Ventura County Railroad Grade Crossing at Rice Ave. Becomes a Deadly, Serial Disaster
Jack Kerouac began his novel, “The Dharma Bums”, with a northbound train trip on what is now the Union Pacific Railroad’s Coast Line.
Kerouac wrote, “Hopping a freight out of Los Angeles at high noon one
day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my
duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the
clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara. It was a local and I
intended to sleep on the beach at Santa Barbara that night and catch
either another local to San Luis Obispo the next morning or the first
class freight all the way to San Francisco at seven 
p.m.
Somewhere near Camarillo where Charlie Parker’d been mad and relaxed
back to normal health, a thin old little bum climbed into my gondola as
we headed into a siding…”
With its fertile land and mild coastal climate, the Oxnard Plain can
support up to three row crops per year. After making a turn south of
Camarillo, the Coast Line railroad heads due west
for several miles, and then turns north at Oxnard. From Camarillo to
Oxnard, State Route 34 (known as Fifth Street in Oxnard) parallels the
train tracks. As it was during Kerouac’s 1955 excursion, northbound
trains still encounter grade crossings at Pleasant Valley Road, South Las Posas Road and again at East Pleasant Valley Road. Before reaching Rice Ave., there is still one more grade crossing at North Del Norte Blvd.
The Coast Line, now operated by the Union Pacific Railroad,
starts in San Francisco. In his 1950’s journal entry titled “The
Railroad Earth”, Jack Kerouac described milepost 0.00. “There was a
little alley in San Francisco back of the Southern Pacific station
at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with
everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of
their commuter frenzy as soon they’ll be charging en masse from Market
and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dressed through
workingman Frisco…”
Just over 406 track-miles south from Kerouac’s surprisingly contemporary
description of San Francisco, at Oxnard is the infamous intersection
of South Rice Ave. and Fifth St. In frequency and severity of rail
collisions, the grade crossing at Rice Ave. and Fifth St. is the most
dangerous in Ventura County.
Although
the location ranks as only the 23rd most hazardous rail crossing in
California, the carnage involved with high-speed collisions at Rice Ave.
makes it seem much worse. Since 2009, three separate train collisions
have occurred at what is now the deadliest rail crossing
in Ventura County. A small shrine near the grade crossing includes
three white crosses, two of which commemorate a June 3, 2014 Amtrak/car
collision that took two lives. The largest cross features a fading
“RIP” for Joel Arias.
Two baseball caps left at the makeshift memorial indicate that one or
both decedents were San Francisco 49er fans. A long-dead miniature
Christmas tree and wreath commemorated a poignant moment for friends
and family of the young men. That fateful day, Arias accelerated his
black, 2004 Infinity G35 
southbound towards the Rice Ave. crossing. As his vehicle approached the tracks,
red lights flashed, bells sounded and the crossing arms were down.
Speeding onto the tracks, Arias’ Infinity collided with the engine of
the eastbound Amtrak Coast Starlight passenger train. Although no one
on the Amtrak train was injured, both twenty-year-old Arias and his
nineteen-year-old passenger, Chris Stevens perished upon impact with the
Amtrak locomotive.
Nine months later, before sunrise on February 24, 2015, Jose
Sanchez-Ramirez, 54, a first-time visitor from Tucson Arizona,
approached the same location. In the dark, driving on unfamiliar roads,
Sanchez-Ramirez turned his vehicle too soon.
Eighty feet west of Rice Ave., his Ford F-450 utility truck and
double-axle trailer came to rest, straddling the southern rail. After
realizing that he had high-centered his rig, Sanchez-Ramirez turned on
the emergency flashers, opened the driver-side door and vacated the
scene on foot.
Originating from the East Ventura Metrolink Station at 5:25 AM that day, Metrolink Train No. 102
accelerated to seventy-nine miles per hour before approaching the Rice
Avenue grade crossing at 5:44 AM. Southbound Metrolink trains typically
feature a diesel pusher engine, several commuter coaches of various
types and a cab-control car with enhanced crash protection at the front.
In this case, the unoccupied pusher engine was the venerable Metrolink No. 870 and taking the lead was the newer Hyundai-Rotem cab-control car No. 645.
After a deadly collision in 2008 involving a Metrolink passenger train
and a Union Pacific freight train in Chatsworth, California, Metrolink
spent $263-million on a fleet of new, more crash-worthy passenger
coaches. Although the cab-control car and the Hyundai-Rotem third and
fourth coaches were of the new design, the second coach was an older,
lighter and less crash-worthy Bombardier bi-level model. In retrospect,
it seems foolish for Metrolink to create a five-car train in which the
second coach is both unsafe and functionally obsolete.
Soon
after Sanchez-Ramirez abandoned his rig, Train No. 102 approached the
Rice Ave. crossing at fifty-six miles per hour. Senior Metrolink
Engineer Glenn Steele, 62, was in the right-hand seat of the cab.
Steele, of Homeland in Riverside County, had forty-two years of
experience and ranked No. 1 on the Metrolink seniority list. Operating
the train from the left seat was an unnamed student engineer. This was
to be his final check ride prior to the student becoming a Metrolink
engineer.
Survivors of a train collision
often describe the events as happening in slow motion. Because of their
immense size, railroad rolling stock takes time to derail, head off in
different directions and then come to a rest. Still, in less than one
minute the calamitous events of that February morning came to their
inevitable conclusion.
Moments
before the collision, the truck’s headlights and emergency flashers
loomed into view of cab-control car No. 645. From there, the student
engineer applied the emergency brakes. It is unknown if the student
engineer stayed in his seat throughout the inevitable collision with
the truck and trailer. Later reports indicated that engineer Glenn
Steele stayed in his seat throughout the flaming collision. In those
brief moments, he witnessed and felt the derailment, decoupling,
spinning and toppling of the cab-control car.
With the train's brakes in full emergency mode for only eight seconds, cab-control car No. 645 collided with the Ford F-450 eighty feet west of the Rice Ave.
grade crossing. Lighter than its diesel pusher engine to the rear, the
cab-control car derailed and then rode up over the wreckage of the
F-450, slicing it almost in half. Forensic evidence shows that the
derailed left 
wheel-truck of the cab-control car hit the steel edge of the grade crossing platform, hopped into the air for several feet and then veered diagonally to the left across Rice Ave.
As Sir Isaac Newton taught us, objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Metrolink Engine No. 870, an EMD F59PH
rated at 3000 horsepower, took longer to stop than the four lighter
coaches that preceded it across the roadway. Although cab-control car
No. 645 featured an anti-derailment device, which looks
similar to a small snowplow, that lightweight blade was no match for
the mass of a 14,000-pound utility truck and trailer. A photo taken
after the collision shows that the anti-derailment “plow” had detached from the 
cab-control car and was lost in the collision.
As cab-control car No. 645 veered to the left, the obsolete Bombardier
bi-level coach No. 206 behind it pushed forward, exacerbating the
derailment. Just east of the Rice Ave. grade crossing, the cab-control
car and the second coach fully derailed and soon decoupled. As the
cab-control car veered to the left, its steel wheels ripped up wooden
railroad ties, further compromising the roadbed. Meanwhile, Engine No.
870 continued decelerating at the rear of the train.
Like a highway patrol officer performing a “pit maneuver”, momentum from
the second coach pivoted the cab-control car to the left. As it veered
off-track and down an embankment, its crash-resistant nose dug into
the bottom of a shallow depression. Because of its lightweight
construction, the 
obsolete
second coach had not withstood the extreme pressures exerted on the
couplers at each end. Inertia from its previous mate pivoted the cab-control
car 180-degrees, while toppling it onto its side. Coming to rest,
cab-control car No. 645 lay on its right side, pointing opposite its
original direction of travel.
Meanwhile, the lightweight Bombardier second coach was off the rails at
both ends and decoupled from both the cab-control car and the third
coach. Having expended so much kinetic energy pushing the cab-control
car asunder, the second coach launched off the rails to the right,
where it came to rest, on its right side, many yards away. The newer and
heavier third and fourth coaches derailed, yet stayed in alignment
with the tracks. In the final moments of 
the
collision, the third coach toppled onto its left side. Although
partially derailed, Engine No. 870 came to rest in an upright position.
As the nose of the cab-control car
hit the dirt, Engineer Glenn Steele remained at the controls. As his
lead car finished its tumultuous pirouette, the right side-window of the cab broke out
and disappeared into the rubble. According to news reports, Steele
suffered chest injuries in the crash. Later, a family member told the
press that Steele’s heart had stopped twice in the days after the
accident. One week after the collision, Glenn Steele succumbed to his
injuries.
This is Part 1 of a two-part article. To read Part 2, Click Here.
To read all of our Ventura County railroad safety articles in one place, please visit 5thandRice.com.
By James McGillis at 05:37 PM | | Comments (0) | Link
