He has represented hundreds of victims of railroad disasters including the Placentia crash in 2002 and the Glendale in 2005.
As the news conference began to fall apart on Wednesday, and before he was whisked away from reporters by police for several hours of questioning, Mr. Burkhardt was asked if his tiny railroad's giant disaster would be its financial ruin.
It was fascinating to learn about that bad behavior of railroads when a disaster strikes.
The image and this description come from the book "Steamboat Disasters and Railroad Accidents in the United States," published in Worcester in 1846.
And a top official in the disaster-plagued railroad industry announced that in his opinion Britain was suffering from "rail cancer".
The railroad behind the Lac-Mégantic disaster has since gone back to two-person crews, but several small railroads are still running trains with a single operator — and larger railroads are eyeing the practice, Kaminkow said.
The Wellington disaster, named after the little railroad town where the ill-fated trains spent their final hours, held the front page for weeks, and then, like most news stories, it disappeared into the past.
Mr. Warrington said the disaster "punctuated the importance of the railroad" as a strategic asset.
But it is Dan, the railroad man, who brings back the real seeds of disaster that will infect the lives of the dreamers and their children forever.
This bottleneck can be a disaster in bad weather; it also keeps the railroad from sending more trains east from Penn Station, against the regular commuter flow, out to where many jobs are, or could be.
