(BLE Editor’s note: The Grand Forks Herald posted the following article by Jaime DeLage on its website on February 14. Tome E. Neihart is a member of BLE Division 695 in Minot, N.D.
GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Trooper-on-a-train Bill Klug boarded in Lakota, N.D., and had an uneventful ride until he got to 42nd Street in Grand Forks.
He traded his cruiser for a 7,500-ton Burlington Northern Santa Fe train Thursday night. The assignment was to look for drivers sneaking across railroad crossings when lights already were flashing. Fellow troopers on the highway would ticket anyone he spotted breaking the law.
But Thursday’s ride was well advertised, and no drivers risked a ticket or their lives on Klug’s watch. Until he reached 42nd Street.
“Watch this,” said BNSE engineer Tom Neihart. “This should be interesting.”
About a dozen cars were crowding down 42nd Street to the DeMers Avenue intersection, apparently unaware that the train was bearing down on them, albeit slowly. Two cars were at the stoplights ahead of the tracks, and two other cars were trying to get in line behind them, standing right on the tracks.
Neihart blew his whistle.
One of the drivers ahead of the tracks was Klug’s shadow, Trooper Jeff Harris. Alarmed that the drivers behind him weren’t getting off the tracks fast enough, he finally jumped out of his car and waved them back.
“Ding bats,” Harris said later at the train yard. “I don’t know what it is with some of these people.”
Engineer Neihart, of Minot, has similar stories. In 31 years on the job, he’s hit just one pickup, but he’s had other near misses.
The pickup was almost 30 years ago. Neihart was driving 25 mph down a siding in Elgin, N.D., when the pickup popped out between two grain elevators. Neihart slowed his train as much as he could, but it still flipped the pickup into a ditch. The driver survived, for which Neihart is grateful.
“You’re doing the best you can, and it’s just not good enough,” he said. “Somebody’s going to get hurt, or somebody’s going to get killed.”
Conductor Kenton Beeter, also of Minot, remembers the guy with the brand new pickup towing the brand new boat west of Williston, N.D. The pickup driver raced along the train at 70 mph and more, trying to reach a crossing before the train.
He reached the crossing before the train, but not before the arms came down.
“He went through at 40 mph. Wiped out the crossing arms, banged up his pickup and his boat. And he kept on a-going,” Beeter said. “I’m thinking that wrecked his weekend.”
Thursday’s train ride was a first for Trooper Klug, but it’s an assignment the state Highway Patrol makes about a dozen times a year.
And while it didn’t produce any tickets, Klug calls that productive. That’s why the patrol publicizes things such as Trooper on a Train and sobriety checkpoints.
“The more people know about it, the better,” Klug said. “The whole thing is to try and prevent (violations) rather than try to catch somebody afterward.”