Gray Lady; Please Put The Hatchet Away

Gray Lady, these incidents are tragic, as they represent lives upended and even lost.

But the fact remains, is that all the victims were trespassing on railroad property - and it's a dangerous place to do so.

Fair Use:

One evening last June, as Esther Iradukunda set the table for dinner at her home in Buffalo, she heard a high-pitched cry through the kitchen window. She rushed outside and followed the screams to the train tracks that ran about 100 feet away from her house.

She found her young brother Aron lying on the tracks, run over when he chased a ball between the cars of a train that had suddenly begun to move. Now it was stopped again, but one of the boy’s legs was lodged underneath, the bone jutting through the skin, and he had grave wounds to his abdomen.

Ms. Iradukunda desperately pulled her brother clear just as the train began moving again, rolling slowly toward the CSX train yards about a quarter-mile away. Aron, now 10, survived but lost his right leg.

But what if there had been a "full crew" of five (six; if NY had a "full crew" law) on the train; would have the outcome been any different?

This train was where remote operations are permissible. Also funny is how "back in my day" (70-81) in the industry, Full crew meant five men (girls belong in the office), and in some states, six.

Boys and Girls, when it's time for an Operation Lifesaver briefing at school, stow your phones and listen up.

I think I've asked this before, but wasn't there an Amtrak/Operation lifesaver PSA which was told by the ghost of a kid who got their shoe laces caught in tracks on the NEC? I've got recollections of seeing it at some event at union station in DC , early 80s. It made me very cautious around tracks.
OL needs to get folks with good social media game to get things like that in front of folks.

In the case of these kids, it doesn't matter if there was a crew, or not.
If the ball goes under the train, leave it. It's like running into a 4 lane street.

I remember that ad. The kid was walking on the rail and slipped and caught his shoe on the tie clip.

The unfortunate reality is that federal funds for this kind of PSAs are mostly from highway safety funds, and given that crossing fatalities have dropped by more than 2/3 since the '80s, those funds aren't as available as they once were for rail safety campaigns. (Non-vehicle trespassing injuries seem to have doubled in that time though.)

I remember walking to junior high school soon after graduating elementary school. This meant crossing B&M’s Waterbury Branch, formerly New Haven’s Highland Maine. The train seemed to come through town not long before the tardy bell. This caused me to be tardy on a few occasions, although the students who were on the bus, which also was delayed were considered on time.

One day a bunch of us got held up as the train pulled by the switch for the yard. It paused while a trainman on the hind end lined the iron, so the train could back off into the yard. While the train was stopped, one kid decided to crawl under a boxcar, rather than wait. Just as he got out the other side, the train backed up.

I may have told the story before. but some leave any common sense behind when they are around the railroad. This kid was something of a punk, misguided perhaps. He soon afterwards found his father’s gun and shot himself in the foot. My point is that even with education, the railroad is what’s called an attractive nuisance. For some reason, all common sense is cast aside. Over my nearly thirty year career, I can’t count the number of cars which break multiple traffic infractions not to wait a few minutes. Similar to just playing around trains, I would love to know if the behavior is a result of impatience or some type of risk taking.

I think it's a combination of things - impatience, a feeling of invincibility (particularly in younger adult/pre-adult males), unfamiliarity with the differences between trains and cars/trucks (in terms of the ability to stop or swerve to avoid something), etc.

I know in my 40+years hanging around trackside I've seen a number of close calls that were particularly memorable - some by people who should have known better (College Park, MD fire department (1989)) and some who clearly, even after being warned, felt that they were immortal (East Worcester, MA yard, 2010 or so). In the first case a fire engine decided to cut around closed gates right after one train passed, and missed getting clipped by one coming from the opposite direction by about 10 feet; in the second case, a group of young adults decided to cut across the yard rather than using the nearby underpass, started climbing through a stopped freight, then had to leap back in panic as another freight came around the corner.