00:00Railroading in dark territory always has its risks. Without signals to follow, all
00:06you can rely on are track warrants, and you better read those carefully, because
00:11if you don't, it could cause a catastrophic disaster. And that's exactly
00:15what happened in Texas 15 years ago, which came to be known as the Gunter
00:21train collision. On May 19th, 2004, two BNSF rock trains were were running in
00:33opposite directions on the X Frisco line just north of Dallas, Texas. The
00:39southernmost point on that subdivision was Irving, Texas, where the northbound
00:43train left from. Its callsign was BNSF 6351 North, and the power was 4SD40-2.
00:516351 Leading, formerly Santa Fe 5036, FURX Lease Unit 8099, a former BN
01:01locomotive, and another lease unit from First Union Rail, 3052, which was ex-Canadian
01:08Pacific, and finally another BNSF SD40-2 7806. As mentioned earlier, this line
01:15was in dark territory, or in other words, unsignaled territory. According to
01:206351 North's track warrant, it had priority over another rock train, a
01:25southbound. The callsign for this train was BNSF 6789 South. The power consisted of
01:33three locomotives. The leader was SD40-2, you guessed it, 6789, an ex-Santa Fe GP60M 142, and yet another BNSF SD40-2 7138.
01:44The point on the line where the trains were scheduled to pass was Dorchester Siding, which was around
01:55milepost 657.7. The milepost numbers on this line went higher as you go further south toward Irving.
02:02The track warrant for 6789 South specifically read that it did not take effect until the arrival of 6351 North.
02:12Then, only after 6351 passed were they to proceed further south. The track warrant was either misread or
02:20ignored by the crew because they proceeded past the south junction of Dorchester Siding, back onto the
02:26single-tracked main where 6351 was heading in the opposite direction on the same track. At milepost 661.9,
02:35both trains came into view, getting closer and closer to one another. And then...
02:53The trains collide head-on near the town of Gunter, four miles south of Dorchester Siding. The estimated
03:01combined speed was in excess of 60 miles an hour. In the chaos of the wreck, the engineer of 6789 was
03:08killed while the other crew members of both trains suffered injuries. It didn't take very much time
03:15for the National Transportation Safety Board to find the smoking gun, which was the track warrant for 6789.
03:22If you look at box number seven, which says, not in effect until after arrival of 6351 North at South
03:31Dorchester, you can see where the crew made an error. Although we don't really know how they made the error,
03:38or what contributed to it, whether they were asleep, drunk, tired, or something else,
03:45this tiny oversight cost the engineer his life. If 6789's crew read their track warrant more carefully,
03:53or alternatively, if the line was equipped with positive train control, the collision would have
03:58been prevented. But we can't just rely on computers to do all the work for us. After the wreck, 6351, and all
04:07the locomotives of the southbound train, which were 6789, 142, and 7138, were considered totaled and
04:16scrapped. The four other engines involved were repaired and returned to service to continue their careers.
04:23Train crew's actions and inactions can result in deadly disasters, and it was 6789's crew's inactions,
04:32not reading their track warrant carefully enough, that puts them at fault with a gunter train collision.
04:39Let's hope train crews of today have learned the mistakes of the crew of 6789 15 years ago,
04:46so they know not to make those same mistakes again. So have they learned? Apparently not really,
04:53because 11 years after that in 2015, in Georgia, a head-on collision on NS happened under very similar
05:02circumstances. So to make the railroads as safe as possible here in North America, shouldn't we just
05:08install signals everywhere and phase out track warrants entirely? Seems to me like that would be the
05:13best option.
