Examples of Third-Party Liability in Railroad Accidents

In my experience, the two most common that I’ve dealt with as far as third party causing a railroad worker’s injury are crossing collisions, and that is where I’ve had 18 wheelers that were either trying to beat the train or for some reason, usually the truck is overloaded, gets stuck on the track, and the locomotive hits the truck. The Engineer and conductor on a locomotive literally are inside, it’s basically a big metal box and so they have little or no protection inside the cab. So you can imagine the impact of something the size of a locomotive hitting a semi or 18 wheeler on, that’s stuck on the crossing or trying to beat the train, they get the engineer and conductor pretty well bounced around in there, so I’ve had them deal with significant injuries. In those cases, you have a third party, in other words, the trucking company that is at fault there. Another example is a van collision. Railroad workers are required to stop work after they’ve been on duty for 12 hours. In other words, they can’t work for those 12 hours, so they stop work or even they may be at a stopping point before that time, but they need to be transported to another location, so a new crew will be brought out. The old crew taken back in a van had cases where those vans were involved in collisions and as a result, our railroad workers were injured. Again, you’ve got a third party who is at fault for the railroad workers’ injury, and so you would go, you know, find out who owned the van, and that would then become your target defendant.