A lawsuit filed earlier this year in state court by a Santa Cruz County woman who alleges the Union Pacific Railroad Company (UPRR) is responsible for injuries she suffered in 2019 when her car was hit by a train at a private crossing has been removed to a federal court at the request of the company.
In June, Melissa Lunderville sued UPRR for negligence stemming from a Aug. 2, 2019 accident. UPRR was able to remove the case to the U.S. District Court in Tucson under a claim of diversity jurisdiction because the company is incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware and its principal place of business in the State of Nebraska.
Now that a federal judge has been assigned to the case, attorneys for UPRR are expected to respond to Lunderville’s lawsuit in the next few weeks.
According to the lawsuit, the only way Lunderville can access her property near Interstate 19 east of Tubac is by the Clark Road Crossing of a single mainline track. The crossing did not have traffic control arms, automatic whistles or horns, nor a “slow order” which would have limited the speed of trains in the area.
Lunderville alleges that large amounts of overgrown vegetation and “unsafe conditions” with the crossing caused her vehicle to be struck by a UPRR locomotive traveling as a high rate of speed. Therefore, the only way for Lunderville to see if a train was coming was to get within fouling distance of the track, the lawsuit alleges.
Fouling distance refers to the area near railway tracks in which an individual or item can be struck by a moving train or other on-track equipment.
“As [Lunderville] crossed the tracks, the Union Pacific train smashed into her, causing severe and permanent damages, including a traumatic brain injury,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit also alleges the engineer did not blow the train’s horn and was not prepared to stop in the event of a local safety hazard, which could have “significantly reduced or eliminated” Lunderville’s injuries.
The company is expected to argue that Lunderville was aware of the obvious risks with traversing the crossing and that trains travel pass that specific crossing at a high rate of speed. More than 400 train versus vehicle or pedestrian accidents occur which year at private crossings, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
