While all of this is true - I do, after all, live in the area and have to regularly contend with blocked train crossings myself - it still does not excuse or even explain the recent collision in Gary, Indiana.
That involved a South Shore Rail Road commuter train, NOT a freight, and trust me, the differences are VERY obvious and well known. SSRR’s only block crossings for minutes as they travel at speeds comparable to cars and trucks and are not nearly as long as freights. Indeed, some of the scheduled SSRR’s are as short as two cars and I don’t ever recall seeing any longer than eight. I rode that very commuter line twice a day five days a week for over a decade so I know what I’m talking about.
Crossings for the SSRR commuter rail (they actually have a short-haul freight up by the steel mills but they’re not relevant to the discussion here) are distinctive as it is an electrically powered line so you have overhead pantograph wires and the supports for them. Also, everyone who lives here for any length of time knows very well which crossings are commuter rail and which are freight.
The five people in that SUV knew damn well that they’d be inconvenienced at most for five minutes and probably half that. But they still played chicken with the train and lost.
The problem with freight trains is unrelated to that accident.
The distinction between suicidal and I-don’t-care-whether-I-live-or-die-reckless does exist, but it helps to have a microscope to be able to examine it.
There are Dopers who’ve read a lot of, oh, Douglas Adams; and one, you should know, who perhaps read too much Jack London
It’s like that quote from Churchill about the thrill of being shot at and missed: climbing onto something so big, dynamic and deadly, avoiding slamming doors and shifting loads, cops and sketchy companions. And yes, even being shot at and missed. (When your parents would never miss you, hopefully the people whose gardens you were raiding would)
Upon return from my misadventures, those who saw me for the damn fool I’d had been were entirely right. No argument there. Although I still believe there was then a reliability in myself that none of them could quite claim.
I was on a train in Tokyo when an incident happened. It was in the evening and the train was crowded. They didn’t announce on the train what had happened, and we were stuck for like 45 minutes.
It was only afterwards that we found out what happened.
The conductor I was speaking with was still incensed about it, however far in the past it had been. I believe he gave the woman a right good reaming out.
Raised platforms have their own perils for the brainless among us. I hope that this person at least receives a hefty fine and feels bad about the damage they caused with their stupid behavior.
A guy that I went to school with (elementary through high school) and his brother were walking to school one day when their path was blocked by a stopped train. The boys decided to crawl under it to avoid being late for school. The guy I knew made it out okay, but his brother wasn’t so lucky. He lost both legs when the train rolled over them.
I spent 8 years on an ambulance as an EMT. I had the opportunity to see the aftermath of a few car/train collisions, and it’s something I hope to never see again.
As a passenger on a train (Amtrak used to run a one-way trip from Louisville, Kentucky into Chicago on an overnight run, and I took it several times), I was riding when we stopped because the train had hit a deer. We had to stop for a few hours while they cleaned the carcass out from under the train car.
The train I tok regularly ran through pastures of a large farm, and sometimes I’d see cattle out there. My conductor friend, who’d spent decades in that job on the Boston & Maine RR and its successors, told me that sometimes when farmers had an old cow that wasn’t giving much if any milk any more, they’d open the fence by the tracks and chivvy the cow out there so they could collect damages when a train killed their cow.
The early diesel “streamliners” tended to have a low front plow that rode just a bit above the rails. The point being to nerf any animal off to the side rather than letting them run under the wheels. See EMD F7 - Wikipedia for a classic example.
The plow on early steam engines had more slope and was more of an afterthought, but the idea is the same: push the animal off the rails so it doesn’t derail the front wheels. Diesel locomotives, new or old, don’t generally have small pilot wheels. Their first set of wheels are weight-bearing drive wheels.
Contrast that with steam locos where the fairly small, fairly light pilot wheels up front were the norm. A cow-sized animal might easily derail those, even though the animal wasn’t nearly large or stout enough to derail the drive wheels. But once even the pilot wheels were derailed, at best the train was forced to stop for repairs and at worst a loco derailment would ensue.
While they don’t have the archetypical big pointy “cow catcher” of old, many diesel locomotives do have a snowplow mounted as part of the “pilot,” which is also designed to redirect items (such as, yeah, cows) off the tracks and away from the train.
Well, sure, because they never actually catch the cow. It’s barely “catch and release.” More like MOOOOOve over!
What I hate is railroads cause this. No, they don’t force people to crawl under trains. But when they block roads for literally hours, what do you expect is going to happen? People live there, they have to go places. But the railroad could care less.
There is a main line that runs right between the Phoenix baseball stadium and convenient places to park. Too many times they just left the train blocking the street and sidewalk indefinitely. So now there is a pedestrian bridge. Before that, I don’t know what people did, but it probably involved illegal and dangerous crossing.
