Widows: Railroad knew of defect before veterans killed
Larry Boivin earned a Purple Heart in Iraq in 2004, but he didn't survive a Union Pacific freight train that slammed into the flat-bed trailer he and other veterans were riding on during a 2012 parade in Midland, Texas.
The dispute, according to a review of court documents, is over another part of the same federal regulation that also says a railroad "shall" maintain the warning system as designed.
The driver of the truck pulling the Midland float said in a deposition that if there had been nine more seconds of warning — in accordance with a 30-second warning — the gate arm would have come down in front of the truck, not behind the cab, and he would have stopped in time.
State and local transportation officials, responding to open records requests, found no documents that show Union Pacific got approval from the state to reduce the time.
In 2005, the railroad installed an upgrade to the track detection equipment to accommodate faster trains, and in 2006 it increased the train speeds in Midland to 70 mph, court records show.
The upgrade, the widows' lawsuit alleges, created the defect in the detection system, effectively reducing warning time.
The defect in the track detection circuitry was compounded in March 2012, the widows' lawsuit contends, when a Union Pacific representative found the warning time set for 35 seconds and dialed it back to 25 seconds because that's what the railroad's design called for.