(The following story by Michael Dresser appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on January 10, 2010.)
BALTIMORE — The newspaper headline – “Middle River Girl Killed by Train” – could have run last week when 14-year-old Anna Marie Stickel was struck and killed by a passenger train while walking to Kenwood High School.
But the headline actually ran in May 1968, when 9-year-old Bonnie Louise Calhoun was run over near Martin Boulevard and Old Eastern Avenue – within walking distance of where Anna was killed – by a Pennsylvania Railroad train.
Little has changed over four decades on these tracks in eastern Baltimore County, where the nation’s busiest passenger rail corridor divides neighborhoods from several schools. But now, after generations of living with the railroad and the pedestrian fatalities that haunt the stretch where Anna and Bonnie died, local residents are questioning why railroad, government and school officials haven’t done more to protect their children.
“We’ve got to do something and we’ve got to do it soon,” said Donna Yeager, whose son Brandon was one of Anna’s closest friends and who said one of her Kenwood classmates died crossing the same tracks in 1975. “Common sense tells any parent a teenager is going to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest distance.”
These days, the name of the railroad is Amtrak, and the trains are faster and deadly quiet. Chain-link fencing lines some stretches of the track that were unprotected in 1968, but the barrier is riddled with well-known gaps and cut-throughs that are reopened as quickly as the railroad can repair them. In other spots, such as the wide open stretch behind Rock-a-Billy’s Bar & Grill where a man was killed in 1986, there is no barrier to the tracks except warning signs.
And teenagers still go from Point A to Point B in a straight line.
When six of Anna’s schoolmates, who were visiting a makeshift memorial to the girl off Orems Road, were asked if they had crossed the tracks, four raised their hands.
Ben Douglass, a 33-year-old Cecil County resident who grew up in the Middle River area, remembers the unauthorized crossings from his youth.
Douglass said that as a teenager, he and his friends regularly crossed the tracks to get from his home in the Middlesex neighborhood on the south side of the tracks to the Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club on Fuselage Avenue. He doesn’t recall any more than perfunctory warnings from adults at the club.
The former Kenwood student, now an electrician, pointed out a well-worn path just behind the club and near the spot where Anna and a friend slipped through the Amtrak fence, according to Baltimore County police. His old cut-through there showed signs of recent repairs, and two of Anna’s friends had attached a note saying “we love you.” A few yards away, concealed by foliage and next to a vagrant’s camp, was a gaping hole through which a man could be seen ducking onto the track bed.
Geography has made the Middle River-Essex area unusually vulnerable to tragedy on the tracks. Between Rossville Boulevard on the west and Martin Boulevard on the east runs a 2-mile stretch of railroad right of way – four tracks across – without a legal crossing. On both sides are residential neighborhoods; on the south side are several schools. Both sides are home to taverns whose customers sometimes cross the tracks while in questionable condition.
The problems in Middle River are hardly unique in Maryland. Baltimore is crisscrossed with passenger and freight rail lines that run adjacent to residential neighborhoods. Across the state, railroad communities such as Elkton, Havre de Grace, Aberdeen, Edgewood, Perryman, Chase, Relay, Laurel and Cheverly have a history of fatalities on the tracks – often teenagers using time-honored local shortcuts.
In recent years, such trespassing has claimed about 500 lives a year nationwide. In Maryland alone, more than 85 died in such incidents – whether accidents or suicides – during the past decade. In terms of deaths per 1,000 miles of tracks, the Federal Railroad Administration has ranked Maryland among the most dangerous five states.
Like other railroads, Amtrak sticks to a consistent message: Crossing or walking along its tracks is trespassing. It is illegal and dangerous. People who trespass do so at their own risk.
But in the wake of Anna’s death, those who loved her and others in Middle River are questioning whether Amtrak is doing enough to keep people off its tracks.
“They put up no trespassing signs and ‘Private Property.’ That’s not going to deter a teenager,” said Anna’s mother, Tara Stickel, 38, Thursday as she stood by the memorial that her daughter’s friends put together along the Amtrak fence. “Kids don’t think that far ahead. It’s up to everybody else to protect them.”
Stickel and other local residents would like to see that stretch of the Amtrak Northeast Corridor lined with structures like the Beltway’s noise barriers.
“What’s it take to put a wall up? They’ll do it for cars?” said a distraught Tony Powell, 37, the boyfriend of Anna’s aunt Anna Haslup, who had tears streaming down his cheeks as he visited the memorial.
Rob Kulat, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration, agreed that chain-link fences are ineffective. But he said barrier walls aren’t the answer.
“Somebody has to pay for it,” he said. “The expense is tremendous.”
While Kulat suggested that the county consider an overpass or underpass – an idea broached by several local residents – he said the best approach is education.
“The railroads are not responsible for people’s laziness,” he said. “The best thing is just letting people know it’s illegal to be on the track and it’s dangerous to be on the track and the trains are quieter than they used to be and they come up on you fast and they can’t stop or turn.”
The proximity of neighborhoods to tracks, and the resulting trespassing on railroad property is one of the industry’s most vexing issues. Often, tracks were in place long before development crept up around them, and little thought was given to separating them from the public.
According to the Federal Railroad Administration, the typical rail trespasser fatality involves a white male in his late 30s who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Teenagers and younger children make up about 10 percent of those killed. But of the 31 trespassers killed on Maryland tracks from 2006 to 2009, six – or almost 20 percent – were between the ages of 11 and 20.
For Anna, the decision to walk the tracks last Tuesday was the result of having overslept, family members said. With her mother already at work, she and a friend who had also missed their school bus decided to make the long trek to Kenwood. Her brother, Michael Stickel Jr., said they exchanged text messages and he told her to text him again when she was safe.
She never sent that message. About 9 a.m., as she and her friend walked along the southbound track, an Amtrak Northeast Regional train came up behind them. The friend was able to jump clear. Anna, listening to music on her iPod, didn’t hear the train in time.
“I never knew that she was ever on the tracks,” said Tara Stickel.
But local teenagers said their use of the tracks was an open secret.
Yeager’s son Brandon, a 16-year-old Kenwood junior, said that until he recently qualified for a driver’s license, he could often be found on the tracks.
“I used to play on the tracks all the time,” he said. “We’d just go to see how close we could get to the train.”
Brandon and other students said the subject has seldom been raised by school officials – even since Anna’s death. He said police officers assigned to Kenwood would watch teens walk up an alley to a well-known fence gap but wouldn’t intervene.
At the end of that alley behind Middlesex Road, there are signs of brand-new repairs to two popular gaps in the fence. Douglass examined the workmanship on one but was not impressed.
“A couple wire cutters will take care of that,” he said.
According to a county schools spokesman, Kenwood Principal Paul Martin has “tried and tried and tried, and warned and warned and warned” students about the hazards but it remains a problem.
“I understand the desire to put this responsibility on the shoulders of Kenwood High School,” spokesman Charles Herndon said. “The school has certainly made every effort to heighten the awareness of the dangers of this particular practice.”
If there is any consolation from Anna’s death, it may be that her friends have learned from the tragedy. When the same six students who were polled earlier were asked whether they would cross the tracks again, none put up a hand.
Mackenzie Bower, a 14-year-old friend of Anna’s and a freshman at Chesapeake High School, said there were lessons to be learned by teens and parents. Students, she said, should “try and get a ride to school.”
And parents?
“Just try and talk to your kids about the dangers of taking shortcuts in life.”