Seattle Times - Train safety: Stop, look, listen — live

Mark Sidran, Chairman of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, has written this vital opinion piece called Train safety: Stop, look, listen — live. The WUTC investigates all railroad fatalities. Anyone who comes in contact with tracks should read it - plain and simple.

Mark goes the distance to discuss safety and easy steps to keep yourself alive around the tracks. He also mentions by name the same people who have recently died on the tracks this year in Washington. It's a sad and avoidable end that I personally would like to see decrease in number over the coming years. My hope, like it has always been, is that their deaths aren't forgotten and that somehow at least one person will consider the danger the tracks represent.

Bellingham Crossing has Attention of Safety Advocates

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A pedestrian crossing in Bellingham, the scene of a fatal accident last month, has now come under scrutiny by groups who have identified this spot in the past as both dangerous and in need of serious help. BNSF and the City of Bellingham entered an agreement in 2001 to rehab this pedestrian crossing; so far none of that proposed work has been done. A PDF of the 2001 plan is available HERE.

Girl, 17, killed by Amtrak train in Kent

Very very tragic. This story should never have been written, but sadly people die on tracks each day. The article described her crossing point as "200 yards north of James St" which would be Cloudy St. There is no road across the mainline there, which means no signs or protection. The tracks are a dangerous place.

My thoughts and prayers go out to her family today.

Cascade Green Rarity?

A rarity? Probably not, at least in other parts of the nation. But around Seattle these older big SDs aren't seen much.

One thing that is interesting: 12 years after the BNSF merger, we are still seeing a lot of Cascade Green left over from the Burlington Northern days. Heck, we see a lot of Warbonnet too. I can't even fathom the magnitude of the undertaking to repaint all the locomotives this company owns. And in the end there really isn't much point if you can just paint "BNSF" on the side and get back to work!

Yakima County railroad crossings -- Safety off track?

This Yakima Herald article quantifies how dangerous rural crossings can be:

Yakima County railroad crossings -- Safety off track?

Best quote from the article is poignant: "I don't trust that just because the lights aren't flashing that there isn't a train coming." The more of these I read, the more likely I am to look both ways - and even stop completely - before crossing tracks.

Train Accident near Safeco Field

On Sunday October 1st at 9:30am my sons and I were near the BNSF crossing at South Holgate St, eating our McMuffins and waiting for trains to pass. It was an icky morning, described in our house as the type of "Splatty Rain" that seems to come at you from all directions and in all sizes. Fast food steams up the windows, especially when there are three hungry boys eating hot hashbrowns. We sat long enough for me to finish my food, electing to move the truck up closer to the crossing. When we got closer we saw lights, a bright trio on the tracks. Earlier, on our way into the area, we saw an Amtrak train sitting at King Street Station. This surely was the Coast Starlight or Cascades heading south. But the bright trio of lights didn't move. They just sat there.

"Daddy, can we go see what they're doing?" David asked me.

No, I said, because there's nowhere for us to park around there. So we headed off to find trains in another venue.

It's a good thing we didn't go there.

Turns out that a woman headed to work at Safeco Field was hit by a train while crossing the tracks, in her wheelchair. Thankfully no-one was killed, and as I write this the woman is in satisfactory condition at Harborview Medical Center. The initial reports said that her chair got stuck on the tracks. Therefore the headlines look like:

"Train accident was fourth near ballpark since 2000"
"Woman in wheelchair hit by train in Seattle"

The headlines are true in the grammatical sense, but can mislead readers into thinking the whole thing happened a certain way. Headlines often use terminology that will tug at a person to read it. "Woman" and "wheelchair" are words high on the list. Actual blame cannot be found in a headline, but from the way it's written the blame can be assumed. In this case, the assumption from the headlines can be that the "big bad railroad" is at fault for hitting a disabled woman in a crossing. Ignore due diligence, choosing rather to skim over an article or merely read the headline, and the nuances of the issue can be lost. This article is a perfect case in point.

As the story unfolds an age-old issue comes out. Reports indicate that the woman went around the pedestrian crossing gate that had just dropped down. A witness said she had just cleared the crossing when the gate closed, and that the woman was heading into the crossing. A southbound train was doing 18mph and blew a warning (it's really loud there, because of all the tall buildings to bounce sound). Whether or not the chair got stuck on the track is unclear, as the police report indicates that the locomotive clipped the back of her chair rather than it actually being stuck; that would indicate the chair was moving and not stuck. The timing of her crossing still perplexes me; it seems that there was plenty of warning, both visible and audible, to keep this person away from the tracks. The Seattle Times article on this issue points out that railroad crossings are clearly dangerous places, chair or no chair, and that the utmost safety must be considered when crossing tracks - especially on a mainline that sees "100 movements" per day on average.

The most important thing to remember in all of this is to "always assume a train is coming." Pointing blame in this accident is not as important as simply learning to be safe around trains. "Stop, Look, and Listen" still runs through my head from a song I learned in Kindergarten. Back then the Northern Pacific ran through my town, so it was an important lesson that made me fear the dirt crossing when heading up the hill to a friend's house on the other side of the tracks. Even though we have no rails around our home now, I teach the boys about the importance of looking both ways and crossing tracks safely.

I'll tell them both, later in life, how close we were to seeing a visible example of that.