(The following story by Eva Ruth Moravec appeared on the San Antonio Express-News website on June 2, 2010. Gary Langlinais is a member of BLET Division 197 in San Antonio.)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — The journey had been uneventful, so Mike Love and his three-man crew were biding their time.
“We were almost home,” said Love, a longtime Union Pacific conductor.
It was a Friday night in December 1990, and the train was less than 30 miles from its final destination of Avinger, close to the Arkansas border.
Near Atlanta, a small East Texas community, the train approached Main Street. The crossing arms were down, lights were flashing and bells were clanging.
But one motorist ignored the warnings. The 18-year-old with a history of reckless driving maneuvered his Chevrolet pickup around the arms and into the path of Love’s oncoming train.
At 55 mph, it takes about a mile for an emergency brake to stop a freight train weighing thousands of tons. Knowing this, Love tried anyway, slamming on the horn and grabbing at the brake as the truck bumped over the tracks, its driver desperate to make it across in time.
“But we hit, dead-center on the passenger side,” Love said recently. “We were knocked off the track.”
A half-mile later, the derailed train came to a stop. Jumping out, Love ran toward the wreckage.
The driver and his 18-year-old passenger were unconscious. The passenger, Laurie Burke, a former homecoming queen who’d been voted most beautiful by her high school classmates, died a week later.
Burke was one of 85 people killed that year in crossing wrecks in Texas and one of nearly 700 nationwide. Since then, the figures have fallen. Last year, 248 fatal collisions were recorded across the country, with 23 of them in the state and three in Bexar County, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Changes in life
For years, Love thought about Burke and the driver, who survived. Love passed the intersection almost daily and still remembers watching the grass grow over the train’s skid marks on the ground.
“You reflect,” he said. “You know something happened, and that’s all you can do.”
The crash would change him in another way — he would become an advocate for safety.
With so many fatal wrecks every year, hundreds of conductors and train crews also are affected — some irreparably. And with memorials to the deceased dotting the landscape along rail lines across the country, few pause to ponder the aftereffects on the ones who commanded the train.
“It hurts, it really does, seeing it happen,” said Love, now UP’s manager of train operations in Smithville. “You want to blame yourself until you realize you’ve done all you can. So how do you educate people not to do that?”
Although a rash of chemical car derailments in the early 2000s tarnished UP’s local reputation, the rail line has seen a 65 percent decline in fatal crossing crashes over the past 20 years. Crossing requirements have changed significantly since then, too, as has the public’s caution about trains.
Private crossings are maintained by property owners, a UP spokeswoman said, while public intersections must be equipped with at least passive safety features like signs.
The Texas Department of Transportation maintains public crossings, many of which have active warning signals, such as crossing arms and lights. Motorists who are seen driving through crossings are ticketed and fined $167, officials said.
“I believe in education, and I believe in public safety,” said Sally Tingle, state coordinator for Operation Lifesaver, a nonprofit group that educates people on railroad crossings. “That’s all we can do, is make the public aware, so families don’t have to suffer with such tragedies.”
Tingle knows. Her brother was 33 when he tried to beat a train four decades ago while on his way home.
“In those few seconds, he decided, ‘Yeah, I can make it, it’s my decision,’” she said. “But it’s a decision that will affect generations. It changes the family dynamic forever.”
Elizabeth Rodriguez would like to teach others to not do what her boyfriend did nearly 20 years ago.
After a night of drinking, Rodriguez’s boyfriend George Hargrove drove his 1978 Chevrolet van around a UP crossing at Ceralvo Street, directly in front of an oncoming train. It was about 2 a.m. in late May 1991.
“He said, ‘I can beat that train, no problem,’ and I told him to wait,” she said, her voice shaking. “The last thing I remember is I saw a light, and it was so bright.” Hargrove, 27, and Randall Reed, 31, who was sitting on a tire in the back of the van, died at the scene. Rodriguez was ejected through the windshield and spent months recovering at Wilford Hall Medical Center.
A decade later, after traveling the world, going through countless hours of physical therapy and self-medicating, Rodriguez returned to San Antonio, married muralist Jesse Treviño and focused on her painting.
But it wasn’t until a recent photography class that Rodriguez, now 48, thought once again of the crash. She built an altar — a tall, neon-green Virgen de Guadalupe that overlooks pictures of the trio’s favorite hangouts, flowers and beer — at the site of the crash.
“It was a long, long journey,” she said.
Look of fear
Ask anyone toting a lantern at a rail yard whether someone has died on his watch, and chances are, he will drop his eyes, lower his voice and respond with a quiet “yes.”
“We’ve been killing people since Day 1,” said Travis Benke, UP’s director of Terminal Operations in San Antonio.
A tall, polite, third-generation railroader, Benke recently recalled a crash in which a man driving his little sister to school crossed his path.
“I could see, as we were coming down, a little girl in the back seat waving at me,” he said. “I pulled the emergency brake, we crashed, and as soon as we stopped, I ran over to her.”
She survived, as well as the driver.
And then there’s Oscar Mayfield, a conductor since 1976 who has been involved in seven fatal crashes, who said conductors are “reluctant to talk about it because of our macho image.”
“And that last look of fear — you just can’t describe it,” he continued. “There’s nothing you can do but witness it. But at some point, your mind will find a place to put it.”
Once a train stops after a crash, the conductor “walks the train” to check for damage. Emergency responders are dispatched and the railroad’s investigation begins. So, too, does the conductor’s and engineer’s pain.
Serious crashes trigger UP’s peer support program, and crews involved in them are visited or called by others who have experienced similar incidents. The typically stoical workers break down.
Months after his crash, Love was summoned to court to testify after one of the families sued the railroad.
“I told the lawyers I pulled the emergency brake, honked the horn, then I walked the train and checked on the victims,” he said. “They kept asking: ‘Is that all you could do?’”
Love paused.
“I told them there was one more thing I had to do,” he said. “I had to cry.”
There were no further questions.
He embraced the families of both victims that day in court. Then, as he left the courthouse, he forever devoted himself to educating conductors, engineers and the general public on how to avoid the horrific tragedies.
“When these crashes happen, the whole community is affected,” he said. “That’s why my mission is the safety of my guys and the general public. The movement of goods sometimes comes second.”
Process begins again
Last week, engineer Gary Langlinais and conductor William Cook rode the rails that slice through the core of Bexar County, past embankments of wildflowers and traffic-jammed interstates.
They saw an SUV in San Antonio drive through closed gates to beat the train. At another intersection, a truck that had stopped for a funeral procession moved just in time to avoid being struck.
The crew spoke hypothetically about grade crossing accidents. At the time, neither had been involved in one before.
But hours later, as the same crew arrived in Milam County, the train struck a woman’s car at a private crossing. Killed instantly were three young children in the backseat, ages 9, 8, and 4, all of whom were unrestrained. Their caretaker, a 40-year-old woman, broke a leg.
A couple of days later, both men declined to talk about the crash.
“I’m doing all right,” Cook said.
“It was really bad,” Langlinais said.
It appears the crew members did what they could to avoid the crash, something that typically aids the healing process, Benke said.
“But with children,” he said, “all bets are off on how that’s going to affect you.”
Neither Cook nor Langlinais could say whether they’ll hang up their overalls forever, or if they’ll once again climb up the steep ladder to the marigold-colored cab they have known for so long now.