I'd never place any blame on the engineer, but sometimes a big share of the blame lies with a railroad employee that inadvertantly causes a failure in the warning lights and the arms that drop down to block the road crossing the track. If a warning device is in place at a location and works almost every time, people learn to rely on it. If it fails to deploy it's practically never because of some "act of God". It's because some guy doing maintenance messed up.
No, my point was that he told me that man people died being hit by his train, but he’d conditioned himself that he could never be at fault. It was virtually always the driver or pedestrian at fault.