From: djmurphy@wam.umd.edu (Dave Murphy)
Newsgroups: rec.railroad
Subject: Crossing Accidents and Train Crews
Summary: sidebar to large article on crossing accidents
Keywords: Engineers Trauma US Psychology
Date: 16 Apr 92 21:32:15 GMT
Organization: Hobbes & Bill in '92
Originator: djmurphy@rac2.wam.umd.edu


 
 
From the Washington Post, Monday 13 April 1992, page A6.
(w/out permission)
 
ACCIDENTS HAVE IMPACT ON ENGINEERS AS WELL
by Don Phillips, Washington Post Staff Writer
 
   Corporate employee magazines often deal with nothing more
serious than who won the company softball game.
   But a recent issue of the Norfolk Southern Railroad magazine,
Focus, recounted the story of a gasoline tanker truck whose
driver ignored flashing crossing lights and drove directly in
front of a train run by engineer Jim Tillman. In the ensuing col-
lision and explosion, six people waiting in cars at the
Huntsville, Alabama crossing died.
   By a quirk, engineer and truck driver were placed in the same
hospital ward, side by side.
   The magazine reported: 'For two days, before the tanker's
extensive burns  led to kidney failure and death, Tillman lay in
a burn ward next to this man. Together they cried and they com-
forted one another. Theirs wives did the same. and in that time,
Tillman had the opportunity to ask the 26-year-old driver why he
pulled in front of the train.
   "He just said, 'I thought I could beat you.'"
  The magazine story, including interviews with other engineers
involved in grade crossing deaths, is part of a new recogni-
tion in the railroad industry that thousands of engineers are
walking wounded, suffering emotional trauma because they were
involved in deaths that were not their fault but which they could
not prevent. Psychologists say the best way to treat this trauma
is talk about it openly, to let them know that they are not
alone.
   Few airline pilots are ever involved in fatal accidents [and
those that are often don't survive], and many professional truck
drivers are fatality-free and even accident-free over a long
career. But few locomotive engineers will escape involvement in
the death of a motorist, and likely more than one.
    "I don't think people realize how you feel after that," said
Norfolk Southern engineer James M. Leonard, who has been involved
in 10 crossing accidents, half of them with fatalities.
   In the past, railroads ignored the psychological impact of
crossing accidents on engineers.
   "The problem was a lot of the time, if the train wasn't
damaged, the engineer continued on his trip after killing a fam-
ily of four," said D.B. Ditzel, Montana state legislative direc-
tor for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. "His mind isn't
going to be totally on his job at that point. He's a ticking time
bomb that could tick away for several months."
   The management attitude once was "you just get back on the
horse and ride," said Sherry Daly, regional manager of the Bur-
lington Northern's employee assistance program in Montana, Idaho,
and Washington.
   Daly said engineers often blame themselves, although they
almost never could have stopped their trains in time.
   "It's amazing the number of people who blame themselves--'If
I'd just blown the whistle a few more times; if I'd just seen
them a little sooner,'" she said. "They're victims themselves."
   Many supervisors and senior crew members are Vietnam veterans,
she said, and sometimes are more susceptible to new trauma.
   Reaction varies with the individual, she said, from "grief to
anger to numbness, disbelief, shock." One engineer was so angry
after a tractor-trailer rig pulled into his path that he left the
locomotive cab, ran to the crushed truck and pulled the driver
from the cab, shaking him and shouting, "Why did you do this to
us? Why did you do this to us?"
 
 
--30--

-- 
 dave murphy     university of maryland, department of history
djmurphy@wam.umd.edu    uunet!haven!wam.umd.edu!djmurphy  (NeXT)
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