Driver escapes as impact rips two cargo trailers apart. In broad daylight just outside Sleepy Eye, population 3,400, west of Mankato. This was on Canadian Pacific’s trans-southern Minnesota line — 180 miles west of CP’s Winona railhead and 70 miles east its Tracy railhead near the near the South Dakota border. Images: Brown County sheriff
Locomotive was braking but too late
SLEEPY EYE, Minn. – A train sliced a truck-trailer rig in half at a rail crossing along U.S. Highway 14 near Sleepy Eye. Miraculously no one was hurt. The crash was about 2:15 p.m. Deputies said the grain truck driver, Robert Jewett, age 24, of New Richland, turned off Highway 14 onto a sideroad and across the single-track CP line. The train didn’t derail. Neither engineer in locomotive was hurt — Thomas Behsman, 57, and Jeffrey Schafer, 56, of Madison Lake. The truck’s cab and the train locomotive will need repair. The truck’s semi-trailers ere totaled
Although already braking at impact, the locomotive tore off sections of one grain trailer and carried the remnants a quarter mile down the track on its nose.