(The following story by Mike Chalmers appeared on The News Journal website on May 6, 2010.)
WILMINGTON, Del. — For Chuck Dugan, the moment that every train engineer dreads came late at night almost two decades ago in Claymont.
Dugan and his crew were moving a train across a road when he heard car brakes squealing. He turned to see a car smash into the side of his train, severely injuring the drunken driver and his three passengers.
“He climbed out of the car, and I saw things I don’t like to think about,” Dugan said. “It was a mid-70s Impala, pea green. I’ll never forget that.”
The driver later died. The experience so rattled Dugan that the next year he took an administrative job as yardmaster in Newark.
“I almost quit,” said Dugan, now yardmaster in Baltimore. “More than one person has quit after something like that happens.”
Nationwide, there were nearly 1,900 collisions between cars and trains last year, killing 248 people and injuring 688 more. Trespassing on the tracks caused another 434 deaths and 335 injuries.
“There are hundreds of fatalities a year because people try to beat the gates,” said Jessica Franklin, an administrative coordinator with the Texas Transportation Institute, a research center affiliated with Texas A&M University.
“Or people become complacent and say, ‘Oh, there’s never a train coming,’ so they don’t slow down and look,” Franklin said.
Dugan shared his story while a Norfolk Southern diesel-electric locomotive pulled two passenger cars between Newark and Dover on Wednesday as part of the railroad industry’s Operation Lifesaver public-education campaign. Norfolk Southern offers 15 Operation Lifesaver trips a year in its 22-state territory so police, transportation planners, reporters and others can learn about rail safety.
Such safety messages aren’t new. Hanging in the passenger cars are replicas of posters from the 1920s and 1930s for the Careful Crossing Campaign.
Safety experts say collisions involving trespassers have outpaced car crashes in recent years, in part because road crossings have become safer.
Last year, three people died while standing or walking on Delaware train tracks, including two apparent suicides. There were no fatal vehicle collisions here in 2009.
Nationwide, about two-thirds of those killed while trespassing on railroads are impaired by drugs or alcohol, 87 percent are men, and almost one in five are believed to be suicides, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Transporting the message
During Wednesday’s Operation Lifesaver run, the train crossed dozens of roads. At each one, engineer Joe Walder repeated the same sequence of horn blasts: two long ones approaching the crossing, a short one just before the road and another long one as he rolled through the crossing.
As he approached most roads, cars still zipped across the tracks after red crossing lights had begun flashing but before the gates came down.
More than 80 percent of Delaware’s crossing are marked by flashing lights, gates or both, said Doug Andrews, a spokesman for Delaware Transit Corp. and the state’s Operation Lifesaver coordinator.
The oft-repeated message from Andrews, Dugan and others on the Operation Lifesaver train is that it takes a long time to stop a train, too long for anyone to think it can avoid hitting a person or car on the tracks.
With the emergency brake engaged, a long freight train traveling 55 mph takes a mile or more to stop, Dugan said.
“With the distance it takes to stop, you can’t even see the crossing,” he said. “By the time you see a car, it’s too late.”
Hitting the emergency brake also poses the risk that the train might derail, a possibility that engineers consider especially when they’re hauling tankers of chemicals or explosive materials, Dugan said.
Unavoidable horror
Engineers need to spend only a few years on the job to be able to tell stories of close calls or even fatalities.
John Kennedy, a Norfolk Southern engineer based in Harrisburg, Pa., has never hit anyone, but it has almost happened plenty of times. One night, he came up behind a man riding a four-wheeler down the track in front of him. Kennedy slowed down the train, and the man sped up but was trapped between the rails until he could find a crossing.
Kennedy knows it’s just a matter of time, though, before his train hits someone. He tries to remind himself that when it happens, it won’t be his fault.
“There’s nothing I can do to stop you from walking in front of me or driving around the gates,” Kennedy said.
As the Operation Lifesaver train passes through the Middletown area, Dugan and Kennedy point out how many new housing developments have grown up around the tracks. Where the train used to roll through fields and forests, it’s now flanked by houses and backyards with swingsets and swimming pools just feet from the tracks.
“It’s one volleyball or Wiffle ball hit away,” Kennedy said.
The track is used daily to move coal, grain and other freight up and down the Delmarva Peninsula. At least once a day, engineers see someone drive or run across the tracks as the train approaches, Dugan said.
Often, trespassers are teenagers who spray-paint or vandalize the cars and locomotives, Franklin said.
“The kids like to hang out along the trestle bridges,” she said. “They’ve got their music cranked up, and they don’t hear it coming.”
Education as prevention
The Newark and University of Delaware police departments work together to educate new students about crossing the tracks, said UD Police Major Joel Ivory, who was on the Operation Lifesaver train.
“They tend to use the tracks as shortcuts, not realizing the dangers,” Ivory said.
Several people have died along the tracks running through Newark in recent years, including a UD freshman who was walking home from a fraternity party and was struck on the trestle over Chapel Street near Cleveland Avenue in September 2004.
Franklin said enforcement of trespassing and crossing-gate laws helps cut down on dangerous violations.
“If officers are seeing people trespassing on rail rights of way, they should stop them and get them off of there,” she said.
When Andrews speaks to elementary and high school students about train safety, he has a standard demonstration to make his point.
A train can weigh 12 million pounds, about 4,000 times more than an average car, he tells them. He then points out that he weighs about 4,000 times as much as the empty soda can he places on the floor.
“I just step on it,” he said, “and then I ask, ‘What do you think are your odds against a train?’ “