Hatter Shane Leuck says he was sure he would die in a train crash 40 years ago in Medicine Hat that claimed the life of a Calgary engineer who desperately tried to stop the runaway as it approached the city.--News Photo Collin Gallant
cgallant@medicinehatnews.com@CollinGallant
Hurtling toward Medicine Hat on a freight train with no brakes, Shayne Leuck didn’t have time to be scared. He simply accepted he was going to die.
“You don’t survive being at the head of a runaway train crash – there was no two ways about it – but I did,” Leuck said Friday, nearly 40 years after the train overturned on the corner near Altawana Drive, while the engine careened into the main yard, slamming into another engine, leaving wreckage and one man dead and others badly injured.
“I think about it often; it’s been a defining moment in my life,” said Leuck.
Sunday, Jan. 7 marks the 40th anniversary of the crash that stands as one of the largest accidents in Medicine Hat’s history.
Plumes of smoke from sulphur cars rose for days. It sparked debate about the rail yard’s place in downtown of a growing city, and still informs the city’s emergency response strategy.
The family of engineer Michael Kulikoski told the News the tragedy has weighed heavily at times for them.
“My dad was a really caring guy,” said Ken Kulikoski, a retired firefighter in Calgary who was in his early 20s when the accident happened. “I can really only guess at the facts of the accident, because we were never really informed of the (investigation) process.
“I do really hope everyone is at peace with it, and it did affect a lot of people. It affected a lot of people.”
Canadian Transport Commission officials found all brakes were correctly set in the engine, while the man “scrambled” along the catwalk to check other systems, according to the News coverage in 1984.
His body was found in the overturned wreckage late the next day. Top headlines in Monday editions stated “Engineer did best to brake,” while the Calgary Herald, said “Heroic effort fatal for engineer.”
Leuck agrees, stating mechanics caused the crash that the engineer fought to overcome.
(A pinched air-brake line was determined the ultimate cause along with some human factors in the rapidly developing situation – poor radio communication with the caboose may have kept the issue from being detected sooner.)
In that moment, Leuck was a brakeman getting no response from the controls. His engineer, having already thrown the train into reverse, had bolted out the door to take control of the second engine.
“Then he went out the door and disappeared in a cloud of smoke, and I never saw him again,” said Leuck.
What started as a regular, uneventful run – commonly known as the lumber train – back from Calgary, quickly turned wrong at Redcliff at about 9:45 a.m.
Engineer Micheal Kulikoski, 55 and nine months from retirement, according to Leuck, signalled concern when air pressure didn’t release when he engaged brakes to start the slowdown coming into town.
Instead they began speeding up on the decline into the river valley. The train, travelling 60 miles (100 kilometres) per hour, was less than a minute away from a curve rated for no more than half that speed.
Leuck radioed the caboose crew to check brake pressure, then as the danger fully dawned, he told them to prepare for collision.
Leuck messaged the yard, then braced himself the best he could. The windows went black, covered in motor oil, when the shuddering impact came.
The crash
When the cars hit the curve, lumber splayed across access roads near Parkview Drive. Fertilizer cars tipped. Two carrying sulphur ignited while several propane tank cars were empty.
Fire, police, ambulance and even an oilfield firefighting crew was brought in to contain the scene.
Approximately 160 residents in Riverside were evacuated, including 60 residents of St. Joseph’s home for the elderly by city bus to a reception centre at the Veiner Centre. Power was cut to the entire area.
In that afternoon’s edition of the News, police chief Eric Lloyd said he saw the train coming in from his home on Prospect Drive across the river.
“I said to my wife, that train will never make the curve,” he said.
Cars in the middle section overturned from the force of the turn, decoupling the engines and taking five cars with it across the bridge and into the rail yard.
There, it jumped the rails and struck a parked locomotive with 12 cars behind it.
An initial report given by the fore-runner of the Transportation Safety Board the next day stated that an air line to supply the brakes became pinched in couplings between cars. As well, the caboose crew failed to notice pressure dropping until the train was between 2.25 and 1.6 kilometres from the downgrade into the river valley, whereas four kilometres is needed to execute a stop there.
A misaligned switch at the Medicine Hat yard shunted the then-runaway locomotive into a switcher engine, the driver of which was badly injured.
Several conductors were dismissed as a result, though Leuck, who later won an appeal of his dismissal following the crash, was eventually rehired to continue a 35-year career as a conductor.
Residents recount crash
Hatter David Vickery counts himself among those who still carries uneasiness about the crash.
Just 10 years old at the time, he’d had a sleepover at his parent’s house 19 blocks away in Crescent Heights when they heard “just the most unbelievable crash.”
“I’m a welder and have heard a lot of metal bang around, but never anything like that.”
He and his father went to the edge of the hill and watched the cleanup, later volunteered to cleanup search dogs that were covered in fuel and sulphur residue.
“I remember, being a kid, it being the first time I ever saw anything so severe,” he told the News while flipping through a family album of pictures taken at the time.
“I still drive by it and see it in my mind. It’s a tragedy.”
City responds
At the time, Mayor Ted Grimm credited the speedy response to emergency evacuation protocol drawn up in 1973 after a gas-line explosion and revamped in 1975 to include floods. He and other aldermen vowed to fund a new mobile command centre.
Merrick Brown is the city’s current director of emergency management and says he recalls the accident as a small boy, and events like it inform emergency planning today.
“We’ve been affected mostly by flooding over the years, which can leave us vulnerable if that’s all we focused on,” said Brown, noting that a typical flood can give 48 hours warning. “We need to act as fast as we can, and we have those plans and procedures in place.”
In 2022, Brown’s department, fire, police and medical personnel along with Canadian Pacific Railway, staged a mock-disaster drill to go over operations, chain of command and all facets of containing an emergency and ensuring public safety.
An academic review takes pace every year, but on-the-ground exercises are required to happen every four years.
