(The following article by Ronald Smother was posted on the New York Time website on October 15.)
NEWARK, N.J. — In Manville, N.J., last Friday a killer apparently tried to disguise his crime by placing the victim’s body on the freight rail tracks, where it might be viewed simply as another suicide under the wheels of the 6:20 train.
On Sunday in Morristown, Bruce DeHart, a construction worker putting in some overtime hours refurbishing the train station, noticed the hubbub around the station where a 37-year-old man had committed suicide by stepping into the path of an oncoming train. He thought for a moment that it was just another death of one of the homeless alcoholics who live in makeshift camps around the railroad tracks and occasionally meet their end there.
Two weeks ago, when the blare of an express train horn sounded, only to have the train stopped screechingly at the Short Hills station, Jim Cook, the attendant at the Citgo Gas Station about 50 yards away, knew immediately what had happened.
And on Tuesday, a motorcyclist who sped around a railroad crossing bar in Hazlet, in an apparent effort to beat the oncoming train, lost the race and was killed when the train struck him.
There have been three suicides and one accidental death on the 975 miles of New Jersey Transit railroad tracks in the last two weeks. It began with an unemployed Short Hills banker who killed himself Sept. 29, and continued on Sunday with the suicide of James Thomas Kelly, 37, who was instrumental in organizing New Jersey residents who had been abused by priests. On the same day in Millington, a woman crouched down on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, a railroad spokeswoman said. The deaths continued further with the motorcyclist on Tuesday.
But rather than an unexpected spike in such incidents, they are a reflection of a morbid fact of life in New Jersey. Death on the tracks ? at the rate of about 25 a year ? is common enough that residents near the tracks can sense the cues and New Jersey Transit officials have a regular counseling program in place for engineers and other crew members whose trains are involved in what they euphemistically call “critical incidents,” whether they be accidents or suicides.
“I’ve had three myself in 35 years of service, and I can still picture each one of them,” said Bob Vallochi, general chairman of the union representing the commuter line’s engineers. “I remember how I was treated then, when there was a more callous attitude of getting right back in the saddle. Now you don’t have to just shut it out.”
Engineers like Mr. Vallochi and Wayne Pierson, who has been at the controls of locomotives for 38 years, insist that the incidents are not increasing. It is just the reporting of them that is increasing, they say, now that the rail lines are larger and publicly owned and touch on more and more commuter lives in the state’s sprawling suburbs.
And because the rail lines are so extensive, such “suicides by locomotive” or accidents are almost impossible to prevent, said Penny Bassett Hackett, a spokeswoman for New Jersey Transit.
“You cannot fence in a railroad,” she said. “Plus a fence is not a deterrent to anything because if a person wants to access the railroad tracks, they can.”
There were 27 deaths on New Jersey Transit tracks last year, and with the accident involving the motorcyclist today the number this year stands at 19, said Ms. Bassett Hackett. And lore among engineers nationwide is that the numbers increase rapidly during holiday periods.
John Tolman, the assistant to the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the national union for the train operators, said that the problem of death on the tracks is a national one. He said the union, the Federal Railway Agency and the railroads are currently two years into a study of how to best minister to the train crews who suffer this trauma.
“And the commuter rail line is the primary place for people to commit suicide, largely because there are more frequent trains traveling at high speeds to populated areas,” he said.
Each incident leaves its own sad residue.
In Morristown, where Mr. Kelly walked onto the tracks to be struck by a train early Sunday morning, Mohamed Ramadan, owner of Bagel Brothers, said that he didn’t know the reasons behind the suicide, but offered his own curbside sense of a pervasive depression among his customers because of the economy. A group that once seemed more focused, hurried and directed seemed now more aimless and tentative.
“I have noticed a lot of my customers that used to come in and grab a quick bite to eat are now staying for longer periods of time because they just don’t have jobs to rush off to,” he said.
A way down the tracks of the Morris and Essex line in Short Hills, when Richard Josephs, an unemployed banker, stepped in front of a train near the Short Hills station Sept. 29 after strangling his 7-year-old son, people assumed the stresses of the economy were to blame. Mr. Cook, the gas station attendant, was still mystified by such a tragedy “in this day and age when all you need to do is throw up your hands and say, `Help,’ ” in order to get counseling and assistance.
The train station in Millington on the Somerset-Morris County border is the Millington Station Cafe, a coffee shop in a small, gray stone building whose eight windows are decorated with flower boxes sporting fuschia and white blooms. It was near the station on Sunday morning that Veronica Henderson, 53, a Basking Ridge resident, crouched down on the tracks in front of a New Jersey Transit train, according to Ms. Bassett Hackett.
Melissa Ferrera, 19, a waitress at the station cafe for the last three years, was visibly troubled by the incident and found herself wondering if Ms. Henderson had been among the so many anonymous faces she waited on. Everyone was shocked and concerned, she said, adding that even the train horns had a different sound that day.
“They seemed more melancholy,” she said.