Chapter 13: Kyle Palmer

March 15th, 1995, 6:39 PM CT; Mile 210; 5 miles west of Burlington, IA

Engineer Bob Benjamin was on his first solo run driving a train. All his effort and his time, all the schooling, all the training, all the assisted runs with the experienced engineers had come together to this point. This was his dream, to be an engineer on a famous passenger train, moving hundreds of people to their destination, on time and efficiently ... Not only was this a glamorous job to Benjamin; this was a decent paying job. The perfect convergence of doing what he wanted and being paid well to do it.

This was prime trackage and his train had the highball. He was, perhaps wrongly, running the train too hard. The limit was 79, and the train was touching on 84 mph. But what difference would that make? Very little. The train had lost a few minutes at a signal a mile out of Burlington, and he was going to bring his first run into Omaha on time, damnit!

Drawing on his training he calmly hit the button that turned on the alternating ditch lights, perhaps a little later than he should have. The crossing was approaching a bit sooner than he had expected- he hadn’t calculated for the decrease in time the slight increase in speed created. But in this instance, the fractional seconds made all the difference in the world. It wasn’t the inherent lack of safety of the speed; it merely resulted in the train being in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe Kyle Palmer would have been able to slow down or speed up if the train had announced its presence earlier. Certainly, it had been announcing it for some time before he noticed it, however. Or maybe not. Clearly, the train not running fast would have not made for the perfect (or imperfect) combination of a train running fast, an over eager engineer, and a man too emotionally distressed to pay full attention to his surroundings.

It didn’t really matter at this point what could have been if things had gone differently, because they hadn’t. It had all come together, perfectly and horribly, and now the third person involved in the love triangle was going to die. By the time Bob caught the movement in his eye, it was too late. By the time he was even vaguely half aware of what was happening, the situation was a foregone conclusion.

Contributing to it, although very little and probably not very meaningfully, it took the inexperienced engineer a few seconds to recognize what he saw. It was one of the nightmare scenarios talked about in engineer training school. It was what gave the trainee’s bad nights; they all knew it was, statistically, not a matter of if this was going to happen to them, but rather when. It was a car or truck, and that car or truck was moving too fast to be intending to stop and wait for the train.

Again, as a result of his inexperience and shock that this was happening on his first move, Bob wasted precious moments calculating that, indeed, the car was not going to stop. A more experienced engineer, perhaps, would have started applied the brakes immediately, perhaps avoiding or reducing the severity of the collision by striking the truck a more glancing blow, although even if he had acted with all that experience, this collision was not an avoidable one by the time the truck was in view from his seat.

A lot of maybes, a lot of perhaps’s. None of them mattered.

Benjamin quickly changed his use of the horn from the regulation morse code “Q” trains were supposed to use at grade crossing to an insistent, constant caterwaul, a loud, long, mournful plea of warning. It pierced the night with a thunderous roar scream of decibels that would deafen a man too close. Bob held down the horn button with all the strength he had, as if that button alone could prevent the accident.

He screamed, with all his might, “NO! NOOO! STOOOPP!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!” The no seemed to go on for ever and ever.

Perhaps a more experienced engineer might have first punched the emergency brake panic button. Another perhaps that wouldn’t matter. Even if he had, by the time the train hit, the rear cars wouldn’t even be braking yet.

Bob caught a glimpse of the very flashy pickup truck, recognizing it as a late model Ford F-250 Lariat, as it came directly into the train’s headlamp. It finally snapped him out of his terrified trance, and he dumped the air. He braced himself for the jolt he knew was going to come, surprised as it happened that it was much heavier then he expected.

Practically corresponding with the hiss from the train dumping the air out of its automatic brakes, the jolt came, the train smashed into the truck, and then for a moment all Bob Benjamin saw was a ball of flame out his windshield as the train squashed the expensive luxury pickup as it were a bug under the heel of a size 14 Red Wing Logger boot.

As it dispersed, Bob put his eyes back on the speed display. It seemed to take an eternity for the California Zephyr to finally grind to a halt.

March 15th, 1995, 6:40 PM CT; Mile 211; 6 miles west of Burlington, IA

George’s experience let him know what was coming before it happened. The sudden cry of the air horn combined with the dreaded squeaking KACHISSSS of an emergency brake application had made him stop and brace himself, automatically, from experience. He had been in many grade crossing accidents; it was a grade crossing accident that caused the train delay that married his parents and conceived him.

“JILL BRAC-” but it was too late. The combination of the brakes and the collision coming at once made for a jolt even stronger than usual, and even George almost lost his balance as the jolt was magnified by train instantly crashing its slack. Inexperienced Jill was even less lucky. She tumbled down with a muffled grunt, and hit her head lightly on the floor, luckily decreased by her quick reaction time making her hands cushion the blow somewhat. But it still knocked her unconscious.

George immediately knelt next to her and turned her over. There looked like there would be a bruise and probably a bump on her forehead. He had seen her fall broken by her hands- not well, but he was pretty sure she didn’t suffer any kind of serious concussion. He shook her and she gently moaned- a good sign.

He thought he saw her eyes flicker, but they stayed closed. He brought himself down close to her and started to examine the mark on her forehead. So concentrating on the injury, he failed to notice her arms move around him until they pulled him down on top of her, and she gave him a smothering, wet, and warm kiss. He pulled back to see the smirk on her face.

“JESUS JILL!” he yelled, “Don’t EVER do that to me again!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly worried she did something really bad.

“It’s okay,” he said, softening, “I was just terrified you were hurt, and I would have preferred to know you weren’t sooner!”

“I’m really sorry!” She repeated, properly rebuked for her tasteless game.

“It’s alright, sweetie,” he said, “You’re alright, that’s all that counts.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said, “I know we hit something, and that it wasn’t something that huge. But the engineer fucked up somehow. The brakes should have engaged long before we hit whatever we hit. I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you, it came too fast.”

“It’s okay,” she said, “I know you woul-”

A politely rude cough came from above and behind them; George looked and saw a line of people behind them.

“Are you two going to get up and get a room any time soon?” the man asked with a supercilious smile.

“Uh, sure.” George said, more than a little embarrassed.

With that, they got up, brushed themselves off, and continued to the dining car.

Bob shook himself and woke himself from the trance that had come after the collision. He picked up his radio mic. It was very surreal to him; he knew that could happen at any time, but it had been something in his nightmares up to that point. It hadn’t been real. The discussions in training couldn’t prepare you for the pure feeling of total powerlessness that comes over you in the reality of the moment.

“Oh my god, Joe, we hit something, a pickup truck. Oh my god,” he said, emotionally very upset; he wasn’t even speaking in proper radio jargon.

Joe Mitchell was a conductor for well over 25 years now, and this was not his first grade crossing incident, nor his first fatality. He had developed an almost clinical regard for them- you have to. It was part of the job; he didn’t know the person who was killed. He felt bad about it, but this was not the time to get upset and emotional. There was work to do, and it had to be done on a schedule. People’s live might even depend on it; sometimes the person whose car was hit had survived, and emergancy response might be critical.

He picked up his radio, and pressed the transmit, “Dispatch, this is Amtrak 35, please come in.”

“Dispatch hears you Amtrak 35,” said the metallic voice on the other end.

“We just hit something at the CR-406 grade crossing. Train all stop, please contact relevant authorities, I am going to inspect train and scene, Amtrak 35 out.” He said in a monotone voice, “Bob, come meet me by the baggage car.” He spoke clearly for Bob, because he wasn’t sure he’d catch something more clinical.

“Okay, er, acknowledged,” came a clearly distressed voice.

Bob climbed down the engine’s steps and walked back to the baggage car. Joe was already standing there.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Joe asked in a fatherly way. Joe had already seen the burning wreck of the truck; there was no way anyone in that truck could be saved at this point.

“You don’t even know...” Bob muttered.

“Oh, but I do know, Bob,” Joe said, “I’ve been through this before. Many times. If you keep on with the railroad, this will not be the last time. It’s part of the job, man. And it sucks. It sucks horribly. You were there, and you saw him, and there was nothing you could do.”

“I could have gone slow-” Bob started.

“Hogwash,” he snapped, “All engineers fudge the limit a bit. It’s how we do things. We want to make time. We want our train to be on time. So do I. If you had gone slower, you might have missed this truck, and hit something else that escaped because you were going too fast.”

“I could have hit the bra-” Bob tried again.

“Sure,” Joe interrupted again, “But man, this was your first time! You were in shock. You never thought about it. Now you know, this shit really happens. You have to respond to it clinically, the same way you respond to a signal. Trust me man, he should have seen and heard the train and signals long before it hit. Perhaps the signals were out. There was nothing you could do, trust me.”

“Alright,” Bob said, clearly not sure of himself.

“Check the engine for damage and then start working your way down the train to check for derailments. I’ll join you once I go survey the wreck and see if there is any chance anyone got out alive.” He knew they hadn’t, but there was no reason to tell the already distressed engineer that at this moment.

“Okay,” Bob said, going to check out the engine for any damage.

Joe walked over to the pile of crushed and burning metal that had once been Kyle Palmer’s pride and joy. Joe somehow could tell that this truck had been special to its owner; the paint was still alright enough to mark it out as a two-tone tony Lariat model; the most expensive trim. He noted that the metal of the license plate was beginning to darken and crumple, so he took note of the number before it became unreadable. Without data to identify the truck’s origins, it might take forever to figure out who was killed, and that would delay the investigation.

There was no chance of anyone having survived it. The truck had practically exploded in flames the moment it had been hit. If the impact didn’t kill the driver, the fire surely did. And Joe bet the impact did, especially since it was on the driver’s side, and the truck was practically a V-shaped carcass at this point.

The F250 was a pretty solid hunk of metal. But the 14-car long train weighed about 3 million pounds- 1500 tons. 1500 tons traveling at 84 mph is the equivalent of an F250 T-boning into another F250 at 42,000 mph. Or a super-yacht crashing head on into a dock at full speed. It is hard to comprehend the amount of force involved; the numbers are too big to relate to anything else that happens normally in our world.

He walked back to the train to see if there was anything derailed. He was sure there wasn’t, but one must check these things; it generally took something a lot bigger and heavier than a heavy-duty pickup truck to cause a derailment from a crash. Soon this place would be swarming with cops and other officials. He wondered how many hours the collision would cost the train this time. Knowing full well there was at least one fatality, he wasn’t particularly hopeful about it.