Triple-track crossings are notoriously dangerous.
You look left. No train.
You look right,wait while train passes.
You look left, No train
You cross – and get wiped out on the third track, where the train was hidden by the other train you just slipped behind.
I didn’t mean to discount suicides in my post, which are tragic for both the loved ones of the deceased, as well as the crew of the trains involved.
I imagine that there are some cases in which it’s difficult for investigators to tell for certain if a death is a suicide or an accident, though that may well be the case for other sorts of deaths by other methods, as well.
Regardless, the OP’s question was clearly focused on people who weren’t meaning to be hit by a train, and how this possibly could happen.
It’s not.
A car’s path is unpredictable. It can move left and right in addition to backwards and forwards. You can be walking on a sidewalk and still get hit by a car.
A train’s path is 100% predictable. It can’t be anywhere but on its tracks.* If you are walking a reasonable distance away from the tracks, the train simply can not hit you.
Okay, so don’t read what I said in context.
I wonder what percentage of lethal accidents are, while not strictly suicides, instances where the person had a death wish or an absence of a desire to survive, even if momentary.
Then add being drunk and/or high.
I can’t be the only one who ever walked into a pole/sign/obvious obstacle because my awareness was taken up by reading or pondering something. It’s a little embarrassing when it’s a wall but if you do it around a train or subway, it can kill you.
A year or two ago in Thailand, a lady was run over and killed by a train because she was busy talking on her cellphone and not paying attention where she was walking.
Oh, man. There are freight lines all over the place where I live. Just off the top of my head:
A group of teenage boys (the sort of situation where collective i.q. tends to diminish the larger the crowd) were running to beat a slow-moving train so they wouldn’t be late to class. They realized the train was too close, but one of the boys had too much momentum and couldn’t stop. He lived.
An elderly couple’s car apparently stalled on the tracks (this was when cars stalled more easily than they do now, so it may have been legit). There were multiple witnesses who stated that they had time to get out, and at least one person was running towards the car with the intention of dragging them out, but they made no effort to leave the car. Both died. The assumption was that they had panicked because no one wanted to admit the possibility that it was a double suicide (which, in retrospect, would have taken some amazing timing). I’ve since wondered if they realized that one of them would be unable to exit the car fast enough due to some sort of physical condition, and the other chose to remain with them.
A man stopped right at the line for an oncoming train, then inexplicably rolled forward. He died. The engineer testified that the man was looking down, possibly at his phone.
A man ran onto a rural stretch of tracks to grab his dog. Both died.
A woman stopped for a crossing that had no gate or painted line. She thought she had stopped far enough back, then realized at the last instant she hadn’t and attempted to reverse. She was uninjured; her car lost its front bumper.
Up until the last decade, one of the crossings in my home town had no gates, and I don’t know that all of the rural crossings have them, and there have been numerous times that someone was driving down a country road and apparently got distracted or simply forgot there was a crossing–I have a vague recollection of someone driving farm equipment being hit because they couldn’t hear the whistle over their own engine.
The closest call I ever had was once when I was part way across the tracks and someone backed out of a parking spot right in front of me and then for some reason came to a complete stop…just as the lights came on and the gate started coming down. The oncoming lane had cars in it, and there was a steep curb between me and the parking lot the doofus had pulled out of. I laid on my horn and was about to rear end them–the gate actually had time to come down and bounce against the truck of my car–when they finally drove off. I don’t know if they ever realized what was going on.
Anyway, it happens.
We had a recent thread about addiction to technology at work and if I remember correctly, two people reported that in their workplace, getting caught using your phone or earbuds while in the warehouse was a straight firing offense the first time you got caught. Being absentminded in a warehouse seems analogous to being absentminded around trains.
The subject can’t be allowed to pass without this:
You do need to watch until the end.I can easily imagine that at night on high-speed rural roads. If your car has less-than-awesome headlights, then when you’re zipping along at 60MPH, your stopping distance is beyond the reach of your headlights. And then you approach a train crossing that has no signals or arms, and no streetlights, and maybe you’re distracted or tired. The locomotive has already gone by, so no glaring headlight or ear-shredding horn to warn you, just a big wall of steel. Splat.
Many years ago my dad almost got wiped out by a train. An eastbound train was creeping across the crossing in front of him; when the caboose had just barely cleared the intersection my dad started to cross, and got the surprise of his life when a westbound train came roaring through on the next track. Had he started out a couple of seconds earlier, he would have gotten hit by it.
The misjudging speed thing is a major factor in many train accidents. Large, fast moving things look like they’re moving slower than they really are. People trying to go around gates usually do see the train coming but think they have more time than they do.
I remember the first time I saw a 747. It was doing test landings at a nearby airport. It just seemed to hang in the sky compared to other planes.
Another factor is when things gets real, the reactions of many people fail them. They freeze up or make the wrong choice on how to move. After all, how many people have practice dodging trains?
Another way to die/get hurt from a train: apparently it’s common for students attending Colorado State to jump a train into town. Stuff happens.
These are the ones I’ve never understood. You’re driving along, your car is working perfectly fine, you start crossing a set of train tracks, and right there is where your car decides to stall and you can’t get it restarted. How does that happen?
I went through a (fortunately brief) period of rail walking when I was young, and this is absolutely true - trains can be travelling much, much faster than they appear to be, particularly when you see them head-on from afar, and are often not as loud as you’d think when approaching. Once I saw a train approaching from the rear far off in the distance and slowly walked off to one side of the track. I was about 10 feet off the tracks when, ten seconds later, the train sped by (and sounded its horn, scaring the bejeezus out of me). If I hadn’t noticed it coming in advance I might not have had enough warning to turn, look and react in time. That ended my rail walking proclivities.
Here’s one that’s a live issue near me (large city, lots of traffic, lots of level crossings)
A busy intersection near a train track. Peak hour, tailbacks go over the train line and on down the street. Someone forgets to leave space at the train line, and instead simply rolls up onto the line to wait for traffic to go. Lights take longer than expected to turn, boomgates come down, car has nowhere to go, smash.
In one nasty incident a carload of three didn’t even try to get off the tracks because they “knew” that the express that was bearing down on them was going to slow down and stop at the train station before it got to the crossing. In others people are boxed in, front and back.
Another nasty incident that I recall (actually, more than one of these). Wheelchair user is wheeling themselves safely and legally across the train line, one wheel slips and is caught in the tracks (probably in a rail expansion gap). Can’t free themselves before the train comes.
And the inevitable oblivious earbud wearers.
Here’s a story that illustrates what rail safety experts are up against - there was a boxed-in-on-tracks fatality near my childhood home late last year. Family friends still live near there, and my mother came to stay with them the month after. She and her friend drive off one morning to go somewhere, it’s heavy traffic tailed back from the intersection and … the friend stops on the tracks. In* exactly the same spot that, not four weeks previously*, had seen two other poor middle aged ladies get their brains and body parts splattered all up and down the track. This is not a dumb woman, but - people get into habits. 99.99% of the time it’s perfectly fine. Only, if there’s more than 10,000 people a year doing it…
Sometimes the trains are deliberately aggressive:
Sure, on all counts. Was just saying, trying to figure how people get hit by trains accidentally is directly complicated by the fact that many such incidents are not really accidents, including many with no official finding that it was other than an accident.
Trying to figure out in any quantitative way that is. Obviously it’s possible to get hit by a train completely by accident various ways.
I have wondered this myself but sometimes it is just complacency. The mother of two of my school mates was killed at an unguarded rural crossing simply because she was used to driving over it every day until the one time there was a freight train in the same space at that specific instant.
One of my best friends got hit by a freight train when he was 18. He was completely drunk, almost killed and spent months in a coma. Somehow, the rail company was found at fault during a civil trial because of some violation of crossing specs and he won a whole lot of money but I still think most of the responsibility was with him.
I knew a freight train engineer that was one of the strangest people you could ever meet (he had a full grown pet alligator that came when called and could heal). Part of his eccentricity was caused by all the people he “deadened” as he called it. He said that people would just drive onto the tracks for whatever reason and he just had to wait and watch while he hit them. The best he could hope for was to slow down a little but it was unavoidable because it can take a freight train over a mile to stop.
I can’t say I understand it myself. Trains try to make themselves blindingly obvious even at unguarded crossings but so many people get hit that there has to be some psychological diversion at play that causes people to completely ignore of misjudge them.
These videos are pretty instructive; it’s amazing how stupid and oblivious some people can be when they’re near tracks.
This is the one that I’ve been warned about since I was a kid and still remember every time I come across a train. Just because the train from one direction has finished crossing does not mean that there won’t be a train coming from the other direction on the other track (assuming at least a dual trackway, of course.)
A lot of level crossings aren’t: the tracks are well above the road, and the incline the vehicles have to climb is substantial. I’ve seen some of these crossings marked with signs warning drivers of “lowboy” trucks that they could get hung up on the top of the incline. https://www.google.com/search?q=lowboy+rail+crossing&rlz=1C1FLDB_enUS513US513&tbm=isch&imgil=bsg5FMU1PmGtiM%253A%253Bt0K3iknC9O685M%253Bhttps%25253A%25252F%25252Fmorriscountynj.gov%25252F2016%25252F10%25252Fcounty-rail-crossing-upgrade-projects-starting-in-denville-roxbury-and-the-rockaways%25252F&source=iu&pf=m&fir=bsg5FMU1PmGtiM%253A%252Ct0K3iknC9O685M%252C_&usg=__1EbuiH8Ix72RZ9SmyDLd0F85O3Q%3D&biw=1280&bih=655&dpr=1.5&ved=0ahUKEwjRoIuxkfLTAhXLslQKHdQGBaQQyjcIPA&ei=s74ZWZH7L8vl0gLUjZSgCg#tbm=isch&q=long+truck+rail+crossing+warning+sign&imgrc=HOx7mTokWOEEsM:
Speculation: vehicles stalled on such crossings because going up a steep-enough incline caused the level of some necessary fluid to go below where the engine needs it. ETA: a little more googling shows that cars stalling going uphill is a thing. 