Though I usually don’t post such items, this one is different and explicit enough on this point to be of more than passing interest here, based on our prior discussions. Fortunately, no one was injured. The location may be familiar to some - I’ve posted photos of the plastics company siding in the background a while back, and some here (zugmann, SPbed, CShaver) have either visited or ‘worked’ past the site, 31st St. and Industrial Ave. on the southwestern Allentown - Emmaus (Pennsylvania) boundary line.
Call me confused, but at 6:30 AM there isn’t much sun in Allentown. In fact, the sun doesn’t rise until after 7:00 AM there right now.
Further, the track run mostly north and south - 31st runs east and west (N 40.55796 W 75.48597 on your favorite map program). The picture on the WFMZ site leads me to believe that the train was headed north - which would be away from the sun as well.
I suspect that someone wasn’t really paying attention to where she was going. Cell phone anyone?
You’re right about the lack of sun - it was pretty cloudy/ foggy in this region at 6:30 AM this morning.
The tracks are ‘timetable’ East-West, but here they’re geographically North x NorthEast - South x SouthWest. So they are marginally towards the rising sun - but there’s a pretty good-sized embankment and the plastics co. building on top of it, together with some brush to further shade the crossing from sun glare.
I’d be inclined to believe she was following a GPS to turn onto Industrial Ave for ? reason, and mistook the track bed for that street - not sure how effective the streetlights are there in illuminating the area, either.
Ah, yes, these GPS devices. Twice, people coming to my house have been following the instructions and turned left when they should have turned right because the GPS told them to turn left.
A couple of observations: People seem to expect GPS to be a lot more accurate as far as location is concerned than it was ever designed to be. Does anybody know how to read a map anymore???
GPS aside…driving in a dark or foggy area causes all kinds of deceptions. One could be reading a GPS or a scribbled note of directions they wrote or were given…if you don’t know the area, you can easily be mislead and lost. It happens. Luckily this lady called 911 who I read into the story was who told her to get out of the car…not said, but otherwise not stated.
The other thing to remember here, and I’ve had experience with this is that when police or anybody calls the “safety” or “contact” numbers for the railroad or even call the local yard office, it takes time to get the message to a train. Especially if you call an 800 or regional number. People don’t relate to railroads, locations and directions the same way railroads do. I’ve been asked for the milepost…which I have been able to with fair amount of accuracy, but knowing the railroad name for the track is important too. As was noted above…a north to south track may actually be railroad east to west direction, so say a track that north through town may actually be railroad direction west or east, or even south for that matter. After who ever takes your call hangs up, then he/she must determine who to notify, do the notification, then they may have to notify someone else or directly to nearby trains…this whole process can take up to a half hour! So the two most important factors here is the driver called 911 and got out of the car…
IT IS…but how many people think or think clearly in times of stress and danger? You say you will but what if you think you can get a stuck car started before a train comes or…?
My own experience is that GPS has enabled me to find places which would have been difficult or impossible to find without it and I have come to rely on it to go places I am not familiar with. However, where the roads are complicated it is easy to make a mistake with GPS. And sometimes you can take GPS too literally and make a wrong turn. It is not fool proof.
Before GPS I always relied on maps. I have a county Atlas for local places and I used on line maps for ones that were father away. However, you cannot drive and look at a map. GPS gives oral instructions and it is close enough to the windshield so I can see it as long as the sun is not too bright. So on the whole I find it better but not a lot better.
One thing I have gotten away from. Before GPS I would always look at my map after I returned home to trace out my route a second time. That really helped me learn the roads. I should go back to that. GPS does help me find a place but once I get there I have much less sense of the roads or how I got there.
The problem with GPS is that people take it literally.
I was running the GPS feature on my tablet on part of my trip home from MA last weekend. Considering that I know the last 80 or so miles like the back of my hand, it was curiosity, not need for information, that led me to fire the thing up.
Aside from the fact that the GPS tried to route me a different way than my preferred route, it wasn’t bad - unless it was time for a turn.
Depending on my speed, the GPS would warn me a half or quarter mile, or sometimes 1000 feet out that I had a turn coming up.
Then, about 100 feet before the actual intersection and turn, the GPS would tell me to “turn left.” Had I followed those directions exactly, I would have invariably ended up in someone’s yard, or the ditch (or both).
And I think that’s where the problems occur - people failing to look to see if there is actually a place to turn before blindly following the machine’s instructions.
I read a while back that some truckers were actually driving “IFR” (instrument flight rules, for the non-aviation types) on Interstates in limited visibility, relying on their GPS to keep them on the road. Pretty scary.
When I use my GPS, I always plot my route and then do what I call “Walk the Route”; i.e.: I zoom in close enough to see the turns easily and move along the route to see the names of roads and towns along the route to “get the lay” of the route. (It is often nice to know if a left turn is a 90 degree turn to the left or a 270 loop to the right!)
When I first started to use a GPS program on my laptop PC I went to Florida to visit my sister–in-law and told her I was going to use it to find my way.
She saved a newspaper article (from just the previous week) to show me, about a couple that rented a car with GPS in Miami, Florida. They were from a rural area of the midwest where country roads often had “low water bridges” (basically large pipes/tiles layed crossways to the road in a creek and covered with concrete… the creek normally flowing in the pipes, but a heavy rain might cause the creek to overwhelm them and flow over the concrete). People were used to this and often just drove across where they knew the concrete was, regardless of the water flowing over it. The car rental agency programmed the car’s GPS to show them a route to where they wanted to go. They followed it right down a boat ramp into the Miami River! They thought it was a Low Water Bridge! The maps were just plain WRONG about there being any way to cross there.
The next year I took my Aunt from Indiana to visit in Florida and she, being a member of AAA had ordered the “Trip Tiks” they offer to help with the navigation. These are a set of strip maps showing the major roads to follow, but they do not show much on either side of the route. But she insisted that we use them because they would be “the latest maps and best information”! I could go along with that, but I still turned on my Laptop PC and connected the GPS receiver and let it run and talk to me when turns were coming up.
This incident also highlights the chain of communication that must take place to get a train stopped. (disclaimer - I do not know NS internal procedures).
Vehicle operator determines they are on railroad tracks (whose ???)
Vehicle operator calls 911 and tries to identify where they are.
911 personnel try to figure out where the caller ACTUALLY is
911 Personnel initiate call to the, hopefully, proper railroad.
4a. Large carriers may have all ‘emergency’ calls directed to their ‘police center’ as a central clearing point for all calls affecting public safety.
Police center determines location the 911 personnel are actually referring to and cross reference it with Dispatching personnel that control that territory.
Police Center initiates call to the proper dispatcher
Dispatcher answers call and correlates information from the Police Center to the trains that are operating on the Dispatcher’s territory
Dispatcher initiates communication to affected train(s) in the area and instructs them to bring their train to a safe controlled stop and await further instructions.
Train(s) commence braking train which can take a mile or more to bring train to a stop from line speed.
Going through this chain of communications takes time. It also takes more time, in that civilians and railroaders speak, effectively, different languages. Civilians talk ‘Hundred Block’ - ‘the incident is in the 200 block of X Street’. Railroaders talk ‘Milepost’ - ‘the incident is at milepost 245.6’. Merging the two together is not the easiest thing in the world to do - especially when civilians further qualify their reporting with 'that’s down by the Quickee Mart
It sounds like they need a hotline of some sort and a big number painted on the crossing bungalo. It should not take more than 15 seconds to get the message to any approaching trains.
The Mile Post used to be listed on the signal control box at grade crossings, along with the phone number of the RR and I have used them to report problems a few times. Recently, I see that the M.P. numbers have all been painted over and replaced with a “DOT number” that I believe is unique and will idenify the location. If you are reporting something and call 911 (instead of the number on the signal control box) be sure to tell the 911 dispatcher that DOT number and that they should report it to the RR.
If the problem is not near a grade crossing then the Mile Post number would be really nice to know, but you would have to know to look for it (and then find it) to report it… and most of the general public has no idea what those numbers are on various signs along the track so it does not seem to be a reliable method of reporting where a problem is.
You are dreaming! We already have the ‘hot line number’ placed on every crossing stantion at every crossing that directs the caller to the companies Police Safety Service Center. Do you get 15 second access to the policeman on your beat? Do you want a Train Dispatcher having to respond to every crank call that originates in the field - ‘Do you have Prince Albert in the can?’ - Then let him out. (Before the formation of the PSCC - Chief Dispatchers were the focal point of calls from the public - and there are A LOT of crank calls) Train Dispatchers have their hands and minds full running their territory on a minute to minute basis - they do not need to be accessable to a pubiclly posted phone number. A phone number that, in 90% of these kinds of incidents, the party involved will not have the presence of mind to find and use. Additionally, a number of these incidents will take place in territory that is NOT SUPERVISED by the Train Dispatcher. There are territories supervised by Yardmasters that have road crossings at grade too - and only the Yardmaster knows where his crews are.
The territory I supervise averages 3 ‘vehicles on track’ incidents every day - my territory is 1/11th of my companies footprint, you do the math.
The driver in question was apparently a little ways down the track - and may not have been able to see the writing on the ‘house.’
She dialed 9-1-1, and I believe the story said they were contacting the railroad when the collision occured. Had she gone off onto the tracks a few minutes earlier (or the train was later), odds are the collision would not have occured.
This is not that much different than the young lady in Syracuse whose car died (apparently including the lights) in the middle lane of three on the Interstate at around 10PM. She was on the phone with 9-1-1 when another vehicle hit hers at speed. She did not survive. There was simply no time for anyone in an official capacity to do anything to help her.