25 April 2007
Family of CP Rail Engineer Says He Died a Hero
Trail British Columbia - The family of a CP Rail engineer
says he died a hero, staying at the controls of a racing train and saving his fellow crew members and others from possible death and
injury.
The body of Lonnie Plasko, 51, was found beneath the train wreck in Trail, B.C. in the West Kootenay region on Tuesday, a day after the
crash.
His niece, Lisa Douglas, said the family has learned Plasko told two remaining crew members to jump for their lives, as the
out-of-control freight train careened down a 12-metre embankment.
The two railway workers - a conductor and a trainman - jumped off the moving train and survived. They were sent to hospital and treated
for minor injuries.
"He was a hero. Yes he was, isn't that wonderful?" Douglas told the Canadian Press in a phone interview.
The incident occurred Monday afternoon as the train travelled down a hill on a private rail line that is used only to connect a
fertilizer facility to the CP Rail yard in Trail, B.C.
It happened around the time Teck Cominco day-shift workers would be going home and afternoon workers would be starting
their shifts.
"Teck Cominco is quite dangerous with pipelines and parking lots and lots of other people there. So he really did do a great,
great service to everybody," Douglas told CP.
"He really was very heroic. It could have ended up so much more tragically than just one person lost."
Friends say they aren't surprised Plasko remained onboard.
"Lonnie was a really wonderful person, he had a conscience and he was very sincere," Johann Fasthuber told CTV British
Columbia. "He was always a calm person, and he was very polite and very self-conscious."
Cause Yet Unknown
The train's data recorder has been located and the Transportation Safety Board is downloading the information, hoping to get to the
bottom of the deadly crash.
Investigators, meanwhile, are inspecting the braking systems of every one of the 10 rail cars and two locomotives involved in the crash.
Dan Holbrook with the TSB said it's clear the freight train was running uncontrolled down the steep track before it crashed.
"So you would obviously look at the function of the brakes. But that doesn't necessarily mean the brakes malfunctioned. There are
operating procedures and practices that need to be stringently followed, particularly in mountain-grade territory,"
he said.
Anything over 1.8 percent is considered mountain grade and the track the train charged down Monday was near four percent - a grade
Holbrook said would make it one of the steepest tracks in North America.
CP Rail spokesperson Mark Seland said the crew would have performed several safety tests on the train before it left the rail yard,
including a brake test.
Because an engineer was killed in the crash, Transport Canada is also conducting its own inquiry.
Seland said the two surviving crew members have been offered critical-stress debriefing and will be interviewed to help
determine the cause of the crash.
"We will be interviewing the crew sometime over the next couple of days, taking the data from the event recorder, and possible
witnesses, and then pair all that to what the TSB is looking at and Transport Canada and then try to piece together that
picture."
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