Was this another GPS related tragedy? They may have to change the message to “Turn right, but only if there is a road.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/753557,metracrash012208.article
We got like 5-6 inches of snow monday night, this happened a couple miles from where I live…
BNSF x3 tracks cut through the middle of the picture, east being right… looks like the guy ment to turn onto Burlington Ave (the line below/parallel to the tracks)
Learn to drive !
I agree, while at a 4-5pm these days its starting to get dark out its still not that hard to tell a plowed street from a set of 3 railroad tracks with gates on both sides…
If I had to guess… he probably turned onto the north or center track from going south west on maple thinking Burlington Ave was before the tracks like it is a few blocks east when he saw the crossing/gates on the south side thinking the tracks were beyond that he turned left in the center of the crossing which is also on a slight hill… or he could of been on drugs, drinking or suicidal who knows [%-)]
Wouldn’t ya think that once the car started to bounce on the ties and ballast, the driver might have noticed? Or are the roads so terrible in Chicago that driving on train tracks is indistinguishable from driving on the pavement?
My guess immediately was the with the snow cover and blowing snow. The driver mistakenly idenified the clearing for the tracks was one of the roads the parallel tracks. Once he straddled the tracks he did not have the presents of mind to back up. He may have still thought he was just on an unplowed road. If the snow was blowing, he may not have seen the train coming.
Driving on the tracks would better than driving on ILL Rt 47 where I live. Illinois roads are some of the worst in the USA.
From the news report, the driver (who has since died) was going east on the tracks and was east of Maple, so he was probably going in the opposite direction. That is not a pretty intersection in the best of times, but it still shows a lack of situational awareness. There may have been some blowing snow, but the skies were clear–we’d just completed a major drive at about that time of day, and any blowing snow here was insignificant.
With everything being dumbed down to accommodate people such as these, we’ll probably soon see the “no right turn” and “no left turn” signs posted at crossbucks.
My niece and her 10 year old son were booked on Amtrak 383 last night to Galesburg. The 5:55 departure was delayed until 9:15. I wonder about the delay when 2 tracks were opened shortly afterwards. The boy said he thinks the engineer would have been out of hours. Does anyone know more about the Amtrak delay.
Still? I thought they might have smoothed some of them out by now. I was impressed, though, down east of St. Louis this summer that I wasn’t beaten to death on the IL roads like I was in the eighties around Quincy and on the way to Springfield.
[#offtopic]
I was joking with a friend about how cool it would be to drive a forumla 1 car to work one day on the interstate and he replied it would be cool but I would get arrested so im like “Yeah okay right like they could catch me in a F1!” and he was like "All they would have to do is wait for you to hit a pothole and the car would disintegrate [banghead]
While I’ve never driven on RR tracks, I would lean towards agreeing with Expresslane on this one. There are roads around here that are bumpier and worse sounding than gravel roads. But I still can’t fathom how anyone could mistake a RR row for a street. Maybe it is me, but is seems that our society has an epidemic of the Stupids N. Foolish syndrome.
That is SO hilarious!!! [(-D]
Unfortunately, there may be a kernel of truth in what you say.