Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — For the past five years, Amy Goodwin and her husband saved up to buy a new truck only to see the vehicle get crushed by a Union Pacific train Thursday night.

Goodwin, 32, was driving the white 1994 Ford F-250 diesel truck on Anglers Drive when the truck got stuck on a railroad track just east of the entrance of the Fish Creek Falls Trailer Court just after 9:30 p.m.

"I just knew it was going to get hit," a sad Goodwin said Thursday night. "I just knew it."

Goodwin, who is the director of the Partners Program, was taking a child home for the evening.

"We had taken the children out to see the 'The Grinch,'" Goodwin said. "I was bringing home a girl who was staying at her grandmother's house for the night."

The Steamboat Springs resident was exiting the trailer court when she stopped the truck at a stop sign right before the railroad tracks.

"Because it is a diesel, the truck got off to a slow start," she said.

The truck got stuck in a deep rut that formed due to packed-down snow, said Sgt. Jerry Stabile, who responded to the scene along with a second officer.

The truck's front tire got stuck in the rut and the back tire could not get any traction on the snow-packed roadway, Stabile said.

"It was an unfortunate set of circumstances," he said.

Goodwin put the truck in four-wheel drive in an attempt to get the truck out of the railroad tracks.

"I tried everything," she said. "I put it in four-low. I tried to rock it back and forth. I could not get it out."

Finally, Goodwin abandoned the truck and ran to the nearby Kum and Go, 80 Anglers Drive, to make a telephone call to a towing service, she said.

"They told me they would be here in 10 minutes," she said.

Goodwin then exited the store only to hear the sound of a train.

"I watched it get hit," she said. "It was still running. Poor truck."

The truck was hit by an engine pulling 110 train cars that was traveling northbound.

The truck's passenger's side was badly damaged. The truck was spun off the tracks and came to a rest on the west side of the tracks.

The engine was not damaged, and the train proceeded on its way just after 11 p.m.

Goodwin and her husband saved for the truck for more than five years.

"We finally found one that we wanted," she said of the truck the couple had for about two months. "We had just started to add accessories to it because we loved it so much."