(The following article by Dave Murphy was posted on the San Francisco Chronicle website on April 22.)
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — It’s half an hour past sunrise when Caltrain engineer Adam Hua starts the nearly 450 tons of machinery roaring from Gilroy to San Francisco on a routine run. Fourteen minutes into Thursday’s ride, however, geography reminds everyone of how grim 2006 has been.
At 7:19, his Caltrain 227 zooms past the San Pedro Avenue crossing in Morgan Hill, where Caltrain had its first of seven fatalities this year. Usually there are seven to 10 Caltrain deaths in a whole year; 1995 was the worst, with 20.
2006 is on a pace to break that record.
It started about 6:50 p.m. Jan. 23, with Caltrain on its next-to-last Gilroy run of the day. Gates dropped and warning lights flashed at San Pedro, but 20-year-old Nathan Schrock tried to weave his pickup truck past the gates and across the tracks.
He was seriously injured but survived. His girlfriend, 18-year-old Jacqueline Gamboa, didn’t.
In his 27 years as an engineer, Hua has been involved in a half-dozen fatal crashes. “The first one was a policeman on Mary Avenue” in Sunnyvale 20 years ago, he says. “I was on a freight train about 1 in the morning.”
He heard later that the officer got a call about a robbery in progress, so he zoomed past the gates, not even having his flashing lights on. All Hua saw was a brief flash of white paint on the police car’s side.
There was no way to stop in time. There rarely is.
“You need at least half- or three-quarters of a mile,” says Hua, a Fremont resident. “If you’re doing 75 miles an hour, by the time you see it, it’s hard.”
He sees a handful of pedestrians trespass on a typical run, and follows the standard procedure of blowing his whistle one-quarter of a mile before any of the more than 70 crossings between Gilroy and San Francisco.
“If somebody stays on the track,” Hua says, “I’ll do a different tone.”
Most of California’s fatal train accidents involve pedestrians, said Zoe Richmond, president of California Operation Lifesaver, part of a national group that promotes train safety. In many cases, impatience is to blame.
Caltrain spokeswoman Janet McGovern said the agency tries to deter pedestrians from illegal crossings, but it’s too costly to put fences around the entire 77-mile stretch, or even the part that Caltrain owns, which runs from San Francisco to the Tamien station in San Jose. Union Pacific owns the rest.
“We’re adding fencing where we can maximize the impact,” McGovern said. “These tend to be in high-trespassing areas.”
Caltrain also emphasizes public education, which is always the most important safety factor, Richmond added. “Unfortunately, people find very creative ways to jump a fence or cut a fence open.”
Although impatience is the primary cause, confusion could play a role. Many commuter railroads use “push-pull” trains that run with the locomotive in the front or at the rear, such as the train Hua was operating. Trespassers could be confused by that, said Marmie Edwards of Operation Lifesaver’s national office.
“You could be seeing what looks like the rear end of a train,” she said, “but it still may be coming your way.”
Ninety minutes into its run, train 227 reaches central Palo Alto, whistling past the locations of this year’s three apparent suicides, all men: at 8:30 a.m. March 3, at the East Meadow Drive crossing in Palo Alto; 9:20 p.m. March 8, near where the Fair Oaks Avenue overpass crosses the tracks in Sunnyvale; and 7:15 a.m. April 6, when a man stepped in front of a Baby Bullet — an express train — as it fired through the Mountain View station.
The Sunnyvale victim lay on the tracks and waited for the train to kill him, says Billy Rogers, an Amtrak road foreman who routinely rides along on Caltrain, including Thursday’s trip.
A 32-year Amtrak veteran who has been exposed to trains his whole life — “My grandfather was an old steam shovel operator, and my father was train master on Santa Fe” — Rogers says there is little that railroads can do to stop suicides.
“They’ll hide in the bushes until the train is almost on top of them,” he says. “They’ve chosen this as their way to go.”
Caltrain has dozens of signs along the tracks with the phone number of a suicide-prevention hot line. One is clearly visible at the Mountain View station.
California had 93 pedestrian rail deaths last year — nearly one-fifth of the 485 recorded nationwide by the Federal Railroad Administration. And that doesn’t tell the half of it.
“Suicides are not reported,” Operation Lifesaver’s Richmond said. “They are seen as unavoidable.”
Of the 149 trespasser deaths that Caltrain has had since taking over from Southern Pacific in 1992, 88 were believed to be suicides.
McGovern said that the system operates a record 96 one-way trains each weekday — up from 68 as recently as 2000 — but the expansion occurred in August. The death rate had stayed relatively typical through February, but five fatalities have occurred since.
Although Caltrain has far more fatalities than other Bay Area rail systems, it’s also built differently: Abraham Lincoln was president and Henry Ford was in diapers when trains started running between San Francisco and San Jose, so homes and businesses sprang up around railroad tracks. BART and light-rail systems were built after much of the Bay Area had been developed; more of their tracks had to be underground or elevated so they wouldn’t interfere with traffic.
At 8:45, Caltrain 227 pulls into Redwood City, the only place with two fatal accidents this year.
About 7:45 a.m. on Feb. 1, 58-year-old Bonnie Heitz walked around a crossing gate at Brewster Avenue, either underestimating or not noticing the speed of a southbound Baby Bullet.
The Baby Bullet trains don’t go faster than others on Caltrain — a maximum of 79 mph — but make fewer stops, so they spend more time at top speed. That makes them more popular. And potentially more deadly.
There is plenty of fencing along the track near the San Carlos border, except for a slight gap at Cordilleras Creek. It’s the type of obscured, unofficial crossing that a teenage boy would love.
Apparently 19-year-old Jose Alvarez of Hayward underestimated the speed of a northbound Caltrain as he tried to race east across the tracks around noon on April 6. He became the second Caltrain victim of the day, dying less than five hours after the suicide in Mountain View.
As Caltrain 227 speeds past, passengers can still see bunches of plastic-wrapped flowers that some friends left as a makeshift memorial for Alvarez, on a black metal fence just east of the tracks. Next to the flowers is a sign.
“No trespassing,” it says.
Within minutes, the 227 reaches another makeshift floral memorial, this one in Burlingame, for the youngest and most recent victim. Fatih Kuc, a 13-year-old from Burlingame Intermediate School, died about 2:35 p.m. Tuesday at another unofficial crossing, this one just east of Sanchez Avenue, a path that many students use to go between California Drive and Carolan Avenue.
He was walking with friends, and apparently didn’t notice the southbound Caltrain until it was too late.
Once trains get past San Bruno, the tracks are more remote, the tragedies less likely. As the 227 nears San Francisco, about two hours and 15 minutes after leaving Gilroy, Amtrak’s Rogers says he hopes people still appreciate what is special about the trains, as well as what is dangerous.
“These trains are quiet,” he says. “They’ll be on top of you before you realize that they’re there.”