okay Im going to get on the soapbox so please forgive me…[:O]
the toledo blade did a report on the young man tyler larue who was hit by a train in fostoria.so for this article they took a picture of 3 boys(including tylers cousin) walking on the railroad tracks in fostoria!!! hellllloooooooo!!! anyone thinking out there.sending a message about the dangers of trains is fine but dont have the boys walking on the tracks as part of your article.[:(!]my sympathies do go to the larue family and the families of the csx crews involved.please think before you publish.I’m done now thank you.
Joe - I totally understand. If OL & FRA were smart, they would fine the photographer and the paper. ( Only $$$$ seems to get certain people’s attention these days) 49CFR214 is enforced by OSHA as well as FRA and this certainly sounds like a “willfull violation”…
We have a lot of people in this country who just plain lack common sense, no two ways about it. On the afternoon of Sunday the 3rd of this month, the Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern had been operating an “employee appreciation” special passenger train in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The DM&E does not normally run trains through Sioux Falls, but they have trackage rights through here over the BNSF, mostly for the purpose of moving their fleet of business cars to Mitchell.
I grabbed my Nikon FE and a couple rolls of film and went out to get pictures of this train, which was being run back and forth along what used to be the old Milwaukee Road mainline, now property of BNSF. A television camera crew from KSFY shows up to interview passengers and crew members of this train, and from a distance I was watching all this. I watched the cameraman take his camera, he stepped in between the rails, lowered the camera to the wooden ties and began to sight down the track toward the engines in the train. And I thought, “You idiot!! You’re damned lucky there isn’t another train coming from the other direction!!” And then I watched his partner do the same thing! Unbelievable!! If I had done this, I know that I would not have been setting a good example for safety on railroad property.
Interestingly, I just searched the TB site for that story, and while there was a link for it, the page came up “invalid story key.” Maybe they’ve already seen the error of their ways?
I looked it up so I could also send a letter to the editor and express my displeasure, hoping, of course, that the picture would appear on the web page…
I’m a little surprised, Joe. The Blade has on its staff one of the most railroad-savvy journalists I know of. He must have been on vacation when this got out.