(The following article by Art Lawler was posted on the Longview News Journal website on November 18. Jim Pryor is a member of BLET Division 857 in Tyler, Texas.)
ABOARD THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH LOCOMOTIVE — Engineer Jim Pryor, 57, is keeping this train on the tracks.
The locomotive is painted in the same light blue and white colors of Air Force One, honoring the former President Bush.
There’s no steering wheel, but there’s a big horn, one which Pryor presses through every crossing, no matter how small.
On a beautiful clear day, his job looks fun, not all that difficult as he sits on a soft seat in the air-conditioned locomotive. Pryor wears the traditional blue overalls and the light blue shirt and a cap, though it’s not the familiar striped cap.
The job is anything but pressure free, though.
The way he performs determines whether hazardous material makes it to a designated site or not. If he takes a curved rail too fast, he can derail the train. If he brakes too hard to avoid a collision, he can also derail the train.
Pryor goes nowhere until some people in Spring (near Houston) look at the lights on their map. They know exactly where his train, and every train on every track, is at every moment. They have to be perfect, or it all falls apart and trains can collide.
The first fatality Pryor says he had to watch was when a 76-year-old woman followed another car through a gate. The first car made it. Hers didn’t.
Another disaster that haunts him is of a deputy sheriff who was on his way to meet his wife.
“She was waiting for him on the other side of the track,” Pryor remembers. “I still see him looking up at me” (just before the collision).
Union Pacific public relations spokesman Joe Arbana says engineers like Pryor are victims themselves because of such tragedies.
“The last thing in the world they want to do is kill somebody,” he said. “They have to live with it.”
Another official on the train said fatalities “are up to God.” All they can do is try to prevent the collisions from happening in the first place.
Members of the media and public officials from several East Texas communities are on board, as are several officials from the Houston Service Unit of Union Pacific.
They want to educate the media about trains as the holiday season approaches, hoping to avoid family tragedies.
Not that people wait for the holidays to exercise bad judgment at the crossings.
“There’s an incident once every two hours between a train and a car, or a pedestrian,” says Doug Wood, manager of engineering and public projects for Union Pacific.
“Think of a car running over a can of Coca-Cola,” Wood says. The impact, he says, is the same as a car hitting a locomotive.
Somewhat bewildering to train officials is the fact that 21 percent of vehicle-train collisions occur when the driver of the vehicle runs into the train.
Warning lights and gates can help, but 50 percent of collisions come at these sights, railroad officials say. Two-thirds of the crossings in this country don’t have flashing lights, bells and gates.
There are 280,000 grade crossings, too, an average of two crossings per mile. Of the 33,000 gates maintained by Union Pacific on 38,000 miles of track, all west of the Mississippi, 10,000 of them had to be replaced last year, say officials.
Public relations spokesman Joe Arbana says Union Pacific is often blamed for things beyond its control.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “We’re a company made up of human beings. We make mistakes.”
He said the public doesn’t realize that railroad companies move hazardous materials because they’re required to by the government.
“We don’t really want to move the stuff, but we have to,” says Arbana.
Wood, who works with communities and city and county governments, wants to see far fewer crossings. In Melbourne, Fla., nine crossings are within one-sixth of a mile, officials say.
“Each crossing is another opportunity for a collision,” Wood says.
He wants communities to consolidate their crossings, and he’s willing to work with them and offer some financial support, if they’re willing to re-route some of their traffic.
Fewer, and better-equipped crossings, he says, will cut down on car-train disasters. But he know it’s a hard sell.