The Nation - News from May 26, 1988

The former Conrail engineer at the controls during the worst crash in Amtrak history pleaded guilty in Baltimore to a federal charge of conspiring to obstruct an investigation of the wreck. In exchange, federal prosecutors dropped three other counts of conspiracy. Rick L. Gates, 34, is serving a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to a state charge of manslaughter for running a string of locomotives past a signal and into the path of an Amtrak train. Sixteen people were killed in the Jan. 4, 1987, crash near Chase, Md.