Passenger Trains > Going back in time: The sabotage of the Sunset Limited

In going through some old Trains magazines I found the January 1996 issue containing the first hand account of the derailment of Amtrak train #1, on 10/9/95, by passenger Jim Johnson. It's a good read, though not everybody thought highly of it:

http://nikitas3.com/276/liberal-bias-over-a-train-wreck/

The accident was similar to the sabotage derailment of the City of San Francisco near Harney, NV in 1939. To this date neither case has been solved.

Here's another link that's sheds a bit more light on the Sunset Limited derailment/sabotage and it's far reaching impact:

http://www.ble-t.org/pr/news/headline.asp?id=14688



Allen



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/14 14:46 by bradleymckay.

From Article:

>"After all, the freight railroad that owned the tracks that the Amtrak train was running on – Southern Pacific – was running freight trains over those tracks regularly. So how did the saboteurs know the moment an >Amtrak train was due without somehow derailing a Southern Pacific freight train in the meantime?
>
>Answer: They most likely did not. Because Amtrak probably was not the target of anti-government zealots, but rather Southern Pacific probably was the target of anti-business zealots."

The thing is, SP was not using that line for their own traffic "regularly". The West Line was pretty much Amtrak only, and anyone familiar with the operations on that line would have known that...

I agree with that assessment. If anyone wanted to attack the SP, they would have struck the main line where the freight traffic is. Their target was clearly the Sunset Limited.

The thing I ain't gonna forget is when they found a truck nearby, that really was something that they couldn't find back in 39, a getaway vehicle!

Yes, and we lost an attendant, Mitchell Bates, who died in that wreck, too... Sadly, the case is cold and no new information has come out over the years, so it may go down in history like the '39 wreck as another unsolved sabotage. I remember that the SPHTS was interviewed, too, since they had run an article on the Palisade "City of SF" sabotage, and by coincidence, it ran shortly before the '95 Sunset Limited sabotage near Phoenix.

For those interested, a sleeper from the original '39 City of San Francisco wreck survived and is on display at Travel Town in Griffith Park, Los Angeles where it's being restored.

IIRC, an ATV was recovered at the wreck scene in '95 along with a note from a militia group that was never authenticated--didn't know about another vehicle, though.

Just had a chance to go over the source material from the original poster--The BLET article was from '05 and the other was 2011--pretty outdated, and very sad to hear of the ruined lives of some of the survivors who, understandably, were unable to recover from the emotional pain of such an ordeal.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/14 19:43 by IC_2024.

The morning of the wreck I taking orders at Pentrex. I had just heard about it when I took a phone call from the FBI. The agent wanted to know if there was in fact a similar wreck years before on the SP? I told him that there was and that the circumstances were so similar that I had assumed that the second wreck was a "copycat crime". He asked if a book had been written on the first wreck and I directed him "Tragic Train" although I did say the author had a reputation for "iffy facts". He rang off and I never heard from him again. Soon thereafter I was demoted to the stock room because my typing was to slow--no one had ever asked if I could type which I could not! I soon left. A few years later I was on the Sunset Ltd. My sleeper attendant said he had been in the wreck and had found a bunch of handbills protesting the US Government scattered in the desert which he turned over to the FBI. Over the years I have had other passing encounters with the FBI and I can say with some authority that the G-men don't always get their man and they do chase obvious dead-end leads for bureaucratic and political reasons--but we need them just the same.

railwaybaron Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The morning of the wreck I taking orders at
> Pentrex. I had just heard about it when I took a
> phone call from the FBI. The agent wanted to know
> if there was in fact a similar wreck years before
> on the SP? I told him that there was and that the
> circumstances were so similar that I had assumed
> that the second wreck was a "copycat crime". He
> asked if a book had been written on the first
> wreck and I directed him "Tragic Train" although I
> did say the author had a reputation for "iffy
> facts". He rang off and I never heard from him
> again. Soon thereafter I was demoted to the stock
> room because my typing was to slow--no one had
> ever asked if I could type which I could not! I
> soon left. A few years later I was on the Sunset
> Ltd. My sleeper attendant said he had been in the
> wreck and had found a bunch of handbills
> protesting the US Government scattered in the
> desert which he turned over to the FBI. Over the
> years I have had other passing encounters with the
> FBI and I can say with some authority that the
> G-men don't always get their man and they do chase
> obvious dead-end leads for bureaucratic and
> political reasons--but we need them just the same.


I bet at times when that happens some of them get very pissed off, especially on incidents like what happened to No. 1!

A friend of mine who works for Amtrak was interviewed by the FBI (not necessarily as a suspect!) and they peppered him with a lot of interesting questions. The fact that the line through Hyder, AZ was so lightly used (SP was running practically no freight over the line at the time) concerned them in making it vulnerable to sabotage. They wanted to know if there were other locations in the U.S. that had the same characteristics. He mentioned the Lamy, NM - La Junta, CO line (it was lightly freight trafficked even back then) and portions of what is now the Buckingham Branch Railroad used by the CARDINAL.

I think they were pretty sure they "had their man", a disgruntled guy who traded in scrap items with SP, but with the rules of evidence they didn't quite have enough on him to press charges.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/14 09:50 by CA_Sou_MA_Agent.

If you read "Tragic Train" for all the examination of evidence and possible suspects, as I recall (it's been years) the author concludes saying that they pretty much had figured out who the culprit was but there was insufficent evidence. And, by the time of the writing, he was long dead. This after telling us that there's a safe at SP headquarters with evidence in case any new leads develop.