Valparaiso, In. fatalities

Not sure whether the Hoosier or the cardinal was involved:

http://www.indystar.com/articles/9/196693-6449-102.html

From the article...

"The train's engineer told investigators that he saw Johnson's vehicle go around the gate, according to police and Amtrak officials."

If this is indeed verified, then I think Forrest Gump said it best: "Stupid is as stupid does."

John Perkowski

Article states it was a NY-Chicago train.

In fact, it was the Three Rivers.

Wow that is bad my prayers go out to the family involved.

AmtrakFan

The saying stupid is as stupid does is unfortionatly becoming an understatement in this country. People lack the common sense to even wait as the gates are down and the ligths are flashing. I mean come on!!! It's only a damn six car train. hell NJT runs 8 car midtown Expresses at much slower speeds in Dover and yet I have the patiance to wait my turn at the Orchard St and Morris St corsssings for the train to pass. Even the NS local which is 20-30 cars long in't as bad and that moves alot slower plus it's only a few minutes.

Totally pathetic when two people decide that that delivering a few papers mere minutes ahead of schedule is worth risking their lives, a life of an unborn child and orphaning one at home.

My prayers go to the engineer and the unborn kid along with the familes and friends

Hopefully people will learn from this but in a world where common sense and personal responsibiltiy are all but dead that would be asking too much


On another note I'm sorry to hear that the Three Rivers is now down to a mere 6 cars when that train was once 12-15 cars long

Which P42 was involved? How much damage?

#89. I don't know the damage estimate.

Which train was it? Three River's? Someone here said it wouldn't have been the Cardinal, even though it runs from CHI to NYP as well.

Yes it was the Three Rivers. The Cardinal/Hoosier State runs via Indy and Cincinatti (GTW-Mon-Nyc-...etc) so takes a more southern route then the Three Rivers which runs on the B&O (Chi-Pit)

Calling it stupid or otherwise denegrating the deceased is highly insensitive and misses the mark in terms of the real cause of peoples behaviour re going around gates. It's easy to say and is popular amongst the railfan community, but let me go against that grain...

(Please note, primary fault obviously lies with the driver of the car, but with that said let me continue...)

many factors go into a drivers decision to go around gates. In fact in some circumstances gates go down and no train comes, and they go back up again, or gates go down and you wait 20 minutes or longer for the train to clear. This kind of thing provokes pavlovian responses in some segment of the population. Add to that the fact that people cannot accurately judge the speed of large objects (such as trains) and hence are likely to 'think I can make it' when the reality is much different.

To mitigate these kind of accidents we need to transcend the mentality that it's 'stupid' drivers and look at how we can improve safety to benifit both road users and train crews and passengers. It's obviously better to avoid a grade accident in the first place.

But the sticky question is what can be done, and at what cost?

Some things that can be done, but cost $.

1)Grade seperation at busy intersections
2)Four quadrant gates to completely block the road
3)Build medians in the road which has been shown to reduce 'drive arounds'
4)Improve the publics education regarding grade crossing safety.
5)Improve logic for grade crossing protection activation to reduce 'false' indications
6) Reduce the length of time crossings are blocked.

Obviously it's easier to say it's the stupid peoples fault and why should we spend any money to fix it, but as I said earlier IMHO this misses the point.

However, the question remains, how much can we/should we spend on these or other items to attempt to improve grade crossing safety?

Despite the reasonable statements of the above post, I still think it's just plain stupid to go around crossing gates. It's not OK to run a red light if there are no cars currently in an intersection. If the driver ran a red light and plowed into a minivan and killed a few people, the driver would be excoriated by the media. You wouldn't hear anyone say "well, the light stays red for a long time, even when there are no cars coming, so it's not really his/her fault."

It's not the trains fault, it's not the crossing's fault, it's not the light's fault, IT'S THE DRIVER'S FAULT when warning signals and gates are ignored or actively avoided.

In cases such as this, the driver of the car should be held accountable for damages and loss of life. People need to be held accountable for their own actions. I've had to wait 10+ minutes at a grade crossing before, but I didn't go around the gates, and I'm VERY impatient when I drive my car. Fortunately, I know where "in a hurry" ends and "Darwin-award stupid" begins.

We, as a society, can only do so much to rescue people from their own stupidity and lack of common sense. [/b]

I will not retract my opinion of this family's actions.

They murdered an unborn child. Whoever was driving (and I did not read the article close enough to determine) murdered their spouse. They ORPHANED a five year old!!!

Is there a single State in the Union which does not have STOP and WAIT for the train to clear (and the gates to re-rise) when the crossbuck flashes and the gates go down in its traffic code???

John Perkowski

John_Perkowski wrote:I will not retract my opinion of this family's actions.

They murdered an unborn child. Whoever was driving (and I did not read the article close enough to determine) murdered their spouse. They ORPHANED a five year old!!!

Is there a single State in the Union which does not have STOP and WAIT for the train to clear (and the gates to re-rise) when the crossbuck flashes and the gates go down in its traffic code???

John Perkowski

You are entitled to your opinion, but calling a mistake in judgement 'murder' is beyond a fair comparison IMHO. Gross Negligence and failure to use due care, yes, Murder, no

Certainly they did it to themselves, but we've all make poor judements in our lives in the past, the only difference being all of us are alive today, so none of them turned out to be fatal, but some of them certainly had the potential to be.

We are all human, and as such our condition is such that we are imperfect. Accepting that we will all do things that better judgement says we shouldn't do, and in some cases this will cause death or serious injury to ourselves or others.

To blame the driver is certainly appropriate and acceptable, but we must also look at factors that can mitigate the human failures that were secondary factors in the incident, otherwise we will continue to see chilren orphaned, and train crews psychologically affected at a greater rate than we should accept.

Not defending anyone who runs around gates here, but I will state that criticizing people for not being able to wait "25 seconds" for a "six-car train" to clear is simplistic at best.

I'd gather that most of the trains in the area are long, slow freight trains that probably take several minutes to clear. The length of the train is not evident when the gates come down.

Of course, if everyone was as absolutely perfect as railfans (who, of course, have never jaywalked, never sped through a yellow light before it turns red to clear the intersection, never driven 1 mph above the posted speed limit, never eaten or talked on cell phones while driving, never performed any major project without thoroughly and accurately reading and following all written instructions, always keep the sidewalks in front of their houses clear the second snow starts to fall lest a pedestrian slip and injure him/herself, always wash their hands thoroughly in fast food restaurants after they handle money but before they pick up napkins, straws, cup lids, plastic forks, etc., lest they contaminate them with their poisonous germs for subsequent users, etc.), then there would be no problem in this world and all would be well.

David Telesha wrote:metrarider wrote:

You are entitled to your opinion, but calling a mistake in judgement 'murder' is beyond a fair comparison IMHO. Gross Negligence and failure to use due care, yes, Murder, no

Breaking the LAW is a "mistake in judgement"?????

If I go rob a bank is that a mistake in judgement??

Gross negligence and manslaughter - thats what it is.

Don't run a lowered gate with flashing RED lights and you'll live. Any simpler and it would be even more (if thats possible) horribly ridiculous.

I did say it was gross negligence, and I would agree with the manslaughter as well.

Robbing a bank is a premeditated action, and as such is substantially different than a split second decision to go around a gate. At some level though they are all errors in judgement, but that statement is not meant to defend the actions of those that undertook those acts.

David Telesha wrote: metrarider wrote:

many factors go into a drivers decision to go around gates. In fact in some circumstances gates go down and no train comes, and they go back up again, or gates go down and you wait 20 minutes or longer for the train to clear

Saying that the 1 out of 1,000,000+ crossing malfunctions that cause the gates to go down w/ lights and back up without a train passing as the cause for running a gate makes no sense AT ALL.

I'm not talking about malfunctions.

Gates routinely go down and then go back up again, as many have motion detection which will raise the gates again if a train stops. I see this happen multple times daily on the crossings near my house. The train approaches the crossing, gates go down, train stops before the crossing, gates go up.

David Telesha wrote:
metrarider wrote:

6) Reduce the length of time crossings are blocked.

Saying the 25 +/- seconds that the gates are down before the train passes makes people impatient is just as ignorant. Or are you saying the speed over crossings should be increased meaning that the chance of survival for a crossing runner is decreased but thats okay as long as other people don't have to wait more that a few minutes?

No, I'm talking about 20+ minutes for a slow moving freight to go by, and yes it is impatience and ignorace, but we cannot completly cure either fault in humans as it's simply a trait many posess.

And no, I don't suggest decreasing the time before the gates go down, I'm not even advocating any partilar approach, but trying to bring some rational discussion about how safety might be improved by recognising some human factors and applying (hopefully) simply mitigation factors

understand, none of my comments are meant to absolve the driver of responsibility or to shift blame to the railroads or anyone else, simply trying to bring up the issue of human factors for which there are mitigation techniques that if reasearched and applied could greatly reduce these types of incidents.

Mitigating human factors in part is what lead to ATS systems and cab signals on many passenger lines, it's underlying many procedures for maintence and operation of trains and occurs in road traffic planning in many cases, it should simply also be looked at in grade crossings.

I think we'd all agree that grade crossing accidents are tragic, from the perspective of the engineer who has to live with the deaths and the surviving members of the families of the deceased. Following from that it would be A Good Thing (tm) if we can reduce these types of accidents.