(The following article by John Wilkens was posted on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on October 12.)
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Ah, the romance of the rails. Wheels going clackity-clack. A whistle blowing. Scenic splendor gliding by at a leisurely pace.
Save all that for the movies. The railroad life that Mark Cook deals with comes from the other side of the tracks:
Motorists who drive around the warning gates at a crossing rather than wait for the train to pass. Joggers on the tracks, listening to music, unaware of what’s coming up behind them. Fare-beaters, transients, vandals.
Cook is a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the Railroad Enforcement Unit, a small team that sometimes rides the rails (but mostly alongside them) in an effort to keep people safe and the trains moving.
He’s been part of the squad since it started, about 10 years ago, and he’s seen some hard-to-believe stuff.
Once he found a painter who had set up his easel next to the track, trying to capture on canvas the beauty of a Torrey Pines sunset. “I told him he’d have to take a picture,” Cook said, “or finish the painting from memory.”
Another time he was riding a train as it came up on a jogger running across a trestle in Carlsbad.
“She had nowhere to go,” he said. “All she could do was try to beat the train off the trestle.” She did. “But I’d guess she’s never run across that trestle again.”
Railroad tracks crisscross much of the county, but people don’t often think about trains until they see or hear one. It’s easy to underestimate how powerful and deadly they are.
Every year, about 1,000 people die in the United States in rail-related incidents, according to officials with Operation Lifesaver, a national nonprofit organization formed to educate people about the dangers.
In San Diego County, six people have died in the past 12 months on the two corridors worked by the Railroad Enforcement Unit – one stretching along the coast from the Orange County line to downtown San Diego, and the other from Oceanside to Escondido.
Some of the deaths were suicides, said Lt. Donald Fowler, supervisor of the team, which is based in Encinitas. The others were people who weren’t paying attention, or who gambled and lost.
It’s the gambling that most befuddles and concerns those who work around trains. Cook shakes his head when he talks about folks he has found fishing off a trestle near Oceanside, or the teens who stand on the railings of a trestle in Carlsbad, wait for the train to get close, then jump into the water.
“It’s some kind of rite of passage,” he said. “Their parents did it. Now they do it.”
In 1972, when Operation Lifesaver started, there were, on average, more than 12,000 collisions between trains and cars at railroad crossings nationwide.
Through public-education campaigns and better signage, the number of collisions has been cut to about 3,000 annually. But now, the group said, the number of incidents involving pedestrians is rising.
Last year, at a sting operation in Old Town, the Railroad Enforcement Unit wrote citations for dozens of pedestrians who walked around warning gates or in front of trolleys.
Fowler said the team does a couple such operations each year, usually in Old Town or Sorrento Valley, another crossing where people find it too hard to wait for the trains.
The deputies also do special details at the beginning of the Del Mar horse-racing season, for people who like to dine at nearby restaurants and then take a short cut along the tracks.
The maximum penalty for illegally crossing the tracks is a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Most violators get probation and a fine of several hundred dollars.
What people don’t realize, Cook said, is that they are poor judges of how fast trains move. Their size makes it appear as if they are lumbering. And people also don’t understand that it takes a braking train about a mile to come to a stop.
Add to that the fact that people at crossings often just glance at trains with their peripheral vision, again not comprehending their speed, and a disaster is in the offing for those willing to ignore the clanging bells and dropping gates.
Even when they know a collision is coming, people don’t always do the right thing. Cook recalled an incident last year in Leucadia in which a woman found herself stuck on the tracks in her Monte Carlo with a Coaster train barreling down.
“She just figured the train would kind of nudge her car out of the way,” Cook said. Instead, the front half of the car was crushed. Somehow the woman walked away without injury, the deputy said.
Cook and the rest of the enforcement team – funded by the North County Transit District, which operates the Coaster trains – spend most of their time patrolling the railroad right-of-way, looking for problems.
A 25-year sheriff’s department veteran, Cook said he volunteered for the detail because he liked the idea of moving around a lot and not being stuck on a particular beat, even though it means having to listen to two radios at the same time (one sheriff, one transit district).
Another plus: “You don’t get any domestic disturbance calls out here.”
Unlike others on the team, he didn’t have a thing for trains as a kid, although he’s learned to appreciate some of the machinery’s quirks. He knows where to go, for example, to hear the tracks sing.
When the unit first started, Cook said, there were transient encampments everywhere, not surprising considering the longtime attraction of trains to wanderers of all sorts. Those camps have been cleared out.
Now they’re more likely to see kids throwing rocks at trains. Or surfers cutting across the tracks to get to the water. Or old furniture. “If we don’t haul it away,” he said, “someone will put it on the tracks, just to see what happens.”
In the three years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the patrols have taken on added importance. Cook said he often finds himself eyeing certain stretches of track, wondering if they might be particularly attractive to saboteurs.
But there are also times when he’s monitoring the bluffs near Del Mar, riding an off-road vehicle known as a quad, and it’s time for lunch. He’ll sit there, soaking in the view of the ocean and the coastline, thinking happier thoughts.
Sitting, of course, away from the train tracks.