SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Jackrabbits scurry out of the early morning mist to avoid an Amtrak train starting out of downtown Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee reports.
As the train picks up speed, pigeons and doves take off in a flurry of wing beats, just missing the locomotive. Other animals aren’t as lucky. A red-tailed hawk perched on a fence post panics and arcs into the path of the train now traveling nearly 80 mph. A cattle egret slams against the bulletproof windshield in an explosion of white feathers. And in every town along the run from Sacramento to Bakersfield, at least one dog lies as still as death between two iron rails.
The engineers — a 25-year veteran named Earl Friend and his 25-year-old protégé, Jeremey Edson — don’t seem to notice.
Their eyes are thousands of yards ahead, scanning for signal changes, railroad workers, shifts in speed and for the people who should know better.
Every two hours in the United States, a vehicle or pedestrian is hit by a train, typically after someone ignores warning signals and safety gates and decides they are quicker than the oncoming train.
Last year nationwide, 508 pedestrians were struck and killed by trains, and 419 other people died in collisions between trains and automobiles, according to Federal Railroad Administration accident statistics.
In Sacramento County, 26 people have died since 1998 in train-related accidents.
But as any engineer will tell you, the most jarring incidents don’t show up in the administration’s accident statistics because they aren’t accidents at all.
“The suicides — those are the types of incidents that really grab hold,” said Charles Gessford, who works in Roseville for the Union Pacific Railroad arranging counseling and relief for employees who witness such events.
“They don’t realize there are people on these trains,” Gessford said. “They see metal and wheels and noise and smoke, and they don’t realize there’s humanity and emotions and feelings attached to it.”
Friend and Edson don’t look like railroad men. Instead of overalls and engineer’s caps, they wear Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses. Friend helped train Edson when the latter became an Amtrak engineer in 1999, and the two have become buddies. As the San Joaquin train courses through the Central Valley, they talk about an afternoon game of pickup basketball at the final stop in Bakersfield, an upcoming trip to Mexico, and which summer movies they want to see.
But between them, beneath the joking and banter, there’s a grisly collection of memories: a 12-car derailment; a young pedestrian who didn’t cross the tracks in time; a woman who drove around the safety gate; and two suicides.
One man, Friend said, sat down on the tracks outside San Jose. The other stepped into the train in Antioch.
“The suicides are the worst,” he said. “I’ll never forget them.”
Sometimes, the engineers don’t see them coming. The people hide behind telephone poles and leap in front of the train at the last second, or lie down on the tracks at night.
Other people stand defiantly between the rails, look the engineer in the eye, and let the overwhelming physics of an approaching locomotive take care of the rest. Edson said a fellow engineer had an incident in which a woman dressed in her finest clothes, bought a bottle of champagne and raised a glass just as the train hit her. Last month, a Bay Area man tipped his hat to a UP engineer before he was struck. For the people on the inside of the windshield, it’s a feeling of helplessness.
A fully loaded freight train can weigh 6,000 tons, and when traveling at top speed takes up to a mile and half to stop. A train’s massive size and destructive force are best described with an analogy: The train’s weight vs. that of a car is similar to that of the same car vs. an empty soda can.
The California Public Utilities Commission only began collecting train suicide information from county coroners last year, an uncertain process that turned up 20 incidents statewide for 2001. Railroad officials say actual figures are much higher.
Some people are struck at night and their bodies found the next day, making it hard to tell if it was a suicide unless a note is discovered. Many rail deaths are filed away as “undetermined.”
The Caltrain commuter route, a 77-mile stretch from Gilroy to San Francisco, had 18 suicides alone in the last 2 * years, according to officials there. The incidents became so frequent last year that Caltrain officials put up signs along the route advertising suicide-prevention hotlines and have asked the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office to join railroad police in patrolling the tracks.
In April, two people leapt to their deaths in front of separate Sacramento Regional Transit light-rail trains in a span of 13 hours. There have been eight rail-related suicides in Sacramento County in the past four years, according to the Coroner’s Office.
Whether the death is the result of suicide or an accident, what’s most haunting to engineers isn’t the visual image — the victim disappears from view 12 feet before impact — but the sound that comes a second later, said UP’s Gessford.
“It’s very distinctive,” Gessford said. “You know what you hit.”
Many engineers also go through something called intrusive recall — where the sound or sight of the crash is replayed mentally, over and over.
Edson knows all about the phenomenon.
He was at the controls of an Amtrak Coast Starlight going from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento in 1999 when a tractor-trailer rig didn’t cross the tracks in time near Salinas. His train slammed into the trailer, causing 12 cars to derail. Edson was thrown backward and suffered a broken rib when the windshield caved. Some passengers sustained minor injuries, but everyone — including the truck driver — survived. Edson said he remembers making eye contact with the driver shortly before impact, but it’s the sound that still bothers him today.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said. “It’s the sound of something going under the train. You just associate it with death. When the train stopped, I didn’t want to walk back (to the accident scene) because I knew someone might be dead.”
Gessford said cleanup crews sometimes will fail to remove all crash debris. A mirror or part of a bumper will linger for years at the scene and trigger unwanted memories every time an engineer passes by.
For Friend, a reminder also has come in the form of a letter.
In Atascadero in 1992, he struck a young man who tried to beat the train on foot. Part of Friend’s coping process, he said, is to avoid learning anything about the victims: their names, ages, where they were from and why they were on the tracks.
But soon after that 1992 accident, he opened a letter from the young man’s grandmother, who expressed sympathy for what Friend must have seen and felt. She said the accident had hurt many people and that Friend must have been one of them.
“I carried that letter with me for a long time,” Friend said. “No one had ever cared how I felt, and I didn’t know how to respond.”
He recently threw away the letter, he said, as a way of putting the episode behind him.
Friend said he deals with the tragedies by telling himself there is nothing he could have done to prevent them and by understanding they are part of the job.
The people who threw themselves in front of his train, he said, will always be in his mind, but he’s not angry.
“Those people were in tougher situations than I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You don’t forget the people you run over, but you can deal with it by understanding they are at their end.”