MALLORYTOWN, Ont. — There are thousands of potentially deadly railway crossings in Canada and they should be fixed as soon as possible.

The problem is that the tracks run on elevated ground that’s too high above the roadway they intersect with, and tractor-trailers — particularly low boys or heavy-hauls carrying oversized or overweight equipment — get hung up and stuck on the crossings.

Then trains ram into them.

It’s happened twice in the past seven years in Ontario. And this week, an inquiry into one of the accidents, this one near the central Ontario village of Mallorytown, brought the issue into the public eye again.

The accident happened in 2008.

A tractor trailer grounded out seven minutes before a passenger train roared into the side of it, wrecking the truck and derailing the first few cars of the train.

The truck driver had escaped the cab and in fact he ran towards the train to warn the engineer but was forced to leap into the ditch and out of harm’s way to avoid being killed. 

"It must be a horribly sick feeling to see a train barreling down on your truck when there’s not a thing you can do about it," says Tom Griffith, the Transportation Safety Board‘s lead investigator into the accident.

Miraculously, there were no serious injuries at the accident. For a dramatic animated re-creation of this event, click here. 

In 2002, a very similar accident on Coronation Street in Kingston involving another truck and train convinced Transport Canada to work with road and railway authorities to develop low ground-clearance warning signage, but a national standard has still not been put in place.

"I think in fact there are more lower trucks than there used to be, and I’m sure there are thousands of these kinds of crossings all around Canada," he told todaystrucking.com.

The Board also determined that truck drivers (probably drivers in general) don’t know what to do when faced with emergencies at railway crossings.

Posted at each crossing, on the back of the railway crossing signs, is an 1-800 emergency phone number to call in the event of a problem at the crossing. The number puts you in touch with the railway, immediately.

If necessary, the railway would then contact the engineer to warn him about the incident so he would have time to slow down.

"As it is," Griffith said, "these trains are sometimes going over 100 miles per hour. They can take a mile and a half to come to a stop."

"The goal is to prevent vehicles from getting stuck at crossings and to ensure drivers know what to do if it happens."

Federal law stipulates that Transport Canada must respond to the safety board’s suggestion within 90 days of receiving it.

Griffith says truck drivers should also know ahead of time what kinds of crossings are on their routes and that they should plan their trips accordingly.

"There’s always alternative crossings; they might add a bit of extra time to the trip but at least they’ll be safer," he said.