PLACENTIA : Stuck Truck Driver Escapes Train Crash

A 28-year-old Costa Mesa truck driver narrowly escaped a potentially fatal accident Monday when he scampered from his vehicle moments before it was demolished by a train.

Glenn Jennings, a driver for Stonegate Roofing of Anaheim, was returning to the company’s facility at 9:50 a.m. when his truck stalled on the Santa Fe Railway tracks at Orangethorpe Avenue and Jefferson Street as a 54-car train weighing 4,425 tons bore down at 55 m.p.h., police said.

Neither Jennings nor the train’s three crew members were injured in the collision, which sent the flatbed truck flying sideways into two utility poles, destroying its cab.

“The truck simply stalled, but I wasn’t scared at first because the bells hadn’t started ringing and the (crossing) gates hadn’t come down,” said Jennings, standing 20 feet from his truck’s wreckage an hour after the accident. Although his voice was calm, his knees shook as he described the accident.

“But then the arms came down and the truck wouldn’t start and I knew the train was coming, so I tried to push (the truck), but it wouldn’t go,” Jennings said. “So I got back in and tried to start it one more time, but then I just got out and ran.”

Seconds later, the train smashed the truck, Jennings said. The truck flew sideways into a railroad communications pole 20 feet away, snapping the pole in half, then smashed into an adjacent Southern California Edison Co. power pole. The impact flattened the cab and sent debris flying hundreds of feet down Orangethorpe.

“If I hadn’t gotten out of the cab, I wouldn’t be here talking,” Jennings said.

The accident closed a mile stretch of Orangethorpe for four hours. Although the power pole was severely damaged, police said there was no disruption of electric service.

The train did not derail and resumed its journey from Long Beach to Kansas on Monday afternoon.

It was at that same railroad crossing on Dec. 1 that a 22-year-old woman from Big Bear apparently committed suicide by driving her Mercedes-Benz in front of a train. At least two other, non-injury accidents have occurred at the same spot in the last two years.

Last February, a man escaped injury when a train clipped his car as he tried to go around the crossing gates at the intersection.

In February, 1990, two cars collided on the tracks and were struck minutes later by a train. The drivers escaped unharmed.