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Officer Jason Martin of the Brinkley Police Department arrived on the scene minutes after the crash. After helping Mr. Armstrong, whose pickup had been pushed down the track, Officer Martin noticed people wearing Union Pacific uniforms back at the crossing. Only later, Officer Martin said, did he realize that they had cut vegetation around the crossing before he had a chance to assess whether it might have blocked Mr. Armstrong's view of the train.

"I was upset that they did not let us know what they were doing," he said. To document their activity, Officer Martin said he has pictures of the fresh cuts.

"Why didn't they go out there to cut those bushes a week before?" he asked. "That doesn't look good."

The officer also expressed concern about a second Union Pacific train that had been parked on a parallel track near the crossing. Officer Martin said that before he could measure how close the parked train — which could have blocked Mr. Armstrong's view of the oncoming train — was to the crossing, railroad workers backed it farther away from the crossing.

To establish how far that second train moved, Officer Martin said he asked the railroad for data from the engine's event recorder. But five months later he said he has yet to receive it.

Yet another problem arose, Officer Martin said, when he noticed that someone had taken bulbs from the brake lights in Mr. Armstrong's truck after it was towed from the accident scene.

The officer said he did not know what happened to the bulbs. The railroad's accident reconstruction team, he said, denied taking them. But whoever took them, he said, probably knew their value in an investigation. "What the bulbs do is tell if the brakes had been applied or not," Officer Martin said. And that could indicate whether Mr. Armstrong saw the train before it struck him.

Officer Martin said he is certain about one thing: "I won't get them back."

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Families of victims also criticize regulators for allowing railroads to keep custody of the recorders in all accidents except the few that are investigated by federal officials.

That differs from the airline industry. "United Airlines doesn't download and determine what was said or wasn't said," complained Robert A. Schuetze, a Colorado lawyer who represents crash victims. "But in the railroad industry, they control it."

And railroads are sometimes reluctant to share their data.

A Colorado State Trooper, Brian C. Lyons, testified last year that in an accident reconstruction course taught by Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, he was instructed on the importance of getting the contents of train's black box. Yet, in his first grade-crossing accident investigation, which involved a Burlington Northern train, the officer said the railroad refused to give him a printout of the data for six to eight months.

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