(The following article by Gordon Dillow was posted on the Orange County Register website on February 2. Brother John Tolman is the BLET’s Chief of Staff and Legislative & Political Director. Brother Steve Blasyak is a member of BLET Division 660 in Los Angeles.)
ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — Suicide is always inconsiderate. It hurts the people who care about you, and it forces someone else to clean up the mess you leave behind.
But suicide is really, really inconsiderate when you enlist someone else to do the killing for you.
Consider, for example, suicide-by-train.
It’s an issue that’s been in the news a lot recently after last week’s Metrolink crash in Glendale that killed 11 other people and injured hundreds more – a crash allegedly caused by a guy who was trying to kill himself.
But even in cases where the suicide-by-train goes as planned, where the suicidal person actually manages to die without physically hurting anyone else, it still has an impact on other people.
How often it happens is a matter of dispute. In 2003 more than 800 people were struck and killed by trains nationally. Some estimates say that 200 or 300 of them were probably suicides.
Orange County gets its share. Last January an Irvine woman intentionally stepped in front of a train and was killed. In November 2003 a 50-year-old Irvine man did the same thing, as did a 51-year-old man in Yorba Linda that same month.
And just last week, two days after the Glendale disaster, a guy in Irvine allegedly parked his car on the tracks shortly before a train was due. He drove off when police arrived, and was later arrested, but he told police he’dbeen intending to commit suicide-by-train.
If he’d succeeded, the results most likely would have been gruesome. Railroad workers grimly describe someone hit by a train as being “splattered and scattered.”
And when it happens it not only disrupts train traffic and delays passengers and grosses out the emergency workers who have to pick up the pieces, but it also drags train crews into something they’d really rather not be a part of.
“It’s traumatic when you hit someone,” says John Tolman, a 25-year veteran train engineer who is now chief of staff for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a labor organization that represents 32,000 railroad workers. “You never forget it. There’s not an engineer I know who can’t tell you every detail of his first one and his last one and every one in between.
“My first time I was (on an Amtrak train), and I saw this guy in a car parked at a crossing, and he just pulled right out in front of me. A train hitting an automobile is like an automobile hitting a tin can. I was going about 80 miles an hour. There was no way I could stop in time. There was nothing I could do.”
“I’ve been pretty lucky,” says Steve Blasyak, 50, of Fountain Valley, a Union Pacific engineer for 28 years. “I’ve hit a few cars (stuck at railroad crossings), I hit a truck one time, but as far as I know I’ve never had anyone commit suicide.
“I’ve come close. One time there was a lady in a bathrobe standing in the tracks near a bridge, and she jumped out of the way at the last second. But then the guy in the next train behind me hit her.”
Different railroads have different policies for crew members of trains that kill people. Some require them to take some time off, others offer “peer support” sessions with other crew members who’ve been through it. Blasyak thinks that helps some people – but they also have to understand that it comes with the territory.
“It definitely has an impact on people,” he says. “But when you get on with a railroad you learn that it’s something you have to get used to.”
Interestingly, the engineers I’ve talked to seem to have varying levels of sympathy for people killed by trains.
It breaks their hearts when it’s kids who are playing on the tracks. And they even feel bad about the suicides; they figure that anyone who wants to get hit by a train is seriously sick.
“I think it’s kind of a weird thing to do,” says Blasyak. “It’s hard to get inside people’s heads, and I don’t know how I’d want to go out if I had to. But it sure as hell wouldn’t be getting hit by a train.”
But the sympathy level drops precipitously when engineers talk about knuckleheads who are killed when they drive around crossing barriers, or walk drunkenly on the tracks, or make a fatal miscalculation while playing “chicken” with a train. That’s right, there are people out there who intentionally play chicken with trains.
“It happens all the time,” says Tolman. “They try to jump out of the way at the last moment. I guess it’s an adrenaline rush or something.”
The engineers didn’t say this. But anyone who plays chicken with a train probably should be struck and killed, to protect the gene pool.
So anyway, if you’re ever thinking about ending it all, show some consideration to yourself and everybody else. Don’t do it, call a suicide hot line, get some help.
And please, stay away from the tracks.