The train, carrying 198 passengers and 14 crew, had been traveling at 78 mph at the time of the accident, and immediately went into an emergency stop. Gasoline from the truck’s fuel tank ignited at the time of impact and fire immediately swept through sleeper 39013 and engulfed Superliner coach 34033 to the rear. Lee died in the crash; as of Sunday night, four passengers were known dead and another five were unaccounted for after 88 passengers and 13 on-duty crew members had been treated at area hospitals, and four people remained hospitalized. The 43-year-old truck driver employed by John Davies Trucking of Battle Mountain, Nev., was also killed, but the Nevada Highway Patrol had withheld his name pending notification of his family.
The accident occurred in broad daylight in the middle of the Nevada desert at a crossing equipped with cantilevered masts over the roadway supporting flashing lights, as well as crossing gates. According to an observer familiar with the scene of the accident, U.S. 95 parallels the tracks for some distance, then makes a curve over the tracks at the crossing. “I do know that if you are paying attention, there is no way to miss the crossing. It sticks out like a sore thumb,” he explained in an email.
After the accident, the Union Pacific-owned tracks were blocked, so Friday’s eastbound Zephyr was terminated at Reno and returned to Emeryville as a continuation of disabled westbound train 5, whose 148 passengers able to continue on were provided with five chartered buses to the Bay Area. Trains detoured over the parallel former Western Pacific Feather River Canyon route through Portola, Calif., Saturday. On Sunday, the Zephyr resumed its normal route.
The National Transportation Safety Board continues to investigate the crash scene, where burned-out sleeper 39013 and coach 34033 remain. Normally, regular sleeping cars are placed next to the transition sleeper on Superliner-equipped trains to keep all of the sleepers together on one side of the dining car, but that practice has been temporarily changed on the Zephyr. Owing to a lengthy disruption of the Empire Builder by North Dakota flooding at Minot, the Zephyr‘s summer-only Chicago-Denver “cut-off” sleeper has been running through to Emeryville to provide additional transcontinental capacity. This accounts for the decision to place the three sleepers at the end of the train; it also enables a coach attendant to handle the four roomettes in the transition sleeper sold for revenue space (the others are occupied by crew members and a few are set aside for Amtrak business travel).
As of midday on Monday, it isn’t known where the fatalities aboard the Zephyr occurred. However, 13 people died on March 15, 1999, in a strikingly similar accident, in which the driver of a tractor-trailer carrying steel beams drove around gates at a highway crossing in Bourbonnais, Ill., near Kankakee, in front of the southbound City of New Orleans. In that accident, an F40 locomotive trailing the lead P40 jackknifed into an adjoining parked freight car and swung back into a sleeping car, which was also engulfed in flames from spilled diesel oil.
It is possible that the outcome of the California Zephyr accident east of Reno last Friday could have been markedly different if the car trailing the transition sleeper had been another sleeper rather than a coach, but additional details of this accident will be sorted out in the coming days and weeks, culminating in a definitive report and recommendations from the NTSB.
