When thousands of tons of freight cars rolled free from a Montclair switching station, crew members knew they had just minutes to try to stop them before the runaway cars gained too much speed. Their one shot, experts agreed Saturday, was to catch the cars with a locomotive before they left the yard, a risky maneuver.
Frantic Union Pacific employees tried to get permission from their dispatch operators to give chase. By the time they heard back, it was too late.
The 3,883 tons of rail cars rolled loose after crew members apparently failed to secure the brakes.
More than 20 minutes later, 11 of the 31 freight cars were derailed by railroad officials into a Commerce neighborhood, destroying several homes and displacing 150 residents.
No one was seriously hurt in the accident, which sent freight cars and thousands of pieces of lumber tumbling without warning into the blue-collar neighborhood of single-family homes and apartments.
Rail safety officials, who would not comment about the details of their investigation, said that once the line of freight cars began to pick up speed as it traveled downhill toward Los Angeles, there was little that could be done to stop the cars safely.
"If they'd got it before it left the yard, if they could have hooked up a locomotive, that would have been fine," said Robert Campbell, the lead investigator of the accident for the National Transportation Safety Board. "But once the cars got out of the yard, they had too much speed and weight. It would have been a death wish."
Experts said using a locomotive to chase, attach and control a runaway group of 30 speeding rail cars would be virtually impossible. "One thousand bad things can happen," said NTSB investigator Dave Watson.
The locomotive and rail cars would probably collide in the attempt, Watson said, causing a massive accident and potentially killing the locomotive crew. Even if the coupling was successful, Watson said, there would be little chance of connecting the air braking system and the locomotive would be powerless to stop a string of cars that reached speeds of 70 mph.
"I guess it's theoretically possible, if you've got Steven Seagal" to dangle between speeding trains and connect the air brakes, said Watson.
Ernie Flament, a retired Union Pacific engineer and the president of the Los Angeles-area Union Pacific Employee Club, said that during his long career with the railroad he had seen an engine catch runaway cars.
