisions since 2002, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Of 24 such collisions, CSX was blamed for seven.
CSX was also more accident prone last year than its three nearest competitors. CSX tallied 4.68 accidents per 1-million miles traveled in 2003. That placed it ahead of Union Pacific Railroad Co. (4.18 accidents), Norfolk Southern Corp. (3.3 accidents) and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp (3.18 accidents).
The damage from Monday’s collision was less noticeable by Tuesday. Workers had cleared the wreckage from the line. Two tankers upended in the wreck spilled up to 30,000 gallons of concentrated liquid fertilizer, but as of Tuesday, most was cleaned up.
“Twenty thousand gallons were accounted for either in the tank cars or in the ditch and we were able to siphon it up,” Sease said.