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Railroad security is and has been an issue and it think railroad’s need to keep their eyes open and not put profits before safety. And I can give you an example. I had a case a number of years ago in Washington state where a locomotive engineer goes to work, he’s going to get on his engine that had been parked there overnight in a rural area. They leave the engines running because since they’re diesel that’s the procedure BNSF did at the time. So he goes on his locomotive and he’s trying to operate his locomotive and he’s going to back to do his job and his engineer seat breaks. Well, the railroad tried to claim that the reason the seat broke is ‘cause some trespasser went in there or excuse me, they tried to claim that my employee actually tried to beat on his own seat with a wrench and made his seat fall off. Well it runs out they had left the train there all night long and other people had had stuff stolen from trains there by trespassers.
And so, we showed because of their lack of security, these trains not only could, you know, things be endangered if somebody wanted to steal a seat to put it on a boat or something or whatever they were going to do. More importantly, it was dangerous because locomotives have what’s called a reverser, it’s a piece of equipment you put in to control, it’s almost like the keys to the locomotive. And they don’t lock the cabs or didn’t lock the cabs at the time.
And I explained to them at that time, I said, this could cause a major problem. If somebody gets in there and the trains already running and just puts it and all they have to do is use one of these video games that tells you how to operate locomotives and they could be going down the track. We took depositions and warned them and everything. They didn’t do anything about it. And then something happens up in Quebec where they blew the whole city up because they had a one-man crew and everything else. And they started to get the message. And so now they lock the locomotive cabs.
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St. Paul, MN personal injury lawyer John D. Magnuson talks about the dangers present due to the railroads poor security procedures.