Feds: Ex-LIRR employee charged with falsifying report linked to 2019 Speonk derailment

A former Long Island Rail Road signalman who officials said put "customers and employees' lives at risk" was criminally charged Thursday after he lied about having inspected an electric line to a switch whose break caused the 2019 Memorial Day train derailment, federal prosecutors said.

Stuart Conklin, 63, a former resident of Ronkonkoma, lied about having inspected the faulty electrical line in April that resulted a month later in the crash east of Speonk between an eastbound and westbound train, the complaint said.

Conklin said in a report he was required to file that he had inspected the line during his usual work as he walked the track, officials said.

Conklin, now a resident of Magnolia, Texas, was charged with "knowingly and willfully [making] a false entry in a record or report required," the complaint said.

He faces up to two years in prison if convicted. Conklin was not charged with causing the accident.

He was released on $25,000 bond after a hearing at federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday. Bond conditions limit his travel to the continental United States and prohibit him from contacting any potential witnesses in the case. He did not enter a plea.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Seth DuCharme said Conklin's alleged behavior was potentially dangerous.

"Conklin’s false inspection report endangered passengers on a heavily used line of the Long Island Rail Road and potentially placed scores of riders in harm’s way," he said.

LIRR president Phillip Eng described Conklin's alleged conduct as "a betrayal of the public’s trust and put our customers’ and employees’ lives at risk."

The complaint says Conklin resigned from the LIRR on May 31, 2019, six days after the two trains crashed and derailed.

Conklin’s attorney, Anthony LaPinta, defended his client.

"I am not convinced that Mr. Conklin‘s conduct rises to the level of criminality," LaPinta said.

Christopher Natale, the head of Conklin’s former union, the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen Local 56, said he could not comment on an ongoing case.

Testing and a report on the integrity of the line is supposed to be completed every 90 days to ensure the safety of a railroad's operation, federal prosecutors said.

The evidence against Conklin includes LIRR video footage showing that he was not near the electric line on April 26, 2019, the day he was supposed to have performed the inspection, according to the complaint filed by an agent of the Inspector General’s Office of the federal Department of Transportation.

The investigation also revealed that cell-site data from Conklin’s phone showed that on a number of other occasions, he was not at work when he was supposed to be, court papers say.

On one of those occasions, in March 2019, the complaint said, Conklin reported that he happened to be by the site where the break was eventually discovered, checking for vandalism.

Conklin’s cellphone indicated he was more likely in Ronkonkoma on that shift, according to officials.

The electric line is known as a rail bond, which is "a jumper around a joint in the rails of a track to insure continuity of conductivity for signal currents," the complaint says.

No one was injured in the early Saturday morning crash that forced the evacuation of 30 passengers from the eastbound train; the westbound train had no passengers. The collision ripped up hundreds of feet of track, prosecutors said.

It took about 100 LIRR workers to repair the damage, but service was not restored to the regular schedule on the line until the following Monday. The Memorial Day weekend is one of the busiest on the LIRR for holiday travel to the Hamptons and Montauk on the South Fork

In October 2019, after an investigation into the incident by the Federal Railroad Administration, the MTA’s chief safety officer, Patrick Warren, said: "The May 25 Speonk derailment resulted from a signal system malfunction caused by a defective signal system component, and the matter is still under investigation."

According to the FRA report, the westbound train, with no passengers, had pulled over to a side track east of Speonk to permit the eastbound train to pass.

The crew of the 14-car westbound train was "aware that the train was too long to fit into the siding," but a signal indicated to a "block operator" in Babylon monitoring the trains’ progress that the train had cleared the main track, the report said.

The engineer of the eastbound train, getting the signal to proceed, was five car lengths from impact when he saw the rear car of the pulled-over train, a diesel locomotive, "fouling" — or sticking out — onto the main track ahead of him, the report said.

The engineer of the eastbound train applied the emergency brakes, but his train struck the left side of the other’s engine, the report said.

An unidentified LIRR employee assigned to work near the faulty rail bond told investigators that he recalled seeing Conklin inspecting the devices along the track in April 2019. But the same employee also "observed Conklin cease conducting the inspections before reaching" the defective bond, according to the complaint.

The complaint also said that after the trains’ crash and derailment, LIRR employees reinspected an unspecified number of bondings in other areas along the track that Conklin had reported inspecting.

"Those reinspections identified other instances in which bonding wires were either broken or in poor condition — observations that were not included on the most recent inspection forms for the same bonds completed by Conklin," the complaint said.

John Marzulli, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment.

In February, five current or former LIRR track workers pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan to an indictment charging them with illegally getting tens of thousands of dollars in overtime pay in a case brought by Southern District prosecutors in Manhattan.

By Robert E. Kessler

Robert.Kessler@newsday.com

Bob Kessler covers federal law, including law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, DEA, IRS and ATF, as well as the federal courts.