Union Pacific Railroad Concedes Misstatements About Deadly Wreck
GLENVIEW, Ill. (CBS) -- The Union Pacific Railroad is correcting some misinformation about the July 4th freight train derailment that killed a Glenview couple.
As WBBM Newsradio's Mike Krauser reports, Union Pacific had said the tracks near the bridge were being inspected twice a day during extreme temperatures. But spokesman Mark Davis tells the Chicago Tribune that was a mistake – the inspections were actually twice a week.
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The railroad also said the tracks were inspected hours before the fatal derailment, but Davis tells the newspaper the inspection would have been scheduled for later in the day.
This past Monday, railroad officials revealed that a Union Pacific employee noticed something potentially wrong with the tracks an hour before the coal train wreck that left Burton and Zorine Lindner dead.
"While we can't change what happened, we can learn from it," David Connell, vice president of engineering at Union Pacific, told an audience of about 200. "We believe we had a heat-related anomaly to the track."
The attorney for the Lindners told the Chicago Sun-Times an inspector was at the scene at the time of the derailment because of the employee's observations.
It is still believed that extreme temperatures caused the tracks to buckle, and the bridge spans were knocked off their foundations, causing the bridge to collapse.
The current investigating entities are the Federal Railroad Administration and the UP itself.
There is no definite time-frame to replace the bridge that crossed Shermer Road near Willow Road.
