A 77-year-old man killed when a train hit his small car Thursday night in a township south of this city was on the phone trying to get help when the accident occurred.

Shelby County sheriff’s Sgt. Tim Bender said the victim, 77-year-old William Takas, of Anna, Ohio, appeared to have been headed north on River Road when his car apparently became stuck on the tracks.

Bender told News Center 7’s Kate Bartley that according to the preliminary investigation, the man was on phone with 911, asking a dispatcher to send him help.

A dispatcher was telling him to get out of the car, Bender said, noting that the man likely was killed on impact at the crossing near the 2400 block of River Road.

Investigators don’t know where the man was headed and they were trying to notify his next of kin late Thursday so his name isn’t likely to be released before Friday morning, Bartley reported.

Rescue crews and deputies were dispatched to the crossing in Orange Twp., just south of Miami-River Road and southwest of Sidney, at about 8:45 p.m.

Investigators don’t think the man was on the tracks in his blue four-door Ford Focus more than a couple of minutes before impact, Bender said, and it does not appear that the engineer had any chance of stopping the train to avoid the incident.

The crossing gates were down when authorities arrived, Bender said, but there is no reason to believe the tracks were not clear at the time of the incident.

The crossing, believed to be a CSX Corp. crossing, is well known as “dead man’s crossing.”

Federal Railroad Administration records show that this marks the sixth train-vehicle collision at that same railroad crossing in a 33-year span, including one fatal crash in November 1996.

The most recent collision at that crossing was in February 2007, when an unoccupied sport utility vehicle that had been reported stolen was struck by a CSX freight train, according to the agency’s records.

There have been two total train-vehicle collisions this year in Shelby County, one resulting in an injury, the records show.

Statewide, from January to August, there have been eight fatal and 14 injury accidents at rail crossings, according to the federal agency.