Then STOP for fuck’s sake. Look back deep into that abandoned pit you loosely call memory and recall that you were once taught (assuming you are driving that car on a license) that a flashing red light is the same as a stop sign. News Bulletin! The ones at rail crossings are NOT A FUCKING EXCEPTION!
Don’t go around the gates because “the train is far away and I can get around in time.” Contrary to popular belief, not every train creeps along at goddamn 20 miles an hour. There are fast freight trains that go up to 70mph. And, again contrary to popular belief, we still have PASSENGER TRAINS in this country. Whether 500 people get to work in one piece and reasonably on time TRUMPS EVERY TIME AND DOUBLE ON SUNDAY your “right” to not have to wait a few moments in your ever-busy schedule.
And when you stop, STAY STOPPED until at least the gates start coming up. DON’T go around because the train went past. Do you know why that rail line has two or three tracks? BECAUSE SOMETIMES TWO TRAINS RUN AT THE SAME DAMN TIME!!! Getting hit by the train you didn’t see coming doesn’t just happen in Road Runner cartoons!
Last but not least, DON’T EVEN THINK OF NAGGING YOUR CITY COUNCIL TO BAN THE BLOWING OF TRAIN HORNS! Do you know why the engineers are honking? No, it’s NOT to wake you up or drown out your television, egotist. It’s because you (or people just like you) go around the fucking gates and the engineer would RATHER NOT KILL YOU! Just because he’s not legally responsible because YOU blunder out in front of his train doesn’t make him feel any less guilty about being the instrument of someone’s death just a few feet in front of him. So he honks when the train crosses streets – yes, even though there are gongs, flashing lights, and a bar across the street. Why? BECAUSE YOU PRETEND THOSE WARNINGS AREN’T THERE, HE HAS TO TOO!
I once knew someone who died in this exact scenario. One train passed, she went around the gates and got hit by a train coming the other way on the second set of tracks.
A common sense correlary: When traffic stops in such a way that you would be forced to stop you car over train tracks, you might want to consider not parking on the goddamn tracks. I know that having to hold your car back 15 feet or so is a pain, but getting sideslammed by a train is somewhat worse.
Even though 99% of the time traffic will resume before a train comes along and obliterates you, not stopping on the tracks will help everyone else around you know that you are not, in fact, a fucking moron.
Having a conversation with a trolly operator in a bar in San Diego, we came to the topic of rail deaths. When he mentioned that he’d been involved in an incident or two, I asked him how many, specifically. His response was “This year, or ‘ever’?”
Yup, he’d wound-up helping multiple idiots per year eliminate themselves. Needless to say, we only got to this point in the conversation after several beers. I’d hate to be his therapist.
John Bredin: I see you’re located in Chicago. Have you perchance been to Madison in the past year or so? Some whiners have gotten the City Council to pass a new law banning whistle blowing at some of the intersections. Now last I knew, no new railroads have been built, thus my conclusion is that these people moved into neighborhoods with existing railroads nearby. So NOW they complain. Guess they’d rather win a Darwin. Whatever.
Heh. I live Downstate, in a blue-collar working class medium-sized city surrounded by Rural Boonies. Corn, soybeans. Here in town, everybody is real respectful of the ADM freight trains loaded with corn syrup that go through town–I’ ve never seen anybody try to drive around the gates. This is partly because they’re usually really traveling, and we all know it doesn’t take them very long to get down to the ADM yards, and partly because every so often, somebody out in the Rural Boonies tries to go around the gates out on a county road and gets flattened, and it’s all over the news, in color.
Ugh. Our former next door neighbor used a freight train to commit suicide. (He stopped his car on the tracks. It was ruled a suicide.) He was a horrible nasty man, and he chose a cruel and nasty way to die. IMHO, if he wanted commit suicide, he should have found a way to do it that didn’t involve some poor train engineer who was just trying to do his job.
I think of your whole rant, this touched the most common thread. Idiot fucking $500,000-and-up subdivision dwellers are not only trying to ban the horns, they are actually trying to reduce the noise of the warning klaxons at the crossing, posibly because they disturb their highball parties or something.
If ever a place needed a good anhydrous ammonia spill…
There are quite a few sets of railroad tracks in my end of Indiana, slow freight, fast freight and the occasional commuter train. Every so often, we get a car versus train accident, if one is lucky, one escapes, albeit with a destroyed car. Young and old will play this game, and there are deaths. Sometimes one of the loved ones of the deceased will even say " But ____ was such a good driver!"
WHICH DOES NOT MAKE 'EM ANY LESS DEAD! I am not the best of drivers, but if i would be late, because of a train, I would try to leave early, try to make a note of it, but not race the fucking train!
In other words, you’d rather be the late anya marie instead of the late anya maria.
Re: noise complaints. As a pilot, I hate it when people move next to an airport, and then complain about the noise. Santa Monica Airport used to be called Clover Field. Know why? Because it was in a big field of clover! But developers have built houses right up to the airport boundary, and many people have tried to have this important airport close because of noise and because they’re afraid of an airplane crashing into their houses (which has happened a few times). My advice? If you don’t want an airplane crashing into your house, don’t have a house at the end of the runway!
Well what never crosses the so called brains of these people is that TRAINS CANNOT SWERVE. Yep, that’s right, trains are on tracks they cannot avoid an accident by “turning”, the only way they can avoid an accident is to know waaaaay in advance that there is something in front of them and they can start trying to stop the train, which weighs just a little more that a car, about a mile before impact.
Hehe back where my parents live we have the opposite problem.
Lots of rail roads but no trains.
Well there is ONE train. The dinner train, during the summer 3 times a week this rain putts on through the area traveling at 2 goddamn miles an hour (a very slow walking speed) and it stops traffic for 10 min while it go through across the road (one of the main ways to get out of the valley). Now since this is the only train that can use this rail line people tend to check very carefully how far away the dinner train is then go across (the sensors are half a mile back so there is a good 10 min or between the sensors going off and the train showing up.
There is however one other thing on the railroad tracks. Since its an active rail line the county has to trim back the trees and weeds from the damn rails…
So once every few months a trimming machine will show up and clear out the area. Now here’s a problem… Right below the crossing (20 yards if that) is one of the two bars in town… So there’ve been times when the damn trimming machine was PARKED at the rail road crossing for 4 hrs while its crew was somewhere…
So what the hell are we supposed to do? The lights are going off, and we can see the ‘train’ but its NOT MOVING!
Actually the ironic thing is that we spend more time looking for trains that most people do… If those lights are flashing everyone stops and checks to see where the train is… if you can’t see it yet you go and the person behind you stops…
I live in a west Chicago residential suburb with three tracks running through it. There are, by my count, 10 crossings in said suburb. We know that trains are big, fast and dangerous. We call the cops when we see anyone cross illegally. People (on foot and in cars) die when they cross illegally. I feel on firm ground in saying that I, as much as anyone, respect and fear trains and think that anyone who ignores crossing signals is a moron.
BUT, the Chicago suburbs are exempt from the federal regulation that requires trains to blow their horns at each crossing, and I am glad for this. Please consider:
All of our crossings have gates, lights and sound.
Chicago is a rail hub. We have freight trains, commuter trains and Amtrak interstate trains.
We have 3 tracks and 10 crossings.
Just after the regulation was passed last year (note that the horn-blowing requirement was put in place long after the suburb was built), the trains blew their horns at each crossing for awhile. The horn-blowing is nearly constant for each train as it passes through (10 crossings in about 2 miles).
a. This is annoying. (Feel free to discount this if you don’t think resident concerns should ever be considered in safety debates.) b. The continual blowing is soon ignored as much as the gates, lights and signals because it is constant.
Conclusion: there are some special circumstances here. How about it? Do we deserve to be demonized for not wanting the horn-blowing part?
It takes AT LEAST a mile for a good length train to stop. So when you’re thinking “worst case scenerio the train will stop”, think again. You’re dead.
And another thing, don’t think that being hit by a train isn’t that bad, like maybe you’ll just get pushed off the tracks if something goes wrong of maybe if something goes really wrong your car will protect you simply because it’s built to be ok in collisions. Imagine your car is an empty soda can. Then Imagine the train is a two ton truck running it over. Not pretty. (I heard that fact a while ago)
A while ago I saw a sign at an unregulated RR crossing (private driveway) that said “Stop and look before crossing, last accident [recent date]” so of course I had to ask about the circumstances. Turns out that it was a train/fully loaded cement mixer collision. Sounded to me like a cement mixer might have had a chance, so I asked the guys how it turned out–seems the train totally DEMOLISHED the mixer and it took days to clean up the cement from the tracks and drive… Nobody got hurt, thank the goddess, but an almighty mess. The train wasn’t even going all that fast, either, which makes it even more bizarre that people think they can win a pushy-shovey with a freight train. :rolleyes:
The idiocy of some people never ceases to amaze me. Here’s a real lulu-
When I worked in San Diego for a company that does the redlight cameras and photo radar (yeah, well so’s your mom…), we had a classic shot that we got up in LA. We had a camera set at a light rail crossing that caught a guy driving around the barriers well after the whole flashing-lights-and-siren thing- the barriers were COMPLETELY down. Not only could the license plate on the car and the driver’s face be seen clearly, but so could HIS FIVE YEAR OLD SON IN THE FRONT SEAT, AND THE ONCOMING TRAIN THAT WAS ABOUT TO HIT THEM! The train was just enetering the frame on one side. I think they survived, although I don’t remember how.
I just wish we could get 'em before they have a chance to breed…
EJsGirl: That’s exactly what happened a few months ago here in Madison (WI). Some guy, with his eight-year-old daughter as passenger, cut around the barrier, and got hit. He was uninjured, but his daughter suffered minor injuries. Complete moron.
Speaking of which… just today here in Calgary, some moron
in a truck decided to try to beat the C-train… shutting
down part of the train line when the train hit his truck.
Derailed the train, sent a few people to the hospital.
Way to go, you fucking moron.
