Train vs Pedestrian

aharry · #1 (**permalink**) 10-20-2009, 08:08 AM

Train Accident Victim Is Senior at Auburndale High | theledger.com | The Ledger | Lakeland, FL

An 18 year old high school senior was struck and killed by an Amtrak train yesterday. It was caught by the RR live feed:

CSX Railroad Traffic in the Greater Auburndale, Florida Area Live Scanner Audio

It is 8 min 32 sec in on the 10/19/09 6:01pm archive and continues on the next archive while they search and find the victim.

burner50 · #2 (**permalink**) 10-22-2009, 02:41 AM

No such thing as a train vs. pedestrian.

As the engineer said... They hit a trespasser.

aharry · #3 (**permalink**) 10-22-2009, 08:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by burner50

No such thing as a train vs. pedestrian.

As the engineer said... They hit a trespasser.

Maybe in train land but Fire/EMS were dispatched as train vs pedestrian.. I heard that call live but it may also be in the archive under the Polk County Sheriff/Fire feed. That's the second this year here from wearing an iPod while trespassing.

IrvingtonVFD43 · #4 (**permalink**) 10-22-2009, 04:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by burner50

As the engineer said... They hit a trespasser.

...and thats all she wrote....

poppafred · #5 (**permalink**) 10-22-2009, 11:30 PM

Article said he seemed to be listening to some type of music device.

Why in the world would someone walk down a railroad track while not being able to hear an on-coming train?

Tragic.

Wonder if they are going to try to blame the engineer?

burner50 · #6 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 04:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aharry

Maybe in train land but Fire/EMS were dispatched as train vs pedestrian.. I heard that call live but it may also be in the archive under the Polk County Sheriff/Fire feed. That's the second this year here from wearing an iPod while trespassing.

Maybe in dispatcher land....

No such thing as Train vs. Pedestrian. The tracks are not a sidewalk. There are no pedestrians out there. Only trespassers. People will never learn to stay off the track.

This moron ruined lives because he was too important and deserved a shortcut.

N_Jay · #7 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 07:56 AM

Or it was a suicide

N1SQB · #8 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 08:23 AM

Suicide is not a bad consideration. About 4 years ago, a female academy Chief Instructor of ours was in Florida for Recertification training. I knew this woman very well. She was one of my instructors when I went through the academy in 1999. She was walking along a railroad track path and was hit by an oncoming train that sent her about 50 ft. into the air and into a nearby lake. Needless to say, she did not make it. Nobody localy new it at the time but us up here in CT. knew exactly what happened. She had lost her daughter to an accident a few years earlier. She then lost her husband in a tragic car accident just a year prior. We all knew it and it was confirmed later, she purposely threw herself into the path of the train. There was no way this woman would have been anywhere near train tracks otherwise.

Manny

N_Jay · #9 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 08:37 AM

We had one when I was riding with the parametics oh so many years ago.

FLRAILMAN · #10 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 09:16 AM

Burner50 is correct, when a train collides with a vehicle at a designated grade crossing, it is termed "train vs. vehicle" as vehicles have limited rights to access grade crossings to cross them according to a given situation as state law dictates & the policies of the vehicles company if it has commercial status: school busses, for hire vehicles, trucks carring hazardous materials, unstable loads, etc. Stop look both ways twice then cross, that option can be circumvented if a train is operating in close proximity to said grade crossing, a railroad flagman can either deactivate the grade crossing safety system or manually flag vehicles through the occupied track. so if a vehicle does not act accordingly & crosses the railhead in an unsafe manner & collides with a moving train, he has not commited the act of criminal tresspass, he is in violation of that particular states vehicle & traffic law as dictated by the given states Department of highway safety & motor vehicles. However if a vehicle crosses or attempts to cross a railhead anyplace on railroad property other then a designated grade crossing he is trespassing if it clears the track without incident or collides with a train. That goes for pedestrians also. Anybody crossing, standing, walking, etc. on any railroad property without prior knowlege of the host roads management or police department & not at a designated grade crossing is commiting the act of criminal trespassing. Hence "Train vs. trespasser" is the correct phrase. I wasn't there nor did I hear the live stream however if the medias accounts are accurate, the engineer is not in any trouble, he will have to give a blood sample obviosly, fill out a report & that's it. As for the suicide slant, maybe, maybe not, it's really academic now anyway, it's the engineer & the persons next of kin that is emotionally traumatized the most by this, everyone else was just inconvenienced.

FLRAILMAN

joekansas · #11 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 11:07 AM

I am an engineer. A month ago, out south of town here, a train hit a man walking along the tracks.

Didn't kill him, maybe just a broken arm.

I talked to my fellow engineer and asked him what happened. He says they were leaving town, picking up speed- I would guess 20 mph or better, and noticed this guy walking along the edge of the ties off in the distance. Not at a road crossing or anything, but along our right of way.

When they could see him better, they blew the horn plenty and they could see the guy was talking on his cell phone. It was about dark thirty at nite.

He says the guy turned and looked at them and just turned around and kept on walking and chatting on the phone. They clipped him and he flew off into the weeds. When they got stopped the conductor went back looking for the guy figuring him to be dead. He was laying off to the side of the right of way moaning and groaning, but was in decent shape for what happened to him.

In the paper later on in the week, it said that he was fined for tresspassing, but that's all that was said about it.

About 6 years ago, I was running a southbound loaded grain train down in Oklahoma. 50 mph speed limit, but I was going uphill and had drug down to about 30. We just went south thru this little town and were out in the countryside. There were three of us up in the cab- me, the conductor, and a new guy on his student trips.

At about 3 in the morning we were traveling along, shooting the bull with each other, when I spied something betweent the rails about a half mile ahead of us. My first thought was it sure looked like one of those blue plastic tarps, or one of those inflatable blue swimming pools had blown over onto the tracks.

As we got closer, I kept glancing out ahead trying to make out what it was while talking to my crew members.

Finally, at about 100' from the blue object, I finally made out the form of a man laying between the rails. Dressed in a blue windbreaker, blue overalls, and white tennis shoes laying between the tracks, with his head on his hands like he was taking a nap!

I jumped up and leaned over the control stand of the engine to look down on him as we hit him. He WAS taking a nap, alright, brought on by the bottles of beer laying there with him- Bud Dry. I can still hear the thud as I watched him, the front end of my engine hit him feet first and rolled him up underneath and ground him up.

We got stopped a little ways down the track and the conductor and the new guy got out their lanterns and prepared to walk back and find him. I explained to the new guy that he probably doesn't need to be going back there cause there is nothing he is gonna do for the guy, but I think he was in a daze and didn't pay any attention to me. All he knows is we just killed a man! I got the dispatcher on the horn and told him we ran over some guy and he got the troops enroute.

After they had been back there for about 20 minutes, I could see a one of the lights bobbing around coming back in my direction. Turns out to be the new guy. When he got back he was green as a frog and just sat in his chair with his face in his hands. The conductor got a ride back up from the RR superintendent and they both came up in the cab to talk to me about it.

The conductor said the new guy was doing fine until the EMS guys drug the corpse out from under the train and lit him up real good. Then, they could see what they were standing in- brain matter and other body fluids had squished out onto the outside of the tracks on the ties and ballast and they were standing in it! That was it for the new guy and he hauled a$$ back to the engine. Ahhhh, railroad life!

One other thing- in a situation like that, they don't do any tests on us. We aren't at fault so there isn't any need for a PBT or BA or urinanalysis. We took the train on to its' destination and they transported us back home for a couple of days off with pay. We didn't fill out any reports, either. I suppose the superintendent wrote something after interviewing us, but we didn't fill out anything.

As far as traumatizing me- it didn't bother me. I kept waiting for something, but nothing surfaced. Maybe I am a cold hearted person, but the only thing I carried with me after that is the ability to see, in my mind, that guy going under the engine to his death and hearing the engine hit him.

Some guys I work with hit cars with people in them and it takes them a while to get over it, but so far that situation hasn't affected me.

FLRAILMAN · #12 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 11:58 AM

Your company must be very BLE friendly, up in the northeast where I hail from it appears to be policy with the class Is, regional, short line, commuter & rapid transit systems with FRAs blessing. On occasion I personally have taken anybody that was in the cab at the time of an incident to the hospital to give blood or urine samples, the only exception was any deadheader and/or civilian in the cab with the railroad managements permission. One of the guys I graduated the academy with transported the Conrail engineer & brakeman to the nearest hospital from the train they were operating crashed, killing several passengers in Maryland on the NEC. They both tested positive for marijuana & I don't know what happened to the brakeman but the engineer ended up being convicted & served seven years in one of Marylands finer prisons. Your a member of BLE so I'm sure they have that incident archived in the members only section of their homepage. Read this:

http://www.drugfreenj.org/_modules/s...-07-update.pdf

www.fra.dot.gov/us/content/504

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/...iving/s1p1.htm

www.ble.org

FLRAILMAN

joekansas · #13 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 05:06 PM

Hey, I have a little memory of some time I spent in Florida. I got married up here, and me and the old lady took Amtrak from Emporia Kansas to Orlando to visit Disney World on our honeymoon.

The interesting part was when we were leaving Orlando on the train. We had taken off from the depot and we weren't going too fast when all of a sudden we went into emergency.

It was at night and I couldn't see anything. After a while, the conductor comes walking thru our car and I ask him what happened. He says two guys were walking along near the tracks and as we approached and drew closer, one guy pushed the other out into the path of our train, and our engineer threw it into emergency. He said we didn't hit him.

Both guys ran off and the police went looking for them. Other than that it was uneventful.

FLRAILMAN · #14 (**permalink**) 10-23-2009, 06:00 PM

I started to say that you were a railroad employee so all you had to do was either show your railroad ID card and/or your BLE card & you would have gotten a cab ride, but I forgot you said you were on your honeymoon, if you did that, the next station for you would have probably been Divorcetown, all off. (LOL) Railroading is dead around here, only 5 active frequencies in my area, I miss New York where messing with the various trains were sport for local high school hoodlums, they would put some unimaginable things on the tracks, in the seventies rocking a train got so out of hand that some railroads that had to transverse the Bonx would have to weld steel grates over the locomotive windshields. Speaking of suicides, when I reported for the 12 to 8 shift one night I had to relieve the 4 to 12 RMP at Tremont Station in the Bronx, turns out a guy threatened suicide & headed for the station, one of his friends accompanied him trying to talk him out of it, as the engineer reported, he was deadheading to GCT for the AM rush hour layup, when he saw two men apparently arguing on the platform, just as the train was flying into the station, one man grabbed the other guy & in a swift twisting motion they both fell right in front of the train, obviously they were not DOA (Dead on arrival) but DRT (Dead right there) a little gallows humor in the business is called sanity maintenance. I've been to a ton of "man under" jobs & the worst ones are when a member of a track gang gets hit. I've seen a number of track gang guys get extremely hostile towards the engineer in some circumstances, like the engineer made the idiot back into the path of the train, go figure.

FLRAILMAN

burner50 · #15 (**permalink**) 10-24-2009, 03:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FLRAILMAN

I started to say that you were a railroad employee so all you had to do was either show your railroad ID card and/or your BLE card & you would have gotten a cab ride,

LOL.... why would an off duty railroader want a cab ride?

If I was riding Amtrak, thats the last thing I would want! How about a complimentary upgrade to a cabin?

Astrak · #16 (**permalink**) 10-24-2009, 04:10 AM

Where the highway ROW ends the RR ROW begins. Regardless of where the at grade crossing is ROW still extends though RR ROW can include the intersection up to center line or point of tangent.

FLRAILMAN · #17 (**permalink**) 10-24-2009, 09:01 AM

Bob if you were an Amtrak employee, passengers are the last people you would want to see & as for a compartment upgrade, I don't think so, better hope there is room in the attendants crew car. You probably could pull rank & get a compartment if you were a suit like R. Clifford Black, etc.

FLRAILMAN

KC9NCF · #18 (**permalink**) 10-26-2009, 06:37 PM

Two pedestrians who must have left their brains at home: I took this photo more than a month ago I think.

Dan Hensley's Photos - Wall Photos | Facebook

prc117f · #19 (**permalink**) 10-26-2009, 06:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by poppafred

Article said he seemed to be listening to some type of music device.

Why in the world would someone walk down a railroad track while not being able to hear an on-coming train?

Tragic.

Wonder if they are going to try to blame the engineer?

Well Natural selection at work. This is how Darwin's theory is proven.

Another Darwin award winner.

FLRAILMAN · #20 (**permalink**) 10-27-2009, 01:45 AM

Those two idiots in that photo have got to be at least middle age, look at the thinning hair on Mr. Jerkoffs head & Mrs. Jerkoff looks two haggard to be a school girl. Well at least they are looking at the train so if one of these two dimwits trips & falls on the track they can see what killed them.

FLRAILMAN