>>. I am assuming you can not expand on the "guilty" party in your account...

I was trying for brevity - as I have been told I can get long winded. . . . . But since we have anonymity here I can elaborate some.

Obviously in the first incident, we were the guilty party, not properly posting a watchman (we were working under authorities that required us to get out of the way whenever a train approached).

The second one was caused by a drunk jackass in the dispatcher's office - or so the resultant investigation determined. He was an assistant who was supposed to keep peripheral activities such as ours coordinated while relieving the dispatcher of the need to directly bother with us. He had told the dispatcher that we had released our clocktime when we had not - who then let a train in.

Since we were only a couple of hundred feet inside the portal looking for a flaky signal bond when the train entered (doing about 40), we had very little warning and were too far away from any escape zone with enough guaranteed clearance.

Suffice it to say, I don't really want to ever see such a situation again, even if it is someone else suffering it, or even someone else's fault. The assistant was suspended or fired (can't remember) for reporting us clear when actually, it was somebody else 20 miles away.

Well, I am being called away by the boss (the real boss) for dinner. So I gotta go.

OPB