A few years back there was a video of accidents–I couldn’t handle the thought of buying or renting it and having somebody profit from me for people’s misfortunes, but I am morbidly curious. The ads showed a scene in which a little boy seems to be obliviously walking right into the path of a train, then of course cuts away.
I have to know, did the little boy get hit or did he stop or did somebody grab him or what? I recall there were a couple other people in the shot.
Sir
I know the one about the lady who looks like she’s going to run across the tracks before the train gets there and then she seemingly changes her mind before the shot (on the ad) cuts away (she gets hit but not killed) but I don’t know one about a kid. Does that help at all?
Could be, but I left out of my original post that I seem to remember that it looked like a stereotypical “little British schoolboy” with short-pants, jacket, maybe even a beanie, who knows. But it may have been a lady, and my memory may be confusing two incidents. I think I remember that the train’s horn is blowing loudly, but that may have been dubbed in to add “excitement” to the scene.
Sir
It was a boy. I saw the video on the Internet, and it looked a bit fake to me (although the Internet-type quality may have had something to do with that). There are a lot of fakes death clips out there. Some of them are enough to turn your stomach.
Don’t know about the train clip. I did track down the origin of the one showing a guy getting hit by the car while carrying a pizza. It was done for a New Zealand Traffic Board commercial by some Australian Production Company (can’t remember their name now). It was pretty well done and from what I understand no pizzas were killed or injures in the making of the spot.
A mistake I made when I was in High School was to rent faces of death (one of those types of videos). I wish I’d never seen it because every time I think about it, it makes me sick. You’re probably better off not knowing, and definitely not seeing it.
c_goat, if it helps you feel better, I have heard it’s all or mostly staged
Urbanlegends.com provides a rather comprehensive scene-by-scene review of Faces of Death.
Actually, the one I saw was part 5 I think, there was a scene with a nurse killed by a psychiatric patient who got hold of a screwdriver… rather sickening to see it happen. I won’t go into any detail. Anyway, that’s the scene I’ll never get out of my head, fake or not. On a totally unrelated note, it just goes to show you that video games do not desensitize one to death and violence. I love action movies and the dreaded Quake games, but I’ll never enjoy seeing that nurse get killed like that.
I’ve seen the train video.
It shows a woman about to walk across the track, but when she sees the train approaching, she realizes she won’t be able to make it, and quickly heads back. But a child who is following her (presumably in her care), crosses the track, and is hit. The child’s body (who looks like a boy) is thrusted outward into the air and off the screen, out of view. The video ends there.
Now, based on what I saw, I’m leaning towards a hoax. I think the main reason is the audio. The audio sounds like it was added for effect. When the boy is hit, a quick thump can be heard. Imagine a woodpecker pecking at a tree, but just one peck, and that’s what it sounds like.
I’ll admit, I am by no means an expert on train accidents, but I’m willing to bet that if a small child is hit by a speeding train (which this train was), that child is going to burst. And I don’t mean into little pieces, but at least some limbs are going to come off.
The clip I saw was in AVI format, so I was able to play it frame by frame (I really wanted to see if this was a fake), and after he is hit, the few frames that exist after that, it shows that all of the boy’s limbs are still intact.
In addition to that, it looks like this train is in a train yard. In the video, it shows railroad tracks right beside other railroad tracks. For one thing, I don’t think trains speed through railroad yards. And also, a school boy and a woman dressed up in evening wear normally don’t walk through railroad yards.
There IS a video of a woman getting hit by a commuter train… and she DID get killed. Her body hit the tripod of the railfan who was filming. Go to http://www.trainorders.com and look around… there are a couple of threads discussing just this topic there.
“In the video, it shows railroad tracks right beside other railroad tracks… And also, a school boy and a woman dressed up in evening wear normally don’t walk through railroad yards.”
But there are commuter train lines in large cities with three tracks or more, so multiple tracks doesn’t equal rail yard. And the evening wear sorta argues for a commuter line – people heading downtown for a concert or an evening on the town hit by an outbound express carrying downtown workers home.
That’s similar to what happens in the real video that lawoot mentions. That incident clearly occurs on the Metra/BNSF commuter line serving Chicago, probably in the morning rush hour but definitely during rush hour. Man and woman in business attire cross the tracks at a station with a train stopped on each platform. An express train speeds toward them on the center track; the man stops short but the woman doesn’t and is struck by the train. As to being blown apart, she seems in the last moments of the video to be thrown to one side by the force of the train, but strictly in one piece. Then again, I don’t think she was hit head-on.