2:30 am phone calls are never good news..........

Unless that is, you are normally awake at that hour and the people in your world know this fact.

That is no longer so in my world. So when the phone rang at 2:30 am Tuesday nite, I immediately went into the OMG mode. OMG did not begin to cover it! It was my husband on the phone. Calling me from the emergency room. He had been involved in a train wreck in the yard.

Now, to clarify, my husband is a locomotive engineer for Union Pacific Railroad, so being in or on a train for him is daily business. What is not daily business is being involved in a collision!

He said that he had his train "tied down" (in english that means brakes applied and not moving) and was standing inside the cab getting his stuff together to get off the train and go fetch another one. He said he could hear radio traffic of the switchman on the ground telling another engineer who was controlling another train to STOP STOP STOP. Well, for some reason, the other engineer did not stop and hit my husbands train. Hit it with enough physical force to shove it backwards several feet. That is a hard lick, because a locomotive weights several tons just by itself and what Tony was working with was two locomotives hooked together.

Anyway, he said that the impact from the other train caused him to be thrown forward into the control console. He struck his chest right over his heart area on a sharp corner of the console. Then he was thrown backwards against the power panels behind him. He said he was stunned for a few moments as he had no idea what was going on other than he had been hit! Due to the bright headlights on the other approaching train, he was not able to actually "see" them or judge how close they were.

He went to the emergency room for a check. They did xrays, ekg and of course the requisite drug test. Then he had to go back to the yard to reinact the whole thing for the paper pushers. He wanted to come home cuz he was hurting but they insisted that he stay even though he was totally not at fault and was the one who was struck. When he finally did get home on Wednesday morning he was starting to stiffen up. By the time he went to our own family doctor, he was seriously having some pain in the impact area and up across his shoulder and neck. Thank goodness it was just a minor incident!

People dont realize that they work around deadly, dangerous, unforgiving equipment out there around those trains. Men get killed everyday because of stupid mistakes. I dread the day I ever have to get one of THOSE phone calls.