Claris Law Legal Blogging Community

Editor: Rick Shapiro
Profession: FELA Attorney

Category: Other Railroad Accidents

The New York Times published a major expose relating to questionable tactics by some of the nation's railroads in railroad-crossing incidents, many involving deaths. On July 11, 2004, Walt Bogdanich, a New York Times reporter, published an article relating to deaths at rail crossings, missing evidence, and silence. The article specifically revealed that Union Pacific, CSX, and several other railroads, have broken federal rules by failing to promptly report hundreds of fatal accidents--71 of them during calendar year 2003.

"It's a systemic failure," said James E. Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. "It's been something that has just not grabbed the attention, unfortunately, of the public."

Later, on July 12, Walt Bogdanich was interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) by Melissa Block. Mr. Bogdanich said, "The sad fact is, unless people die at one of these crossings, and unless people are injured at these crossings, most likely they won't get gates or lights. And, of course, that's too late for the people who have been injured or killed." NPR discussed the death of 17-year-old Hilary Feaster, killed in a crossing collision with a CSX train in Tennessee in 1997. Bogdanich said, "Well, what interested us about it was the fact that there had been a double fatality four years earlier that had not been reported by CSX, as required by federal law. What this means is had they done so, the state was prepared, in fact, to pay the railroad to install gates at that crossing. So when Hilary Feaster went across those tracks in 1997, there were no gates."

One of the upshots of Bogdanich's article was that railroads were not reporting accidents to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) officials as required. Let's hope that reporting like this prompts the FRA or federal legislators to more tightly control the reporting of dangerous conditions at rail crossings. Also, the article focused on the fact that many railroads are not required to turn over their "event recorders" (black boxes) to any federal or state/local officials immediately at the time of a railroad-crossing accident. Instead, federal law requires that the information be maintained for at least one year, but it has been argued that this allows too much latitude to railroads.

Also, in the Feaster case, strong allegations were leveled against former CSX claim agent Larry Lovette by police officer Summers, who investigated whether the railroad signals at the Tennessee crossing were working at the time of the crossing crash. Summers claims he didn't learn until years after the incident that a CSX signal repairperson had repaired a malfunction at the signal at the crossing on the very day of the collision. Summers pointed out that CSX's retired claim agent Lovette asked him to sign an affidavit stating that the signal was working fine on the date of the derailment, which Summers says turned out to be totally inaccurate when the proof rose to the surface. Lovette denied wrongdoing.

United States Treasury Secretary John Snow, who was then president of CSX, was asked for comment about the exposé relating to CSX, and his only comment to the press was "Let's talk about Afghanistan." Major exposé on railroad-crossing accident reporting Railroads accused of destroying evidence