NJ Transit train hits, kills man in Long Branch

F23A4 and Mudvalve:

When did you have your interviews? Just curious.

NJ, Interview was sometime around March of '99.

My wife was workng in Sea Girt that day and was returning to NYC in the evening. She was on the first car of that train that hit the fellow in Elberon. She called right after it happened. Apparently there was a conductor on board who was up in the front, she (I think my wife mentioned the conductor was a she) was (obviously) quite upset. My wife said the conductor kept saying "Oh God... Oh no...." while holding her had and chest.

They escorted everyone off the train near the front (I explained to her thats probably because the body parts were back behind the train by the time it stopped). The fire dept had obviously hosed down the front of the train, she said, as they were still spraying water everywhere...
She didn't make it back into Penn Station NY until about 1AM.

She said it was interesting in that there was no big horn sounds or screeching of the breaks, at least nothing she overtly noticed, although she had her walkman on. She said the train slowed down suddenly and the conductor came out all upset.
Quite an episode...
BigDell

When you hear the train hit ANYTHING, your heart quickly drops to your feet......especially if the engineer has already dumped or has started an attempt to brake the train. Even if its only a deer or other animal, the smell is sickening, and the thump and rolling of the creature, whatever it is, feels like its going to come through the floor of the train. Then if any damage occurs in the undercarrage, the crew, namely the conductor, must go down and remove any "debris" and try to put airhoses or HEP cables or whatever back together and try to get the train moving again

There was a female conductor and a male rearbrakeman, I know them both very well.......she is a hardened tough cookie, with a good number of years on the railroad, but when that happens, its never fun and can break down anyone.

Then the grim task of going outside and verifying the inevitable with a location of the incident and the location"S" of major parts of the corpse begins, after checking to see how the engineer is doing of course.

God, that's awful!

How often do trains hit deer and other animals? When I was younger, I actually walked along the ROW from Princeton Junction to Princeton (yeah, I know...I did dumb things when I was a kid!). It seemed like there were remains of deer and other animals in various stages of decomposition every few feet!

It happens a decent amount of time out west on the Gladstone, Morristown and Raritan Valley lines.

I won't forget the time at White House Station while waiting for a train, I looked down to see half a deer (the half with a head) looking up at me (it was dead of course). The dear was in the dead center of the tracks between the rails. The train just rolled right over it when it came as did the rest of the trains.

NJneer wrote:F23A4 and Mudvalve:

When did you have your interviews? Just curious.

The summer of 1998.