It was a tiny news item the other day, only four paragraphs long, but it got to me. These stories always, always get to me. You could ask my wife.
Exactly how is it possible to be hit and killed by a train?
They are big, they are almost always horn-blaring noisy. And they are, for goodness sake, TRAINS!
Yet there it was, a brief telling of a man getting run over on the light-rail tracks near Santa Fe Drive.
The story said the man was lying on the tracks, so the immediate thought is it had to be suicide. If so, that is one sad and awfully horrible way to go.
Still I couldn’t let it go: How is it possible to get hit by a train?
I finally landed in the ear of Marmie T. Edwards, spokeswoman for Operation Lifesaver, an Alexandria, Va., nonprofit, international public-education program established in 1972 to end collisions, deaths and injuries at places where roads cross train tracks and on railroad rights of way.
According to the Federal Railroad Administration, 882 people were killed by trains last year alone. Another 1,021 people were injured.
We are not talking derailments or other such mishaps. Rather, this is the number of people in cars or on foot in the U.S. who were run over by a train.
In Colorado last year, there were 22 railroad-crossing collisions. Two people died; eight were injured. Four people were killed while walking on the tracks; three were injured.
“Yes, people who walk on the tracks always think the train isn’t going to come,” Marmie Edwards said. “When it does, they often never hear it. Do you know how many people are found with MP3 earphones still in their ears?”
She has way too many horror stories. It is why she asked if the guy on Santa Fe had been lying horizontal to or perpendicular on the tracks. I said I didn’t know.
“In way too many parts of this country,” she said, “some people think it is a show of manhood to lay on the tracks and have the train go over them. Sadly, that is only possible in Europe where the track beds are much deeper. It is not possible to do that here.”
No one keeps track of train suicides, she said.
“Our experience, though, is at this time of year, people do really stupid things,” she said. There was the teenage boy in California the other day who with his friends was playing chicken with a freight train. He lost.
People make it easy to get hit by trains, she said. Those who survive always say they didn’t know it was illegal to walk along the train tracks.
“All railroad tracks are private property,” she said, “but people, especially in the West, don’t think of them that way.”
With the proliferation of light rail in many cities, there is more train traffic than ever in the U.S., she said. And most of those trains don’t clickety clack anymore, but run virtually silent.
“Most people come to tracks and don’t look,” she said. “People don’t have enough history with light rail. They think they have more time, but the train always comes right around the corner.”
The longer we talk, the more passionate she gets. More stories spill forth — the 14- and 15-year-olds who were wiped out walking down the tracks. One had his earphones in. The other two were too engrossed in their conversation to hear the train coming.
But we are talking TRAINS here, I repeat for the millionth time.
Marmie Edwards doesn’t say anything for the longest time.
“It’s distraction that kills people,” she finally says. “Distraction is the big killer here.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
