stuck on railroad tracks in turlock, ca

So as per my companies request i'm posting about an incident i had a couple weeks ago. I'll chalk this up to my lack of experience , i have about a year and a half in , but will also say i was mislead to believe there was only one way in and out of this shipper. So here goes, i was picking up at phoenix plastics in turlock ca. You have to pull into a road off of Golden State something or other. When i went to make the left i thought the railroad crossing seemed a little steep but i watched two other trucks come out so i went for it. I got into the shipper with just a little scrape of the landing gear. I then called the boss and asked if he had any advice for getting out of this place once loaded. He said to move the tandems all the way up so i did. Once i was loaded i went to leave and scraped a little on the tracks but then got the landing gear stuck on the asphalt on the other side. within 2 minutes of getting stuck CHP showed up. I was in a panic at this point and asked if the railroad traffic was stopped and he said yes and asked if i wanted him to call a wrecker, i said of course. a few minutes later the rr peiple showed up to see if i screwed the tracks up which i did not. Turns out the week before i got stuck another guy did also. The cop informed me that this guy tore the tracks up and it cost him a $30,000 fine or costs or whatever. Also a guy about two weeks before that got stuick and the train came through and tore his trailer in half. The wrecker shows up, company name...stanislaus towing services, i beleive they said they were out of merced, ca. He basically lifted the trailer by the bumper about 6 feet and i released my brakes and i rolled right off. heres where the issue comes in. As i'm sitting in the wrecker the drivers figuring up the bill, he comes back witha figure of $850 for his 15 minutes of work. The amount did not hit me until talking to the boss the next day. he was livid and felt like it was a set up from the get go. He felt the shipper , chp and towing company was in on this all together. The boss said at most it should have been $400 to get me off the tracks. While i was being loaded i talked to 2 different employees about the tracks and neither one botthered to tell me that there is another crossing that isn't as high aobut a mile down the road. In the shippers defense, the boss guy did try to help me get off the tracks, brought his forklift out and tried pushing and also got some 4X4's to try to get the tractor a little higher but none helped. The cop said this happens at least once a week at the same crossing so i'm led to believe they don't inform people of the other crossing to try to get some revenue in the city or at leadst the wrecker service.... so i guess the botton line is be wary of Stanislaus Towing Service out of merced , ca


i should also mention that the wrecker driver told me that if CHP wasn't involved and i called hinm directly that it would have cost about $200 but because CHP called him he had to charge this higher rate

 

i beleive the name of the shipper was phoenix containers or recycling... they do plastic recycling stuff the good crossing was F street or something like that. It's like a mile south of the one wehre i got stuck, down a type of service road

 

looks like the towing place is out of modesto not merced btw. i was just looking for info on them and found that

 

if i remember right after i was stuck the officer said to go down to East F Street which looks like it's one more street past Golf. They said the 1st intersection , which is Golf, is also steep.