Dan Hall, John Hall and Brian Stone Die in Train Accident

Twenty years after a train accident took the life of her husband, Lyndell Hall will bury her son, who suffered the same fate.

“We take it a day at a time with the Lord’s help and the Lord’s direction,” she said Wednesday in a telephone interview from her Dalhart home. “And that’s just about all I can tell you, because that’s just the way it is.”

Her son Dan Hall, a train engineer, lost his father, who was also an engineer, in a train accident two decades ago. Jim Hall was then 58.

The collision Sunday morning has left the small town of Dalhart reeling. The victims hailed from a town with a population of 7,930. Fifty-six year-old Dan Hall was one of the three victims in the head-on train wreck in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Owner Phillip Haas recalled Wednesday the circumstances surrounding the elder Hall’s death. “I remember going to the scene and picking him up,” Haas said. “The trains were passing each other, and he slipped off the catwalk rail and fell in front of the train.” Now Haas will bury Jim Hall’s son. Horizon Funeral Home in Dalhart is burying the three crash victims.

It is still uncertain what happened minutes before two Union Pacific trains slammed into each other. National Transportation Safety Board member, Mark Rosekind, said Monday that one of the trains failed to take a side track and give the other the right of way. Experts speculated human error was to blame but said it is not clear if any error could be pinpointed onboard the trains, in a communications center of a train yard or elsewhere.

Event recorders have been shipped to Washington, D.C., for evaluation.

Original story: http://newsok.com/texas-town-grieves-loss-of-three-after-train-wreck-in-oklahoma-panhandle/article/3688073#ixzz1z5LSi22p