Thats probably what did happen. You can see the track in the foreground and the engineer probably was in the process of saying "oh ****" when he realized the locomotive was not taking the new rails! There is not a lot of speed involved as the loco was able to stop in short amount of time. Had the back hoe been facing the other way, the cattle catcher would have just bumped it out off way. Soot was disloged from impact and seeing as there was so little soot indicates they are running the boiler well.