Railroad Collision Results
$3.5 Million – Pedestrian Injured by Train
Our client whom we will call John was an industrial worker who left his work station, borrowed his employer’s front-end loader, parked it across a railroad track at 2:00 A.M., dismounted to load the bucket with railroad ties for his own personal use, and failed to notice an oncoming train.
After being hit by the train, John incurred more than $1.2 million in medical bills while spending a year in the hospital. He was fitted with a prosthetic leg, a colostomy bag, and a hearing aid. Despite an extensive period of rehabilitation, doctors predicted that John would no longer be able to work. Exams and appraisals by various specialists allowed Brett Murphy attorney Dean Brett to determine that our client’s damages ran potentially into tens of millions of dollars.
Dean Brett’s effort was focused on demonstrating that John’s one-time error in judgment paled in comparison to the profit-driven, corporate irresponsibility of WATCO, eventually demonstrated to be “the renegade railroad.”
In the fall of 1994, John began building a fence on 10 acres of property he owned near Tri Cities. He contacted Union Pacific about abandoned railroad ties that had been thrown over the embankment next to the railroad line, and was told that he could take them for his personal use. John was hand-loading railroad ties into the bucket of a front-end loader on a switching yard track at his workplace when a railroad engine driven by two employees of the local switching contractor WATCO, rounded a bend in the track, headed for the rear of the loader. The train crew saw an object on the track when the engine was at least 260 feet and 18 seconds away from the loader. The crewmen estimated their speed at between 5 and 10 miles per hour. The engineer failed to blow the horn, failed to engage the warning bell, and failed to engage the brake sanders. He hit the independent brakes rather than the emergency brakes, which would have automatically engaged the brake sanders on the engine before it crashed into the front-end loader, pushing it over John.
Attorney Dean Brett hired an illumination expert to conduct tests at the site, who concluded that the front-end loader was “plainly visible to the engineer of the railroad engine from several hundred feet away at night. The tractor was plainly capable of being seen, even at a glance.” A railroad engineer conducted stopping tests at the site using a similar WATCO engine. At 10 miles an hour, the engineer was able to stop the engine in all instances between 57 feet and 89 feet 10 inches, and between 6.09 and 8.9 seconds. After recreating conditions on the site at the time of the accident, an expert audiologist concluded that “had the horn been sounded . . . . alerting would have occurred when the locomotive was more than 200 feet from the point of impact.”
WATCO management ultimately admitted that the horn should have been sounded to warn John of the impending collision. And the engineer himself admitted that John would have heard the horn. Even the WATCO Location Manager agreed that John would have “definitely” heard the horn had it been blown.
Using these deposition admissions and expert opinions, Dean Brett argued that, even assuming the worst possible case that John was a trespasser at the time of the accident – WATCO nevertheless owed him a duty of reasonable care once the train crew saw an object on the track. Once a reasonable care standard was established, an aggressive discovery campaign demonstrated that WATCO fell woefully short of meeting the standard.
WATCO’s training did not meet the standard of reasonable care. WATCO provided no classroom training to the switchmen who operated their locomotives. WATCO provided only on-the-job training that followed no standard format and did not even include an informal list of items to cover. The “engineer” who was operating the engine when it struck John was given only three days of on-the-job training before he was allowed to operate the 238,000 pound locomotive solo. The on-the-job training was provided primarily by an Assistant Location Manager who was not an FRA certified engineer, and who had been reprimanded for speeding, and later terminated for failing a drug test.
WATCO’s maintenance program did not meet the standard of reasonable care. WATCO’s Location Manager was the person in charge of maintaining the locomotives, but prior to his job at WATCO, he had no experience repairing locomotives. In order to keep materials flowing to Boise Cascade, WATCO used locomotives which had known defects. At the time of the collision with John, the engine was operating without a functioning speedometer and without functioning brake sanders. WATCO is unsure whether the warning bell was operating on the night of the collision, since the crew did not engage the warning bell.
The case was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington as CS-97-0105 JLQ. The case settled for $3.5 million before mediator David A. Thorner.
Plaintiff was represented by Dean Brett of Brett Murphy, Seattle, and Timothy W. Mahoney, Kennewick.
Call the attorneys at Brett Murphy – Washington’s Injury Lawyers today at 888-870-9704, or contact us via our online form.
