Fatalities and effect on Engineers.

WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y. -- Sometimes, when a train bears down on a person who has gotten onto the rails, his eyes meet the engineer's just before impact.

"We have fatalities where people just lay themselves on the tracks, and they could be possibly staring right up at you," said Anthony Bottalico, 58, a union official who began working as a conductor 38 years ago.

Bottalico knows how the deaths affect railway workers. He has seen a decapitation. He has seen legs cut off by a train.

"It has a profound effect on you, probably for the rest of your working career and your life," Bottalico said.


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With the subject of depression and suicide being more or less front and center in the media over the past few days the issue of railroad personnel and traumatic incidents could (and should) get it's fair share of attention. It does seem as if every other day there's another "struck by a train" news story. Certainly those who underestimate the toll these incidents take on crew members would be best to read this.

This is a student video from a BU student about how her whole family dealt with this topic. Her father was an engineer on the MBTA sytem in Boston. This video won several awards in the Film Festival circuit. It takes a couple minutes to get going into the topic, but hang with it.

http://vimeo.com/11827457

That was a really well done video. I feel like I need to bookmark it for when the ignorant start acting like train crews can prevent fatalities like that so I can show it to them.

The film was well done except for its continuing the news media stupidity of calling the train-operator a "conductor" instead of engineer. I've come to expect that nonsense from the media, but the people making that film should have known better.

Yeah, that was the one thing that bothered me - they called him an engineer or train operator a few times, but called him a conductor more.