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If you like to gamble, you may have done what thousands do every week in Houston: take advantage of cut-rate fares for a ride on a casino bus.

But before you get onboard, you’ll want to know about information that 11 News found about who’s getting behind the wheel.

Night and day, hundreds of people from Houston are boarding buses and heading east.

Destination: the casinos in Louisiana.

But more buses have meant more accidents — sometimes terrible accidents, injuring dozens of passengers.

One in 2004 killed a Houston couple.

AP

11 News looked at past wrecks, as well as the federal investigations done on them, and into these reports that show that Texas state troopers have found violation after violation when they pulled over buses headed to and from the casinos.

Scrutiny of big buses and those who drive them became paramount after a crash in 1999.

Headed from Louisiana to a casino in Mississippi, 22 passengers died, one of the worst such accidents in U.S. history.

Federal investigators said the driver was too sick to be driving, suffering from heart and kidney failure.

Yet he was still able to get a required medical certificate.

In 2002, a Greatland Coach bus heading back to Houston ran off the road when the driver reportedly had a heart attack.

In 2004, a Coach USA bus returning to Houston rammed a slow moving semi.

Though the bus driver reportedly denied being too tired to drive, some passengers thought he was.

“Because I saw his head down,” one passenger said.

Allegations of fatigued drivers would be raised in other casino bus crashes, allegations that some drivers were gambling at the casinos instead of resting, then getting back behind the wheel for the sometimes middle-of-the-night drive back home.

Two years ago this month, the National Transportation Safety Board highlighted driver fatigue as well as driver medical oversight in a report on bus accidents.

With all that in mind, 11 News asked the Texas Department of Public Safety for its reports on what troopers found inspecting Houston-based buses serving the casinos.

One company called Casino Express caught our attention.

In January 2004, a trooper inspects a Casino Express bus on I-10 in Chambers County.

A list under violations discovered included:

Duty status, the number of hours the driver has been behind the wheel was “not current,” and an expired medical certificate

At the bottom of the report the trooper wrote: “Driver arrested for criminal warrants, passengers removed.”

Over the next three years, more Casino Express buses were inspected and drivers were cited for:

•Required information for hours and mileage “not shown on log.”

•No medical certificate

•Non-English speaking driver

•Expired medical certificate

11 News made repeated attempts to interview someone from Casino Express, but our calls were not returned.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rates bus lines and gives Casino Express a grade of satisfactory.

And the bus industry insists that overall:

“Traveling by motor coach is in fact the safest way to move,” Victor Parra said.

Parra, with the United Motor Coach Association, said it’s up to bus companies to ensure their drivers follow the rules, like getting medical check-ups and resting between runs.

“When you’re on any kind of run, you are trained that once you are off duty, you’re supposed to rest,” Parra said. “That is built into every training program.”

What could the casinos themselves do?

One of the biggest, L’Auberge in Lake Charles, said it encourages drivers to rest by offering them free rooms and barring them from gambling, simple steps to improve the odds that the trip back to Houston won’t end in tragedy.

One of the bus lines we mentioned, Coach USA, emailed us late Tuesday.

The company says it has stricter rules for its drivers than required by the government for things like medical exams and criminal background checks.