 It is the 27th of June 2022 and investigators are poring over the wreckage of an Amtrak train. Carriages are strewn all over the place and the site is at an at-grade railroad crossing. The crossing is pretty lackluster in terms of advanced warning to road users. Visibility is reduced and has been known to be a risky location. You see the cause of the derailment was the collision with a dump truck. It would highlight that even in the 2020s, disaster-involving poorly designed at-grade level crossings are a lot of thing of the past. My name is John and welcome to Plainly Difficult. Today we're looking at the tragic 2022 Missouri train derailment. A dangerous crossing. Menden, Missouri is a tiny community of some 160-odd residents. The city, founded in 1871, was moved to be near the newly built Santa Fe Railroad Line in the late 1880s. The city and the railway became intertwined, making it one of the area's biggest sources of income. However, ever since its peak at the start of the last century, this city's population has gradually reduced from over 400 down to just over 160. It is largely surrounded by agricultural land with miles around being empty fields, intersected by the railway line. Which over the years would change ownership, eventually coming under the control of BNSF. One such intersection was roughly one mile to the southwest at Country Road 113, Portia Prairie Avenue. This crossing is somewhere in the middle of what I would like to describe as butt-fuck nowhere. As such, it has little in terms of crossing protection systems. It is known as a passive crossing, in that it has no active warning systems like lights or barriers. Instead, it was armed with cross-bucks and a stop sign. The line runs along a berm, which raises above the Portia Prairie Avenue at a height of roughly 9 feet, or 2.7 meters, above the road. A side effect of this is that the road needs to rise up to meet the railway line. As such, there was a pretty steep incline from the road to the crossing. This severely reduced visibility to road users of approaching trains, which I might add can travel of speeds up to 90 miles an hour. Needless to say, the trains have no ability to avoid a collision if running at line speed. Now it is all pretty standard dodgy crossing implementation we see all over the world, where low traffic roads get bugger all in terms of crossing warning and protection. Usually no one cares, so few vehicles use it and the cost is prohibitive. But this crossing in particular had actually been highlighted as a concern from locals. You see the types of vehicles that were most likely to cross the tracks were big, tall, heavy farm vehicles, which gave little room for error when climbing the steep gradient up onto the line. The railway however did have pretty modern train control systems in place, with BNSF authorising train movements with a traffic control system. Train movements are managed by a BNSF train dispatcher, located at the dispatch centre in Fort Worth, Texas. Local resident Mike Spencer, concerned about the crossing, brought it to light on a 2nd of December 2019 Chariton County Commission meeting. He was informed that he should contact the Missouri Department of Transportation's Railroad Safety Division. A week later, commissioners spoke with officials from the state agency and were told it was on their plans to repair. A couple of years would go on until a meeting at the crossing in March 2021 with a state railroad safety division engineer. The issues with the crossing were pretty obvious as such it was proposed to install lights and gates along with roadway improvements. The cost was estimated to be around $400,000. Usually with these kind of things the federal government would pay up to 80% and the county would have to default the bill of 20%. But the site was rather low on the priorities list due to the limited funds available for crossing upgrades. The conversion was approved to be completed in a four-year plan that runs through fiscal year 2026. Great, all everyone needed to do was to not have a crash on the crossing. But we all know what the next chapter of this video is going to be. The Disaster. The normally pretty quiet Porsche Prairie Avenue in June 2022 had become a hive of activity. Alongside the line, near the crossing, the Army Corps of Engineers were undertaking repair works to a levy. To facilitate this, multiple trucks crossed the line to deliver aggregate. One such vehicle is a 2007 Kenworth W900B dump truck. It is owned by MS Contracting and on the 27th of June it is carrying heavy rock heading northbound towards the crossing. But we will quickly pause here just to briefly talk about the train that will also be approaching the crossing. The line was pretty well used being double track and all. One of the trains that funded along the railway was the Southwest Chief, an Amtrak operated long-distance service that covers a 2,265 mile route between Chicago and Los Angeles. Today the train is running four hours late and is extra busy. It consists of from the front to rear, two GE Genesis P42 DC locomotives, one view liner, baggage car and seven Superliner railcars. At approximately 12.40 pm, the Southwest Chief is running along the line heading northeast towards Menden, Missouri at roughly 89mph. At around the same time the Kenworth truck is heading towards the crossing and is about to climb the steep gradient up. Visibility is awful and is not being helped by the vegetation overgrowth along the berm. The train engineer blows the horn roughly one quarter of a mile from the Porsche Prairie Avenue crossing. The truck slowly chugs up the incline and onto the crossing. The time is now roughly 12.42 pm. The front of the truck is over the running line and slowly crossing. The train strikes a truck as it still fouls the line. The train is travelling at roughly 87mph and the emergency brakes are applied, but it wouldn't stop what would happen next. The impact of the train striking the truck was enough to cause each locomotive and carriage to do rail. Seven of the eight carriages tipped over onto their side, throwing passengers around within. The truck was pushed down into a nearby ditch. Once the train came to stop, many aboard made quick work of escaping the damaged carriages. Due to the site being pretty remote, the first responders would take some time to arrive, even though many emergency calls came in. In a strange side effect of the time of year, the route was often frequented by scouts who provided much needed first aid to the many wounded. Over 20 emergency crews would arrive to assist with first aid and emergency evacuations as well as body recovery. Locals assisted with evacuating wounded and debris removal using pickup trucks, personal cars and farm equipment. In total two would be dead on the train as well as a truck driver. Another passenger would die in hospital the next day. Of the 270 passengers and crew aboard the train, 150 would be reported to have suffered some sort of injury. As the disaster took place on the US railroad, it would come under the jurisdiction of the NTSB to investigate. The investigation. So almost as soon as the dust had settled, the NTSB sent a 16-person team to the crash site to pour over the wreckage. The train's data recorder was pulled and it was found that the train was running as it should and they are also even to get some data from the truck as it had an onboard engine management system. Almost immediately the issues with the crossing were apparent and its history of concerns were dug up. It would turn out that it was a tragedy just waiting to happen and the crossing was just rubbish. Sadly the accident was a victim of lack of apparent priority of the authorities to improve its protection controls. Investigators found out that just a few weeks before the disaster, a farmer had posted to Facebook about the danger of the crossing that it posed and its overgrown state. The crossing was blocked off to road traffic with a pile of railway sleepers. The disaster in all is thought to have cost around four US million dollars in infrastructure damage but of course there would be a greater cost in lawsuits of which Amtrak, BNSF and MS contracting all received cases against each other. All of which so far have yet to be decided. So it's really hard to rate this disaster on the legacy scale because its legacy is still yet to be understood. But maybe it's something I'll come back to in a later video. Sorry for the slightly shorter video than normal this week, I've been a little overworked because my minion army aka my family has increased. Basically I'm now the proud farmer of not just a toddler but also a newborn girl. If you've had children, you know what it's like with the whole lack of sleep thing. Luckily I've got two weeks of paternity leave from my day job so hopefully I should be able to catch up with some work. This is a plain difficult production. All videos on the channel are creative commons attribution share alike licensed. Plain difficult videos are produced by me John in the currently very sunny and nice corner of southern London UK. I'd like to thank my Patreon and YouTube members for your financial support and the rest of you for tuning in every week. I have Instagram, Twitter and a second channel so feel free to check them out. And all that's left to say is thank you for watching and Mr Music, play us out please.