Rail Yard Was Only Shot to Stop Runaway Train

When thousands of tons of freight cars rolled free from a Montclair switching station, crew members knew they had just minutes to try to stop them before the runaway cars gained too much speed. Their one shot, experts agreed Saturday, was to catch the cars with a locomotive before they left the yard, a risky maneuver.

Frantic Union Pacific employees tried to get permission from their dispatch operators to give chase. By the time they heard back, it was too late.

The 3,883 tons of rail cars rolled loose after crew members apparently failed to secure the brakes.

More than 20 minutes later, 11 of the 31 freight cars were derailed by railroad officials into a Commerce neighborhood, destroying several homes and displacing 150 residents.

No one was seriously hurt in the accident, which sent freight cars and thousands of pieces of lumber tumbling without warning into the blue-collar neighborhood of single-family homes and apartments.

Rail safety officials, who would not comment about the details of their investigation, said that once the line of freight cars began to pick up speed as it traveled downhill toward Los Angeles, there was little that could be done to stop the cars safely.

“If they’d got it before it left the yard, if they could have hooked up a locomotive, that would have been fine,” said Robert Campbell, the lead investigator of the accident for the National Transportation Safety Board. “But once the cars got out of the yard, they had too much speed and weight. It would have been a death wish.”

Experts said using a locomotive to chase, attach and control a runaway group of 30 speeding rail cars would be virtually impossible. “One thousand bad things can happen,” said NTSB investigator Dave Watson.

The locomotive and rail cars would probably collide in the attempt, Watson said, causing a massive accident and potentially killing the locomotive crew. Even if the coupling was successful, Watson said, there would be little chance of connecting the air braking system and the locomotive would be powerless to stop a string of cars that reached speeds of 70 mph.

“I guess it’s theoretically possible, if you’ve got Steven Seagal” to dangle between speeding trains and connect the air brakes, said Watson.

Ernie Flament, a retired Union Pacific engineer and the president of the Los Angeles-area Union Pacific Employee Club, said that during his long career with the railroad he had seen an engine catch runaway cars.

“It happened in Montclair over 30 years ago,” he said. “We caught it before it was going too fast. If it doesn’t couple, you give it a little boost, and then it’s going faster. It can be done, but very carefully.”

In 1990, in an episode with similarities to Friday’s accident, 14 runaway freight cars rolled loose from a city of Industry switching yard and careened eight miles along the track before slamming into three locomotives deliberately placed in their path in Pico Rivera. No one was hurt, although seven homes were damaged when nine cars flipped off the tracks and into the adjacent neighborhood.

The Montclair switching station yard, where train decouplings take place, is about two miles in length. The 2,281 feet of cars got loose about a mile from the yard’s edge. The freight cars were spotted about four miles down the tracks at 11:41 a.m. by Pomona police officers, who estimated their speed at more than 60 mph.

Roland Kleinsorge, a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers union representative who sat with crew members during their interview Friday with the NTSB, said that although crew members quickly reached dispatch operators after the cars began rolling, the dispatcher was busy with another train and said she would call back. After the call was not immediately returned, the crew pushed an emergency button on a locomotive, hoping to get permission to chase the freight cars.

D.W. Hannah, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers in Redlands, said the NTSB interviewed the five crew members for hours Friday night. He said they were shaken, both about what had happened and about the prospect of losing their jobs.

The five crewmen have all been removed from service, Hannah said, and he expects Union Pacific to hold a hearing next week concerning their jobs. He also said that counselors were brought in for the crew. “They’re upset for a lot of reasons,” he said. “They’re upset it happened.”

As investigators and railroad officials looked into the cause of Friday’s accident, Commerce city officials and residents continued to criticize Union Pacific for not warning local emergency personnel of the impending disaster and failing to help displaced residents.

Railroad officials said Saturday that their priority during the minutes after learning of the runaway cars was how to stop them before they reached downtown Los Angeles.

“What we did not want to happen was for these cars to get into the downtown rail complex,” railroad spokesman Mark Davis said at a news conference Saturday.

His comments drew pointed questions from Commerce City Councilman Hugo Argumedo during the news conference.

“Did you make an effort to contact the city?” Argumendo said. “Did you get ahold of the Los Angeles County Fire Department?”

Argumedo said the city for years has had problems with Union Pacific officials over noise and emissions from their freight trains. Commerce, an industrial city with about 13,000 residents, is among the most heavily laced with rail tracks in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley said Saturday that railroad officials were still working to establish an exact timeline of the incident, starting from when the freight cars broke loose to the decision to divert the train that caused the derailment.

“All I can say is they had to make a decision pretty quickly,” Bromley said. “This is not something you train for.” In an emergency, he said, railroad officials typically attempt to contact all emergency personnel.

“Ideally we like to notify anybody in harm’s way,” he said, “but whether anyone had that opportunity ... we just don’t have that information yet.”

He said the decision to divert the speeding train was made by a railroad official in the San Bernardino dispatch headquarters, the center responsible for Union Pacific traffic in Southern California. Bromley would not identify the individual who made the decision.

He also would not comment on speculation by company employees that there was an opportunity to divert four miles earlier, on a track headed toward Santa Fe Springs. Two Union Pacific conductors, who would not give their names, said Friday the freight cars would probably have derailed there as well, but in an area far less populated.

The train arrived in Los Angeles from Roseville in northern California on Friday morning, according to Watson. It had 68 cars and stopped at a yard near downtown. The crew that took the train into Los Angeles was replaced by a new crew.

The train then went to the City of Industry. Thirty-eight cars were decoupled and the train proceeded to Montclair, where the freight cars were supposed to be sent off to several different locations. Instead, something went awry with the brakes and they rolled off together.

Among factors being considered, said lead investigator Campbell on Saturday, is miscommunication between crew members working the front and back of the train. In interviews with investigators, crew members talked about confusion as to who had the brakes engaged, Campbell said, but added they were still looking into other possible causes.

Rail safety experts explained Saturday that trains have two kinds of brake systems. Each car and locomotive has a hand brake that operates in a manner similar to the hand brake in a car. Train engineers can apply the hand brake by turning a crank on the outside of each train car.

The primary system, however, is an air brake. The air brake stretches from the locomotive to the attached rail cars, connected by a pipe system that runs from car to car. When a stationary locomotive decouples from rail cars, which is what happened in Montclair, air brakes engage.

According to Watson, crew members at the yard then released all of the air from the brake system. This disengaged the brakes and allowed the cars to be moved about the yard.

Watson said that after releasing the air brakes, the only way to ensure that the cars won’t move is to apply the hand brakes or place wooden blocks behind the wheels. The NTSB investigation has determined that the crew did not put the hand brakes on or use blocks, Watson said.

“The hand brakes were not on. Whether they should have been or not we don’t know at this time,” said Watson, who added that the workers may not have used the hand brakes because they were trying to move the cars around the yard.

Residents, 150 of whom were unable to return to their homes, spent Friday night at local hotels. Many returned Saturday to survey the damage.

Commerce city officials took 54 residents shopping Friday night at a local Target and spent about $10,000 to replace clothingshoes and underwear that was either lost in the crash or inaccessible because of the tons of debris still being cleared.

Union Pacific officials “just sat there and looked at each other when we talked about the need to put these people up last night,” said City Councilwoman Nancy Ramos on Saturday.

“After a while we got tired of it and said, ‘We’ll just do it ourselves.’ Our city manager whipped out his own credit card.”

Gil Torres, a litigation manager for Union Pacific, said the railroad has agreed to reimburse the city for expenses and pay to rebuild houses.

*

Times staff writers Miguel Bustillo, Cara Mia DiMassa, Li Fellers, Sue Fox, Megan Garvey, Jean Merl and Joel Rubin contributed to this report.