Speaking as someone who has been a passenger during such an incident - it ain’t great for anyone on the train. But definitely the guy driving the train has it the worst.
That accident took place very near to where I live. We have an enormous number of train tracks in this area. Combine that with the usual number of idiots and it’s sort of a wonder this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often.
Its not always people being the race the train kind of idiot. There is an intersection with LRT tracks near my work. The double tracks make for an extra wide intersection.
There is a busy left turn lane with its own light. People regularly stop in the middle of the intersection on the tracks during their left turn when they see the red light of the lane they are turning into. Its absolute madness. If you are turning left on a green light, of course the lane you are turning in to has a red. All I can figure is they are not used to seeing that red light when they make a left turn in a normal intersection and their lizard brain tells them to stop.
There is even an extra green light on the corner with a ‘do not stop on tracks’ sign underneath it. I honk and go around them. In not going to risk my life and others waiting for them to figure it out.
Sometimes the only way to make an intersection safe is to eliminate it.
Hundred of millions of dollar have been spent in this area over the years to create viaducts, overpasses, underpasses, and re-route roads to eliminate that sort of thing. It has cut down on accidents. I do feel that with humans involved you’ll never entirely eliminate them, but improvements are possible
Take a far-right government official, a convicted fraudster and a predatory journal…and it all adds up to Gold Standard Science.
Reminds me a bit of this one.
Or, for those not interested in viewing a YouTube video, here is the Wikipedia article on that 1995 grade crossing collision between a train and a school bus.
The Dogshit of the Century award could have been made in this case.
At the commuter rail station I use, you have to walk across the tracks to get to the platform on the other side to go into Boston. There are flashing lights and bells at the crossing when a train is coming. In the morning, about 5-10 minutes before my train is scheduled, an Amtrak train comes through on its way to Boston and does not stop.
The other day I watched someone basically run over the crossing in front of the approaching Amtrak train for absolutely no reason. The commuter train was nowhere in sight and wouldn’t arrive for at least another 5 minutes. The conductor blasted his horn, but if that guy had tripped or stumbled there’s absolutely nothing he could have done.
The Lake County Coroner’s Office released the names of the victims Thursday evening. All five victims were between the age of 20 and 24 years old and lived at the same address in Gary.
De’Mario Craig, 24, Bryon Towns, 21, and Maurice Parrish, Sherise Parrish and Latianna King, all 20 years of age, died in the crash. The coroner ruled their deaths all to be from multiple blunt force trauma injuries due to the crash. Toxicology results are pending on the victims.
I had guessed they were all teenagers, but they were a bit older. Given that they all lived at the same address I would guess they were very familiar with the driver’s recklessness and weren’t at all surprised he decided to try to beat the train.
I suspect a dose of “I do this all the time!”, where “all the time” meant “I managed to pull it off twice before without quite getting hit, therefore I’m immortal and can never fail”.
I can’t help but wonder whether any of them were screaming at him not to.
Perhaps they unbelted themselves in a mad panic intending to abandon the suicidal driver?
Or keep a garrote handy.
You’re not wrong. I’ve been a passenger on one train that hit a person. Never saw the aftermath, but we sat there for ages waiting for the necessary personnel to come work the site (a semi-rural area) and eventually clear it. It took long enough that there was some talk of bringing out buses to collect us and move us to where we could get another train closer to Boston, but the train was okayed to proceed at last.
The conductor I spoke of above told me about the time when the train was halted at a station and a woman with two small children went under the stopped train to cross the tracks. Fortunately they made it before the train started up again.
Rail people can be particularly thorough. One Amtrak conductor told me of an incident in which a train hit a shopping cart and had to stop and sit for a couple hours while investigators combed the area to be sure that the was no person involved.
I saw “some of the aftermath”. I don’t ever want to see anything like that again.
The rods you see at the bottom of a tank car are not structural members – the cylinder of the tank can support itself just fine. It’s there to discourage people from crossing under the car. That someone would think crossing under a passenger car would be a good idea is incomprehensible to me.
It probably goes back to the days of A-Number-One, et al: it takes a certain kind of crazy to ride for hundreds of miles lying on the bars under a box car.
I ride the rods
Just a-trustin’ in god
To buy me a bottle of wine
There is a problem with long freight trains blocking crossings:
But as he and his mom walked from their Hammond, Indiana, home on a cold, rainy fall morning, they confronted an obstacle they’d come to dread: A sprawling train, parked in their path.
Lamira Samson, Jeremiah’s mother, faced a choice she said she has to make several times a week. They could walk around the train, perhaps a mile out of the way; she could keep her 8-year-old son home, as she sometimes does; or they could try to climb over the train, risking severe injury or death, to reach Hess Elementary School four blocks away.