Employee fatality at Newington, NH — 05-19-2021

Portsmouth Herald wrote:NEWINGTON – A Seabrook man died from injuries he suffered Wednesday afternoon when he was pinned between two rail cars, according to Police Chief Michael D. Bilodeau.

Police and firefighters responded to SubCom, where the incident took place, on Wednesday about 2:20 p.m., the police chief said.

They transported the victim, Dale Jenkins, 61, of Seabrook, a Pan Am employee, to Portsmouth Regional Hospital for treatment.

The hospital later notified police that Jenkins “had succumbed to his injuries,” at about 10 p.m. Wednesday night, Bilodeau said.
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When officers got to the scene Wednesday, they saw that Jenkins had been “pinned between two knuckles of the rail cards,” Bilodeau said.
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The investigation into how the incident happened is continuing, Bilodeau said.

Police are scheduled to meet with representatives of the NTSB and Pan Am on Friday, he said.

Trains wrote:WASHINGTON — A failure to follow rules prohibiting employees from moving between moving railcars during coupling was the probable cause of the death of a Pan Am Railways conductor, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report on the fatal May 2021 accident.

The accident in Newington, N.H., on the afternoon of May 19, 2021, occurred while Pan Am local D01 was switching at the SubCom Industries facility. The conductor was pinned between two couplers while attempting to add two empty railcars to the local through gravity coupling, in which cars with their brakes released are allowed to roll downhill to couple to the rest of the train. The first five attempts to join the two cars through gravity coupling on the curved spur track were unsuccessful, and resulted in a separation of about 5 feet between the two sets of equipment. The conductor stepped into the gap between the train and the unbraked cars during the sixth attempt and was pinned between the couplers. He was taken to a nearby hospital but later died from his injuries.