Statter911 had it today, along with one from Maine where the fire chief called the railroad - unfortunately, he called the wrong railroad.
I was a trainmaster on Conrail in upstate NY in the late 80’s. We were always having trouble with teenagers. One summer on two different occassions, young people tried to get on moving TV (piggyback) trains. Of course, they just bounced off the car, fell on the track and got a leg cut off. One other time during the winter at night, a young man was walking down the middle of the track wearing all black with headphones. The local crew was shoving their caboose ahead and did not see him until they hit him in the back with the caboose coupler. Fortunately for him, he only lost a couple of fingers on each hand. The crew was traumatized. They pulled the kid out from under the caboose and gave him first aid until EMS arrived.
You certainly can wonder about the basic intelligence of some people–wearing black, walking on a track at night, listening to something right in his ears. I am reminded of the woman who was running down the FEC track and listening to something–and was struck from behind by a road freight, and lost part of her legs.
A few years ago I was plowing snow for the city I work for (Ottawa), and was stopped for quite a while by an Illinois Railway train that was doing some switching. There was a girl on the sidewalk that had been waiting for a while too and all of a sudden she just nonchalantly climbed up the ladder on a hopper, over the couplers, and down the other side. I was so dumbfounded by it I didn’t have time to even react.
Saw this same thing at Railroad Daze in Franklin Park, IL, two weeks ago. I was on the north side of the tracks, photographing the display trains when a freight came through, headed into the yard. The train stopped, blocking several crossings for about 10 minutes, keeping people from getting to the south side of the tracks where the display trains were. One couple, 25-30 years old, climbed up on a tank car, went across the platform, and down the other side. Less than 2 minutes later, the train was on the way. It happened so fast, I was left speechless.
In areas with minimal rail traffic (say, less than a half dozen trains a day, counting those that pass through in the dead of night), I can understand that folks might assume that there is “no” rail traffic, and that walking on the tracks is acceptable/safe. We know different, of course.
In many cases, it’s a shortcut between A and B, making it all the more attractive.
Add to that the “it can’t happen to me” and “trains are noisy, so I’ll hear them” mentalities and it’s just that much worse.
Remember the story of the deaf Texas beauty queen who got run over by a train a while back. Or the young lady sitting on the rail of the CSX Chicago Line in NY, putting pennies on the rail. She never got to pick them back up…
Climbing over the rail cars - that’s just stupid. One thing to be said for friction bearings is that oftimes in order to start a train, the engineer would run the slack in, then pull it back out so he was only starting one car at a time. That made for a lot of racket, especially in empty hopper trains.
The late Mike Royko described a slightly amusing situation in one of his columns many years back. A commuter on the C&NW West Line had gotten off his train and couldn’t cross the tracks to get to his car since a standing intermodal blocked his path. He climbed onto the flatcar but before he could get off, the train started moving and accelerated quickly enough to keep him from jumping off. He waved frantically to the head-end crew to try to get them to stop the train. The crew was nice enough to wave back but didn’t stop. This commuter wound up in Clinton, IA before he could get off.
I was stopped at a grade crossing for a train leaving a yard area once, and as the tail end went past there was a man, wearing a nice khaki “photographer’s vest” with all sorts of RR pins on it and carrying a 35-MM camera (with a big expensive looking lens), standing on the coupler of the last car, right next to FRED. His other hand was crushing a small metal bit sticking out from the back of the boxcar as the train accelerated…
The look on his face seemed to indicate he was none too pleased about that acceleration.
I suppose I should have turned around and went to the rail yard office to report what I had seen, but figured that by the time the RR could have contacted the train, he might have jumped already, or if the train stopped and someone went back to the rear to see about him, he might have been gone by that time and would not be found.
If it had been a child, I might have done so anyway, but he was old enough to know better, so I decided he was on his own!
I have no idea how long a ride he took or where he might have returned to the ground. But I’ll never forget the look on his face! [:|] <–That is the closest “smiley” I could find to what he looked like!
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Climbing over, dumb as it is, is 1000% smarter than crawling under - which some think they can do.
Yep.
At least with the deer that go under our train (instead of around) we can lay it to their being a dumb animal…
I think we’ve all had scares from time to time while out railfanning.
Back in July 1996, I spent a couple afternoons in Fostoria, Ohio videotaping trains coming through town. I heard the third train (an eastbound on Norfolk Southern) approaching. I started recording. The crossing signals on Main Street came on, and the gates came down. Watching through the viewfinder, I saw a car ease around the gate and across the CSX tracks and then floor it across in front of the NS freight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lubK8G5NbE
After the locomotive had passed, I turned my head back towards the crossing, thinking to myself “Did I just see that?” A CSX engineer out railfanning the following afternoon told me that at that distance, it’s not even close. He said that a close call at a crossing is when you stand up to look over the nose of the locomotive to see if you’ve hit them.
Of course, there are those who don’t even slow down when the signals come on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd6WZxYIgAA
The scariest thing I’ve seen while railfanning though had to have been during the 2011 Fostoria Rail Festival. A southbound CSX train of autoracks was slowing to turn east. As I got a picture of it as it neared the crossing with NS, I saw two little girls come running across the NS tracks trying to beat the train. The older of the two stopped. The younger one, about 6 years old or so, kept running and ran across the tracks, stopped when she got to the other side, and then acted like she was going to run back across to rejoin her friend. I pointed at her and screamed, “Don’t move!” She stayed where she was, and after the train passed, her friend ran across to join her and then they took off on down the street. A couple other railfans there agreed with me that had she fallen in front of the train, it would have been bad.