Mr. Krueger, who is 54 but looks much older, reduced by manual labor and medical treatment, is suing the railroad for damages, claiming that BNSF failed to provide basic safety equipment or to warn workers that the federal government had linked creosote with skin cancer. He recalled cleaning the inside of the treatment tanks wearing no safety gear except steel-toed boots and mule-skin gloves.

“I got so high off that stuff I’d be laughing one minute and crying the next minute,” said Mr. Krueger, sitting at the local Dairy Queen beneath old photographs of factory workers. “I’ve got a 2-year-old grandson. My goal was to live to 101. What I’d like is a fair shake from the railroad for missing out.”

Mr. Krueger’s lawsuit is financed by investors he has never met. His lawyer from Houston, Jared R. Woodfill, has borrowed more than $3.5 million from a New York hedge fund run by Stillwater Capital Partners, in a deal arranged by the litigation finance specialist Oxbridge Financial Group, also based in New York.

Mr. Woodfill first drove to Somerville in 2000 to meet with a former factory worker who has since died of skin cancer. He said that his work on that worker’s case, which BNSF agreed to settle in 2003, convinced him that toxic emissions from the factory had poisoned the town’s air, water and land.

Mr. Woodfill, who is 42 and the chairman of the Republican Party in Harris County, is empathetic and well-spoken. He found a ready audience in Somerville, which has declined with the railroad industry. The population peaked in the 1930s. About 1,700 people still live in the timeworn residential section, but automation has further reduced employment at the factory, and a quarter of the households now live in poverty. Residents with a wide range of health problems embraced the idea that the factory was responsible.

Mr. Woodfill signed up workers with skin cancer, like Mr. Krueger, and those with gastrointestinal cancers that he says can be caused by the chemicals used at the factory. He also signed up Somerville residents who never worked at the factory but had developed cancers. And he signed up property owners with no health problems, arguing that the value of their property had suffered.

About 400 people sued the railroad  almost a quarter of the town’s residents.

Oxbridge spent several months reviewing the cases before agreeing to arrange the financing, sending lawyers to Texas to look at documents and to question Mr. Woodfill and his partners. Stillwater Capital is charging about 16 percent annual interest.