Saturday, September 1, 2007

Engineer followed all procedures, officials say

Jeff Proctor Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

Information downloaded from a device used to record a locomotive's operations confirmed that the engineer who was driving the Rail Runner that struck and killed two people near Los Lunas last week followed all appropriate procedures, officials said Friday.

Carol Ann Donovan, 63, and her brother, Michael Raffer, 53, died after her 2006 Jeep Liberty was struck by the southbound train on Aug. 24 about 2.5 miles south of Los Lunas.

Authorities have said since the crash that the engineer was not at fault and that multiple agencies would use witness interviews, observations from the engineer and information contained in the "event recorder" — similar to an airplane's black box — to compile reports.

Those reports have been completed and filed with the state Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration, Lawrence Rael of the Mid-Region Council of Governments said at a news conference Friday.

Rael declined to provide specifics from the reports or the event recorder, saying "some of the facts and circumstances of this incident are still under investigation by multiple agencies, and because it may yield additional facts and there may be litigation in the future, some information may be considered privileged.

"What I can say is that the engineer followed appropriate procedures and did the appropriate notifications through the use of the horn to notify drivers at (the intersection where the crash occurred) that a train was on the tracks," Rael said.

The device "also supports that the train was put into an emergency braking situation prior to that intersection," he said.

The siblings, along with other family members in separate vehicles, were headed to dinner, traveling west toward N.M. 314. They had been gathered all week and were with their mother, Virginia Sheehan, 86, when she died Friday morning under hospice care.

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