McAlester Train Accident Attorney

Securing Your Rightful Train Accident Compensation in McAlester

While they are not as common as other types of vehicle accidents, train accidents do occur. The resulting injuries can be catastrophic or even fatal. If you or a loved one has sustained injuries in a rail accident, you should contact one of the experienced McAlester train accident attorneys at Stipe Law Firm. Our team is here to help you through the legal and insurance complexities of your accident so that you can concentrate on recovering.

Understanding Train Accident Causes and Impact

Train accidents may involve only a single injury or death, such as when a car or a pedestrian is struck at a grade crossing. It may also involve multiple injuries and deaths, such as what might occur in a derailment or a collision. Like most transportation accidents, those involving trains are often brought about by a combination of small, undetected, or ignored defects in equipment, rights-of-way, or performance that accumulate to a critical point.

These include:

• Grade-crossing accidents. In urban or well-developed suburban areas, most grade crossings are equipped with signals (warning signs, flashing lights, and bells) and gates that prevent pedestrian and vehicular traffic from crossing the right-of-way. Rural grade crossings also have signs, flashing lights, and bells, but tend to be without gates. Occasionally, a signal will be out of order and a driver may think they can cross the right-of-way, only to find a train bearing down on them a few seconds later. On other occasions, a driver will try to beat the train to the crossing, even though the crossing signals are operating. Losing the race usually has fatal consequences.
• Unbelievable as it may seem in an age of computerized control systems, the computer-driven signals and switches in a rail yard may malfunction and place a train on the same track as another traveling towards it. The same may be done by a careless tower operator further down the line.
• When a train leaves the rails while traveling at high speed, its cars may overturn, go flying into nearby structures, bend, twist, or telescope. A recent derailment occurred when one of the steel plates bolted to each rail’s end to secure it to its neighbor failed and caused the rails to separate under the weight of a train crossing it.
• Negligent operation. An example of this occurred very recently when an engineer whose passenger train was traveling over 100 miles per hour entered a curve rated at 50 miles per hour maximum, and then braked suddenly. In the resulting derailment, 7 passengers died and more than 200 were injured and required hospitalization. In other incidents of negligent operation, workers on the tracks were struck and killed.

In such accident scenarios, our tenacious attorneys can help identify the cause and the party or parties responsible for your injuries to make sure that they are held accountable.

Comprehensive Legal Support After Train Accidents

Our McAlester train accident attorneys care about the victims and work closely with them to guide them through the legal process.

We investigate your case and pursue appropriate compensation for:

• Medical coverage
• Loss of wages/loss of learning capacity
• Pain and suffering damages

Train injuries can be both physically and emotionally traumatic. We seek damages, when necessary, to compensate clients for their psychological suffering.