Posted by sam at August 30th, 2004
The sound I was hearing did not seem like a sound at all. It was so loud and low that you could feel it more then hear it. The sound had started suddenly and only lasted a second or so and caused the ground to shake for a few seconds after that.
Upon exiting my house onto our back deck I was greeted with perhaps one of the most amazing things of my life. I was young back then, maybe 4 or 5, so some if the memories are fuzzy.
We lived just on the west side of the lake you see on the map (Lower Church Lake) in Broomfield, Colorado. The lake is really small - more of an overgrown pond, I guess. Our house was about am eighth of a mile from the lake, and we had a clear view of it because there was nothing between us except an old haunted house (I mean, a real life Halloween pay to get in haunted house).
You can see on the other side of the lake where the railroad tracks go underneath the highway. There are actually four or five sets of tracks there, running parallel to each other. My older brother and I used to go over there when trains were stopped and play on the trains and throw rocks at them.
It was clear that the noise had come from the lake, so we went out on our back deck to see what had happened. The massive pile of twisted metal and wreckage was truly something to behold. I remember a small group of people gathered at our house, on our deck with binoculars, watching as the workers began to clean up the wreckage.
I don’t remember how many people died that day. The two engineers are obvious, but I remember there were a few cars on the bridge when the two trains hit each other. The explosion and flames, not to mention the train cars piling up and colliding with the bridge, had destroyed it and left the cars unrecognizable. Fortunatly they were freight trains and had no passangers other than the engineers.
Like ants getting their hill knocked down, people worked for weeks to clean up the mess and rebuild the bridge. Eventually everything went back to normal.
I tried tonight to look up an old news story or some mention of it on the net. Most archives don’t go back far enough as this would have happened sometime around 1985 or so. I couldn’t find anything about it but I would be curious to find out what exactly had caused two trains to be on the same track heading in opposite directions. Was it just some switch track operator somewhere who read his clipboard wrong? If so, what happened to him? If I was his boss I don’t think I would have the heart to tell him what he had done. Imagine being responsible for the deaths of two train engineers, and a few unlucky commuters because of a simple oversight.
“The court struck every single one down? Well, that makes the failure rate for gay marriages almost double that of straight marriages.”