The other was his father's line - railroading. One was plumbing - they were looking for such tradesmen to help build the new nuclear plant that was going up at Three Mile Island. Coming home to central Pennsylvania in 1970, he considered two career paths. In the late 1960s, Hosfeld served a four-year stint in the Army, including a tour in Vietnam. Two cars contained molten phenol - a substance used in paint thinner. It was carrying 20 cars loaded with farm products, steel, and coal. It motored past factories, through cornfields and sugar-beet farms and the bog land known as the Great Black Swamps. The train was sailing through dozens of grade crossings, moving too fast to trip the gates. The Crazy Eights blew right through it at 50 miles per hour. Just north of the college town of Bowling Green, the railroad workers tried to do just that - they laid down a steel wedge designed to derail a locomotive in just such an emergency. His first thought was to derail the train. That telltale sign made his heart sink: 'I knew the throttle was wide open.' 'I could see the vapors,' Hosfeld recalled this week in an interview. It was moving at speeds of more than 40 m.p.h. They pressed on, finally catching sight of the train at a town called Cygnet. They didn't know if it was behind them or ahead.

Hosfeld and Smith rushed to a crossing and peered down the tracks. State police began clearing the rail crossings. Off he went, he and his colleague Mike Smith, barreling down Interstate 75 in the silver Dodge Dakota, reaching speeds of almost 100 m.p.h. He says he remembers thinking: Let's see if we can catch it. Meanwhile, Hosfeld, a veteran CSX trainmaster, saw what was going on. But he lost his footing on rain-slicked steps and was dragged 80 feet before he let go. Panicked, the engineer tried to jump back on the train. For reasons still unknown, he applied the throttle instead of a brake system.

He was preparing to make a routine repair - to climb out of his slowly moving locomotive and fix a track switch. A senior engineer that overcast spring day in the Stanley Yard, just south of Toledo, was moving cars around in the typical choreography of freight yards.

Unstoppable movie facts