Truck pulled huge, heavy load in Amtrak crash

HALIFAX, N.C. (AP) – There was time enough to warn train dispatchers as a 127-ton tractor-trailer, so big and heavy that it required a special permit and a state trooper escort, tried to negotiate a difficult turn across the tracks.

But there’s no indication anyone alerted Amtrak before a passenger train slammed into it in North Carolina on Monday, injuring 55 people.

The truck was pulling an electrical distribution center nearly 16 feet tall and 16 feet wide, built by PCX Corp. in Clayton, North Carolina, for a customer in New Jersey.

The load stretched for 164 feet – longer than half a football field – and required 13 axles to distribute the truck and load’s combined weight of 255,000 pounds, the permit shows.

“It was a big project,” Dean A. Di Lillo, a PCX Corp. vice president, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He declined to put a value on Monday’s destruction.

The tractor-trailer’s backroads route required tight squeezes, including the left turn where it got stuck in Halifax, moving over the tracks from one two-lane road to another.

Established protocol requires constant contact between a truck driver, the trooper escort and the train dispatcher when trucks carry oversized cargo across tracks, a former federal railroad regulator told the AP.

But State Highway Patrol spokesman Jeff Gordon said drivers, not troopers, are responsible for warning off trains.

Amber Keeter, 19, was stuck in traffic in her car with her baby directly behind the tractor-trailer as it tried to make the turn where highways U.S. 301 and N.C. 903 meet.

She told the AP that the driver’s team and the trooper spent considerable time trying to prepare for the crossing, and then got stuck on the tracks for about 8 minutes before the train roared around a curve.

“It was so long they couldn’t make the turn,” she said.

She rolled down her window and asked the flag man if he could call someone to stop the trains, “and he said he didn’t think so,” she said.

Then, “the railroad lights started blinking, and so the tractor-trailer driver tried to gun it forward,” she said. The driver jumped out “just a couple of seconds before” the crash.

Protocol calls for troopers escorting trucks to “clear their routes and inform the railroad dispatchers what they’re doing,” said Steve Ditmeyer, a former Federal Railroad Administration official who teaches railway management at Michigan State University.

Even if they lose contact, they can reach a dispatcher through toll-free numbers that have been posted at these crossings for decades, he said.

“That dispatcher would have immediately put up a red signal for Amtrak and radioed Amtrak to stop,” he said.

In this case, the train engineer “didn’t know about the truck until he was coming around a curve. He had no long vision,” Ditmeyer said.

CSX spokeswoman Kristin Seay wouldn’t say if anyone called before the crash. “That’s all going to be part of the investigation,” she said.

Most people treated at hospitals were released by Tuesday, and about a dozen of the train’s 212 passengers had already continued their journey by bus to Richmond, Virginia, where they could take another train.

“We’re just thankful that we’re still alive. It could have been really worse. God was really with us,” said Lisa Carson, 50, of Philadelphia.

The Federal Railroad Administration’s database shows at least five previous crashes at the same Halifax crossing, all involving vehicles on the tracks. The most recent was in 2005, when a freight train hit a truck’s “utility trailer.” In 1977, an Amtrak train hit a car at 70 mph. The driver got out in time, but a railroad employee was injured, that accident report said.

Monday’s was the third serious train crash in less than two months. Crashes in New York and California in February killed a total of seven people and injured 30.

The Federal Railroad Administration is continuing to interview witnesses and will review onboard recorders from the train in Monday’s crash.

The agency’s associate administrator, Kevin Thompson, said the tracks reopened about 15 hours later, and that CSX was repairing the crossing’s safety equipment.

Gordon said the driver tried to back up to make a second attempt with a wider swing to cross the tracks, but there was too much traffic behind it.

The approach of the New York-bound train from Charlotte, North Carolina, set off warning lights and the crossing arms came down, prompting the driver to flee.

“I saw him jump out of the truck when he knew he couldn’t beat it. … I heard the train noise and thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s going to happen,'” said eyewitness Leslie Cipriani, who recorded the crash on her cellphone.

The truck driver, John Devin Black of Claremont, escaped without injury, but the conductor, Keenan Talley of Raleigh, was among the injured.

Gordon said the tractor-trailer is owned by Guy M. Turner Inc. of Greensboro. The company did not respond to an email requesting comment.