Train Hits Truck; 1 Dies, 1 Hurt

The driver of a tractor-trailer died and a farm worker was critically injured Saturday after a Seattle-bound Amtrak train rammed into the bed of the big rig at an unprotected railroad crossing, authorities said.

The crash, east of Hitch Boulevard at the Ronald Reagan Freeway, sparked a blaze outside the train’s locomotive that briefly skittered across the freeway in an agricultural area of Moorpark. The collision closed a stretch of the thoroughfare between Somis and Tierra Rejada roads for hours.

The train’s 390 passengers and crew members waited in the scorching heat at the crash scene for four hours before buses took them to San Luis Obispo, where they were to board another train for the Pacific Northwest.

Truck driver Rodney McCarty of El Rio, near Oxnard, was turning north from the freeway across the train tracks to deliver a skip loader to the farms and avocado orchards near the Home Acres neighborhood, said Ventura County Fire Department spokesman John Foy.

The exact cause of the crash is under investigation.

The injured man’s brother identified him as Moorpark resident Jose Antonio Aguirre, 28. Aguirre, who was on a job repairing a small plank bridge over a drainage channel, was injured when the tail of the truck struck his pickup. Paramedics took Aguirre to Los Robles Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, where he was in serious condition with massive chest injuries late Saturday.

The force of the accident was so powerful that the rig’s bed wrapped around the front of the locomotive, which dragged the tractor-trailer 1,000 feet.