I saw the site of this today. It was a coordinates 39.882102, -76.381522, 1200 feet north on Furnace Road from the Otter Creek Picnic Area. The road is steep, the tractor was traveling downhill, and the curve turns sharply to the right as the tractor was traveling. The embankment was steep, and there were many large trees (I don't think things could have tumbled far). It's a place to be careful when driving a car, but not unusually so. But it would be a terrifying spot on a tractor losing control. There are many small white crosses now on the eastern edge of the road there.
I keep thinking about this (and other accidents) as it relates to tractor handling which works so differently from car or truck handling. Cars are so much more capable with inertia and speed. A tractor's impressive ability to get traction in loose plowed dirt at 4 miles per hour is not much good driving down a steep hill on pavement with a trailer loaded with passengers. We have talked about loads pushing a tractor forward, or perhaps lifting the rear (braking) wheels and losing traction depending on how the load is connected. Or it might be that the tractor was using engine breaking, and popped out of gear or the clutch started slipping or perhaps a drive train component broke. It'd be a tough place to suddenly be trying to get enough force with the brakes themselves. Or perhaps the rears lost traction -- to me they don't look designed for smooth pavement.
Stuff like this can be a bit haunting -- and rightly so. It would be so easy to be comfortable and complacent, and then realizing a situation has become unrecoverable before we even knew we were in trouble.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had some kind of meter or X ray that could tell us how close we'd been to the edge, every time we had a past close call. I wonder if any of mine were completely unrecognized by me at the time.
It'd almost be a curse, to have a lot of hindsight in a case like this.