When we were kids there were tracks not far from our house. We never thought much of running around train cars and watching them blow by. One day a guy in my grade school and his brother were crossing the tracks to go home. They waited for a long train to go by. Just as it passed his brother ran across the tracks. With perfect timing. a train was coming the other way. He was 15 feet from his brother as he got creamed by a train.
I wear noise-canceling ear-buds that go in the ear, mostly when I am on a plane or outside mowing the lawn… even though they are pretty effective, I can hear the lawn mower loud and clear, and have heard a car horn no problem.
Walking on a train track would create an increasingly faster and louder vibration and sound that could not be explained by wearing ear-buds…
My only wild-ass-guess assumptions are:
- he heard and felt the train, but thought the train was on the other track (there are usually two tracks)
- he wanted to die
- he was deaf and void of incoming sensory experiences, and yet able to walk (the first paralyzed person ever to do so)
Either I incorrectly remembered, or the person on the radio was wrong, but they were headphones it seems and not earbuds. There’s a difference there I suppose.
Links
Where, in New York City, would a pedestrian actually cross the tracks or be able to walk on them? I live in Manhattan and every track I’ve ever seen has either been elevated with the tracks several feet below the platform, or in the subway.
Like I said, you’re wary of it. I guess you’ve never walked in the tunnels. 
Someone pointed out the idea that some places the train hardly ever comes. And my point was that anywhere I have been near active train tracks I have been wary of the train.
Blood On The Tracks
There was a similar accident here in Belmont, MA, a few months ago. The teenage girl was walking along the trackside, and crossed-and hit by a commuter train.
I think a lot of these cases are really suicides.
Obviously NOT the first line of Folsom Prison Blues! 
Getting hit by a train is a statistic.
Getting hit by a million trains is a tragedy.
Yep. I think most of them.
People seem to be confused about different types of earbuds. First, there’s the kind that just sits in your outer ear, like the cheap pieces of crap that come with your iPod. However, there **are **also the kind that actually go in your ear canal. I have a pair of the latter, and they definitely cut down on what I can hear around me. (Case in point: With the default iPod buds, I had the sound cranked to maximum volume most of the time. With these 'phones, I generally sit somewhere around 50%.) But you know what? It’s very obvious to me how much I can’t hear, so I make a point of being extra observant when I cross the street, and there’s no way in hell I’d ever walk on train tracks with them in.
Nope, I’m pretty sure getting hit by a million trains would be hilarious.
Shot From Guns, are yours more like this?
Or do they go even further in?
Here’s a pretty good article about the various types of headphones. The ones that actually go in your ear canal are called IEMs (inner-ear monitors) or, curiously enough, ‘canalphones’ 
Tragedy has been watered down to mean “something sad”, but no in any classic sense, one person who wasn’t trying to prevail against great odds getting hit while walking on train tracks is not tragedy. It’s not even a disastrous event in the sense “tragedy” implies.
That said, yes, it’s sad that someone died by accident or intention, given that he probably had loved ones who will miss him. But that’s not a “tragedy”.
With regards to the earbud/headphones argument, I’d go for the headphones every time; those earbuds never sit right in my ear-lugs.
Locomotive Breath
No, those are the kind of ear buds that people are talking about that sit inside the shell of your ear, not the canal, albeit with an extra little thingy to hold it on your ear. Mine are something more like this (not this model, but the same style).
The problem has less to do with the inability to hear as it does with “zoning out” and going into your own little world while you’re enjoying your tunes. It’s similar to a young woman who was killed here recently because she walked out into traffic while on her cellphone. She certainly could hear the traffic, horn, etc. and her eyes were open so she should have been able to glance around to see that she was jaywalking, but she was engrossed in her conversation. She was perfectly capable of hearing and seeing all the warnings, but her attention was more fully invested in her conversation.
Music devices are banned in a lot of the races I run. It’s not so much because music fans physically lose a sense, it’s that they are tuned into the music and are much less invested in the goings on around them. As a result, they are more prone to trip up other runners and/or ignore warning signs and verbal instructions.
That is, after all, why people wear them, to relax and tune out the rest of the world. On the treadmill, I put in my earbuds and get into a nice daydreaming mode, and the next thing I know the treadmill is slowing down and going into cool-down mode, and I have no conscious memory of my 10k run. I don’t do that running outdoors, because I don’t like getting 10k through a route in zombie mode.
Yes, I know what earbuds are, and I’m telling you that people usually wear them shoved halfway into their ear canal.
ETA: This is directed more at Shot From Guns
Yeah, when I discovered the sound that comes out the three little holes at the top of the Apple earbuds, I tried cramming them in top side first with the result being that the plastic sleeves and cords were sticking straight out of my ears, parallel to the ground. My 24-year-old neice was here at the time and she laughed and said I looked like a stupid old man out of touch with technology.
I’m almost old enough not to care, but not quite and so vanity got the better of me. I just taped over the holes instead, thus forcing more of the sound out through the front of the earbuds. This helped, but the frequency response was still lousy, and now I only listen to my iPod through a speaker set that the iPod plugs into, or with a standard foam-insulated headset if I’m working outside.
ETA: Good point, Swallowed My Cellphone. At least once a day and often more, I get stuck behind someone sitting at a light that just turned green or waiting at a stopsign for non-existent traffic to pass by because they’re talking on a cell phone and oblivious to what’s going on around them. Given that I’m not prone to lose concentration whether I’m on my cell phone or listening to my iPod, I guess I didn’t make the connection between them.