18-year-old hit by Fitchburg Line train in Belmont.

As the title says. She was crossing the tracks behind Belmont High School.

Yeah, I heard all about this, and was very shocked, because I go to school at BHS. This is the first time for me some1 at school was killed. At least I don't know many of the seniors that well, but its still very shocking. I made a post in a new topic that got moved to the delay thread.

Regrets to both the crew and the casualty.
Belmont, like Concord-Carlisle, is close by the tracks. Hopefully, Belmont will not be like C-C, which had a number of fatalities and near-misses in close order a few years ago.

People seriously need to learn that crossing train tracks is a dangerous thing and something that should ONLY be done at official crossing points and only after listening hard and lookiing both ways -- twice, especially if there's no sort of gate or warning system at the crossing. Still, my condoleneses go out to everyone involved.

Another life cut short. Perhaps rail safety must be taught along with driver's ed in the classroom.

Back in the day my high school devoted 1 health class a year to "train safety".

R36 Combine Coach wrote:Another life cut short. Perhaps rail safety must be taught along with driver's ed in the classroom.

Hmph time to dig out the operation lifesaver again..

I agree...even though staying off the tracks(or at least looking and listening) is common sense.

Maybe 1030 will come back in OLS paint....a lightning unit would look good in it.

AEM7AC920 wrote:

Hmph time to dig out the operation lifesaver again..

I've said so before and I'll say it again. There are no crossings between the Cambridge line and Belmont Center, and it's a major inconvenience to any student living north of the tracks who walks to school. The MBTA Police arrested 20+ BHS students in 1999 in one day, but we can't expect that kind of enforcement every day. The chain link fence can be patched up but someone can easily make another hole. More money can be thrown at Operation Lifesaver, but why not build a pedestrian bridge with that money?

Meanwhile, the town of Belmont is split in half by a rail service that's too infrequent and too expensive for us to use instead of the local buses, but frequent enough for there to be two fatalities in this year alone. It's time for the MBTA/MBCR to give something back.

connartist88h wrote:I've said so before and I'll say it again. There are no crossings between the Cambridge line and Belmont Center

There is the Brighton Street grade crossing (still in Belmont), but thats about it.

Connartist88h makes a good point. Crossing the tracks illegally may be stupid, but it many people do the same stupid thing we can't just write it off. Railroads and transit work best when it's also easy to walk. Where the RR obstructs safe walking and gets a lot of trespassing, something needs to be done about it, and a bridge is a reasonable partial solution. (I say partial because one of my old scout leaders was run down on the SEC in Roslindale years ago because he didn't like to climb the steps to a bridge. He was about 80 and a bit tottery; he dropped his glasses and while he was looking for them the train got him. Sure, he shouldn't have crossed the tracks, but if dozens of people were crossing there every day it might be worth doing something about.)

I'm basically thinking of Brighton Street as being the town line. It's a little bit further to the east, but where Brighton St. becomes Blanchard Road, Blanchard serves as the town line with different address numbering rules applying for the Belmont and Cambridge sides. I often think of it as the same street and same boundary nonetheless.

I would have to agree that adding a pedestrian crossing behind the school would make sense. Behind the school, the tracks are up on an embankment that separates the school from a large residential area. Adding a pedestrian tunnel under the tracks like they have at Winchester High School would definately make things safer. If you look at the satellite photo I posted below, you'll see that the school is dead center between the Concord Ave underpass and the Brighton Street grade crossing. What's interesting is that directly across the tracks from the football field is a vehicular access road (labeled on Google Earth as Alexander Ave) which runs from the street directly to the tracks and dead ends (with an obvious foot path on the school side of the tracks).

In this situation, imagine you're a high school student who doesn't yet have a car and you live in one of those houses directly across the tracks. I measured it using the ruler in Google Earth, the white house at the interesection directly across the tracks from the school building is roughly 500 feet from the school building, yet to legally walk from that house to the school requires a 1.14 mile walk via the Concord Ave underpass. Like any other smart and responsible railfan, I stay off the tracks at all costs, but if I was leaving for school on foot on a cold snowy morning, knowing that I was about to walk over a mile to get to a building I could see from my house only 500 feet away, I don't think I'd be able to resist the urge to just walk across the tracks. This is from me, a railfan. Now imagine the mind of a non-railfan in the same scenario, someone who roughly understands the dangers but knows hardly anything about the illegality of such a crossing, and you can see why it would be so tempting. The students in this scenario aren't on the tracks to be reckless, they're simply trying to avoid a ridiculously long walk to avoid, ironically, a public transportation system.

Luckilly for BHS students, the Belmont CR station is barely beyond Concord Ave, so non-express trains will be running slower than usual at that location, and freight on this line is currently very rare (if any anymore), but something still needs to be done. Like I mentioned, Winchester High School has a pedestrian tunnel under the Lowell Line, it's there to provide off-street access to the athletic fields and is only a few hundred feet from a road underpass. I wonder if this would be something the town (and MBTA) would put into consideration.

It is a tragedy to have a young life cut short. Operation Lifesaver should be funded and implemented in classrooms nationwide. However, no matter all the classes and video's that get watched, common sense goes a long way in a situation like this. Perhaps if RR PD and local PD started to fine and or arrest people for trespassing on railroad tracks in such a manner it would be another way to get the message across.

Well rumor has it that this one may have been a suicide so none of that woulda helped but don't quote me on that.