I saw this happen once when I was a kid. Gates came down (we were a few cars back in the line), slow freight train in sight, first car can’t be bothered to wait, pulls up on shoulder, around gate, zooms ahead. Second car thinks “ah, good idea!”, starts to… and stops dead on track. He must’ve had a full 20 seconds to restart car but no chance and—BOOM! Fortunately, injuries to persons were not life-threatening though car was toast.
Life Lessons Learned as a 9-year old:
(1) grading on tracks plus panic may be an issue;
(2) people are idiots. Wonder if that’s part of the male/female split?
(3) people are idiots part II: our first reaction: there’s a fire station a bit back up the road, better drive for help (this was pre-cellphones). others’ first reaction: “honey! where’s the camera??”
I asked an Internet buddy about this once, somebody who’s both a rail buff and a railroad employee. He said that more often than not alcohol is the primary contributing factor (quelle surprise) in this sort of mishap. He said that what usually happens is not stalling, but the driver turning down the tracks thinking they’re a road. He’s now trapped with one or both rails underneath his car, with the tires on the other side. Our young Darwin Award candidate’s fate is not effectively sealed. A combination of stupidity/drunkenness/machismo keeps them furiously trying to move out of the way instead of just bailing out of the car.
Around here it seems a couple time a year someone gets squished by a train from lying down on the tracks (They’re not in a car, obviously). It’s always in the dark, and I was figuring they were suicides, but a cop I talked to said it’s generally a drunk wending his way home by a known route (the tracks) and having a sudden urge to take a nap.
That sort of made sense, but how drunk do you have to be to find a railroad inviting enough to lie down upon? What isn’t cold, hard steel is splintery wood or sharp, pointy rocks, and it’s all covered with a grimy layer of diesel effluvium.
What most people don’t know, is that a layer of diesel effluvium makes any surface comfy, and in the right circumstances is also an effective aphrodisiac.
There was a thread recently about a couple of girls who weren’t even drunk, just stupid enough to think sunbathing on railroad tracks was a good idea. One lost half a leg, the other a foot.
Sunbathing… on a railroad…
Well, actually they already had body parts missing before the event - thier brains. So, it should not be a big different for them to lost some more.
A close friend of me had his friends killed by a train. Trains are evil, or we should maybe not blame the trains but those stupid peoples who gets damaged by them…
Somehow I missed that MPSIMS thread the first time around, even though I considered starting a thread about it myself. The incident happened not ten miles from where I live. The girls claim they weren’t sunbathing as first reported, just sleeping after having stayed awake all night. Gee, that’s a lot less stupid, huh? Here’s a video clip from the local news station: http://www.wmur.com/video/16530927/index.html