Just one idiot, really, and that’d be the driver of the truck. Officials have said that the lights and gates at the crossing were working at the time, and that the train crew sounded the horn. For reasons tragically demonstrated here, it is in fact against the law to cross a train track when the lights/gates are activated.
Awesome. Lights/gates active, no place to go on the far side, and he decided he just couldn’t wait to cross the track. Confirmed, the driver is the idiot responsible for all those deaths and injuries. Assuming he survived the incident, I hope he serves time in prison for manslaughter.
How do people not observe this rule? Oh, I’ll just go ahead and pull onto the tracks and wait. I’m SURE a train won’t come. This guys was stopped on the tracks. There’s no excuse for that period.
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t plan a parade route to cross railroad tracks.
Seriously… THIS. There is no reason that truck should have stopped on the track. I don’t care if he had to lay on his (truck) horn to force people out of the way and drive on the other side of the road. No sane person would stop on a set of active tracks.
The vehicle in front of him is tooling along. He is following closely. All of a sudden the vehcile ahead stops. Well, now he is fucked.
Now obviously he was breaking the law regarding not stopping before crossing in the first place. And if it went like I described above he still made a deadly assumption that vehicle ahead would keep going (though 99.9999 percent of the time thats not a horribly unreasonable assumption and due to human nature its something you come to expect).
What gets me is those gates usually drop a fair time before the train goes barreling through. Between the warning of the gates dropping AND the blaring train horn you’d think most folks would have had enough time to get out of dodge.
I don’t know about you guys, but seeing someone stopped on active train tracks is not terribly unusual here. Stupid, and sometimes deadly, but not unusual. I’m sort of assuming that the guy driving the float was your typical half-assed driver, who wasn’t as careful as he should have been about being able to clear the tracks without stopping.
Of course. That makes perfect but sad sense. And like Cat Whisper I too have often seen people stopped on tracks, usually for the reason I described above.
It appears that several safeguards or safety procedures, any one of which could have prevented the accident, were disregarded or not implemented.
The parade organizer should have contacted the train dispatcher (or whoever controls the trains) and made sure there was no conflict way in advance.
The truck driver should have stopped, looked and listened both ways before even beginning to cross the tracks.
The truck driver should never have begun to cross the tracks unless there was sufficient space on the other side to completely hold his extended vehicle.
Suppose the parade organizer gets bad info from the dispatcher, or just writes it down wrong, and the truck driver is informed that no train is expected during the parade. Truck driver parks on tracks, gets hit by train.
Even in those circumstances, I’m still blaming the driver. There’s no reason at all for him to have parked on the tracks.
And in the actual circumstances - in which the driver was given no information regarding the possible passage of trains - he definitely gets the blame.
It was an 18-wheeler flatbed, big semi-cab towing, so not a typical driver as if it was just some pickup or something. The guy driving would have been a commercial driver with all the extra education about not stopping on RR tracks. :mad:
