Hey all, I am relatively new to this discussion board. I am currently in my last semester of my BSN program and have opted to do my very last project on pedestrian/train incidents as my home state of Michigan ranks 15th in the nation when it comes to these.
I am supposed to have a multidisciplinary team put together as a means to help me accomplish this. I was wondering if there are any locomotive engineers who would be willing to share with me their experiences when it comes to these types of encounters and what should be done to educate people about the dangers of being careless near the railroad tracks. I thank you in advance.
I am also thinking about having a few signs placed near the north end of the Amtrak station in East Lansing Michigan on the CN line as this is where I note people tend to cross without paying attention. The goal of these signs would be to briefly tell people to stop, look and listen prior to starting across the tracks if this is the way they chose to use for a short cut. No idea who I would contact to have this done.
Again, all help with this project is greatly appreciated.
Contact Operation Livesaver. They many have someone willing to talk. Outside OLS, I would not expect many enginemen to be willing to talk about their accidents, which are often traumatic for the railroad employees.
As to signs, I would not expect CN to be interested since what you propose would indicate to the plaintif’s lawyer that the railroad was aware of regular trespassing and did nothing to stop it.
Mac
Operation Lifesaver is a good resource.
As for the signs, Mac is right–CN would not post anything like that, which basically is condoning trespassing if a regular crossing isn’t involved. No-trespassing signs and a fence (possibly installed by the railroad and the municipality in cooperation with each other) would be the way to go here. Then let the city and railroad work toward making a safe crossing (tunnel or overpass) at this point if one is needed.
If the people are at a grade crossing, and going past functional signals as a matter of course, perhaps signs put up by the city, pointing out the consequences of violating (the threat of fines or public-service sentences sometimes has more of an effect then the threat of potential injury or death, it seems). That route has been taken in our area, and the message is slowly sinking in.
Thanks for all that info. Wow. Had no idea about many of those things (sorry this is all new to me as I recently took up rail fanning about two months ago). I do know that crossing carelessly is a huge problem at the tracks. Just today, some fool ran out in front of an oncoming train. Really?
My goal for this project is to develop an educational resource to help get the word out about playing it safe around the tracks. I kinda wondered about the signage placement after I had posted this original post.
I will contact Operation Lifesaver and see if they have any insight.
Again, thanks for all of your help.