Train Nearly Hits Car; Extremely Close Call

[jward]

the biggest vistims are the train crews. they are the ones who are first on the scene. they view the carnage knowing they were responsible. even though it was out of your control, you still live with the nightmare especially if there were kids in the car.

[Jhanecker2]

Did actually happen here in Marengo , IL  several  years ago .  Woke up late one morning to see several rescue vehicles  on the street outside my bedroom . I got dressed & went outside to see what happened .  Discovered a mile long freight train on the tracks with the locos about a  half mile up the road and a vehicle in the ditch adjacent  .   Vehicle  had a ding in the rear passenger side trunk .  Since the crossing is the last one on the westside of town and the track has warning flashers and the visability  is about a quarter of a mile east of the crossing and miles to the west I wondered how the driver missed seeing the train .  The freight trains are only doing about 30-40 MPH  and blow their horns at about a dozen crossings through town so they are definitely audible .  I talked to the  county sherrifs  and the rescue squad and found out there was one victim the driver who was banged up  and taken to the nearest medical establishment  .   They said he would recover so I asked how drunk was he ?   They put in  barricades shortly there after  to keep people  from  pushing their Luck . I live at the end of Railroad Steet

[Doneldon]

A not insignificant number of driver-only vehicle train crashes are suicide attempts, just like the driver only bridge abuttment crashes. The authorities usually label these as accidents in order to spare their families from the awful truth. I'm not sure that this is a completely good thing.
                                                                                                                                                   -- D

[poliss]

"The authorities usually label these as accidents in order to spare their families from the awful truth"
Do they? Do you mean that when there's an inquest that the officials lie under oath? Where does your information come from?

[mhampton]

Lacking a suicide note or other hard evidence, to label one of these incidents as anything other than an accident would be pure speculation of the victim's motives on the part of the authorities. 

[Doneldon]

Do they? Do you mean that when there's an inquest that the officials lie under oath? Where does your information come from?

poliss-

I worked in so-called suicide prevention for many years and have been part of psychological post mortems on numerous occasions. There is nothing particularly secret about this perhaps surprising reality, at least in the human services/psychiatric community.

Please note that I'm not defending this behavior; I'm not convinced that deception, however well intentioned (and I absolutely believe it's well intentioned), is always advantageous to the survivors over the long term. It does spare them some of the heartbreak and may help spouses and children obtain insurance proceeds, but I question whether letting people believe a falsehood is invariably good for them. I'm also not content that, in the case of railroad-assisted suicides for example, railroad personnel are left believing that they may have caused a death, or that huge, fundamentally unfair financial settlements may follow. And the legal issues also apply in the case of highway suicides and police-assisted suicides.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    -- D

[jward]

wrongful death lawsuits are a fact of life for the railroads. lawyers fish for something, anything that would show the railroad at fault, the railroads are viewed as having deep pockets. among the issues looked at: was the horn sounded, were the speed limits obeyed, were the brakes applied at the time of impact. and you'd have to be a cold hearted person to run somebody over and not feel anything.

during my time on the railroad i was involved in a couple of incidents. in one, a man in perfectly good healthwalked out in front of a train at a grade crossing, looking right at the locomotive the whole time. if that's not a suicide i don't know what is. in the other incident, i relieved a train crew who had just hit a 6 year old buy on a bike. he was lucky, he didn't sustain life threatening injuries. but the look on the engineer's face said it  all.

[NarrowMinded]

People are idiots. I ride my bike down a service road that paralles a set of active tracks, just about every day on the way home when I get to where the tracks cross a busy street I find cars stopped on the tracks waiting for the traffiic light to change, I recently hooked up a dual tone airhorn to a rechargable 12v battery so I have a horn that cars will stop for while I am on my commute. When I see them sitting clueless on the tracks I give it a long blast, you should see them jump. I think I may video tape it next week and post it I think you all would enjoy seeing it.


NM-Jeff

[Jhanecker2]

Narrow Minded :  Please Do.   Your right, there far to many idiots  abroad in the world  .  They never switch on their brains when they leave the house & then wonder why they get killed when they don't pay attention to reality.   Nature is not out to get us personally  , but it is out to get us .   Darwin's Law always applies. J2.

[Desertdweller]

I am a retired locomotive engineer.  It is hard for me to imagine a situation where a train would be driven into an automobile on purpose.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible to bring a train to a controlled stop at a crossing.  This happens many times, for instance, when a train stops at a crossing to change crews.  This, of course, takes some advance planning.

Even though the driver of the automobile may deserve a Darwin Award, the other people in the car do not.  And there is always much fallout from a road crossing accident: reports, delays, event recorder downloads and analysis, possible drug testing.
All this even if the engineer was clearly not at fault (the railroad needs documentation to protect itself from lawyers).

Once a train is put into "emergency", control over it is lost.  This is why it is a last resort.  It is possible damage to the train may result (flat wheels).  The engineer can only bail the independent brake to avoid a severe slack run-in.  Only units with extended-range dynamic brakes will continue to slow a train at low speed.  The engineer will lose throttle control until the brake system times out and can be reset.

Les

[RAM]

This has nothing to do with railroads but the railroads are faced with people like this.  A plant in Oklahoma filed bankruptcy.  They made gasoline cans.  They got sued by people who poured gasoline on a fire.  They had three warning labels about not mixing gasoline and fire.  They sued because design defect.  Now 117 people  are out of a job.