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up. As the family waited on the
platform, a woman told Angelica that there had been an accident. Angelica did not believe her. A northbound train approached and
she felt relieved. When it blew by the station, Angelica turned anxious. She and the children hurried downstairs, hunting for the
arrivals-and-departures board. Train 82, the Silver Star, was not listed. She asked a ticket clerk, who gave her an 800 number to call.
The clerk pointed the frantic young mother to a pay telephone. A stranger’s voice at the other end delivered the horrible
news.
    In the weeks ahead the families of the injured and dead settled their claims, discovering
in the process how remarkably modest payments are to the survivors of transportation crashes and to the heirs of those less
fortunate. Only Angelica Palank refused to go along. She did not believe the crash was an accident. She did not believe her Paul
died because of some random bit of misfortune that no one could have seen coming. Determined to learn all she could about how
Paul was killed, Angelica sued.
    To get the truth Angelica Palank would have to put herself
through law school. She could never flinch as she took on one of the richest corporations in America, a personal trial that extracted
a heavy toll on her and her children. Ten relatives died in one year, but still she stuck to her cause. Friends and neighbors cut the
grass and brought meals. At one point, she nearly lost her home to unpaid property taxes. It was scary and nasty, as is all litigation
about real wrongs. When she found lawyers willing to take her case—Christian D. Searcy and F. Gregory Barnhart in West Palm
Beach—their work began to peel back layer upon layer upon layer of corporate denials and superficial government inquiries. In
time they uncovered a trail pointing not to bad luck, but to policies with a blatant disregard for safety.
    The compulsion to increase profits can blind men to risk, especially when those at risk are strangers. Society
imposes rules on corporate behavior to protect public safety in the face of baser impulses. These rules require enforcement,
though. They also require a corporate culture that appreciates the importance of safety. As Adam Smith wrote, “The object of
justice is the security from injury, and it is the foundation of civil government.”
    For more than
two decades, the ideology of blind faith in markets, combined with the view that government is inherently inferior to self-regulation,
has caused politicians to trim enforcement funds. Trim long enough and the little cuts sever muscle. Ultimately they slash to the
bone. Such was the case in the derailment of the Silver Star. But it took one diligent woman and her lawyers more than a decade to
demonstrate how harmful these ideas about trusting all companies to do right can be.
    Before
Angelica Palank’s lawsuit got going in earnest, the National Transportation Safety Board examined the crash. The investigators
quickly deduced that the accident was not a chance happening. Rather, it resulted from improperly done repairs. Railroads—like
airlines, meatpacking plants, and other businesses where hidden dangers lurk—employ inspectors to double-check what safety
workers do. This saves lives and avoids lawsuits. Yet the safety board found that the CSX inspectors somehow failed to notice the
Orlon Crossing was in a dangerous state of disrepair.
    CSX maintenance crews had used
shims to level the crossing, even though the switch “is not designed for adjustment.” Granite rock, known as ballast, covered the
wobbly switch mechanism. Once the investigators cleared the ballast away, they found this vital switch was without a proper pin to
hold the pieces in place. The switch was held together with nothing but a rusty nail. The safety board concluded that CSX
inspectors “could have and should have seen the switch deficiencies during a normal inspection and, with