The Wreck of Amtrak’s Sunset Limited
H. Richard Eisenbeis, Sue Hanks, and Bruce Barrett
University of Southern Colorado

On September 22, 1993, the Sunset Limited, the pride of Amtrak, glided swiftly along through the warm, fall night. A dense fog hugged the countryside. Because there was nothing to see through the train’s windows, many passengers dozed peacefully, lulled to sleep by the gentle, rhythmic, clickety-clack of iron wheels passing over jointed rails. Crewmembers roamed the aisles and halls making sure that those guests still awake were accommodated and comfortable. In less than a second, this peaceful scene was shattered by a thundering roar as seats were torn from the floor and passengers were sent flying through the cars. At 2:53 a.m. Amtrak’s only transcontinental passenger train, the Sunset Limited, plunged into Big Bayou Canot, killing 47 passengers. Eight minutes earlier at 2:45 a.m., a towboat, pushing six barges and lost in a dense fog, unknowingly bumped into the Big Bayou Canot Bridge knocking the track out of alignment. The train, traveling at a speed of 72 mph in the dense fog, derailed as a result, burying the engine and four cars five stories deep in the mud and muck of Big Bayou
Canot.4,7,8,10,12,13
Bruce Barrett, a locomotive engineer, has described what might have been occurring in the cab of Amtrak engine Number 819 prior to the wreck.2
This scenario is based upon my 17 years’ experience as a locomotive engineer on a major western railroad and upon the compilation of bits and pieces of data from public records and accounts of the accident.
Engineer Michael Vincent was at the controls of the two-week-old General Electric “AMDCopyright © 1999 by the Case Research Journal, H. Richard Eisenbeis,
Sue Hanks, and Bruce Barrett. All rights reserved.

103” locomotive. Engineer Billy Rex Hall was in the cab with