(The following article by Frank Gray was posted on the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette website on June 2. Brother Ronald Drudge is a member of BLET Division 537 in Fort Wayne, Ind.)
FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Norfolk Southern runs a program called Operation Lifesaver, designed to discourage people from trying to beat trains at crossings and urging them to keep clear of tracks and trains.
Now and then, it will load up a train with people from area police departments and emergency medical services, along with some news people, and take them for a ride so they can see for themselves the chances that drivers take.
We went along on one of those rides Wednesday morning, sailing along in a passenger car, watching a monitor that showed the view of a video camera mounted on the front of the engine, waiting to see the crazy things that drivers are willing to do.
There was a good chance we’d see a good show. Indiana is one of the worst states for crossing safety, and the car-train crashes happen exactly where you think they shouldn’t. More than half of all car-train collisions, for example, take place during daylight hours, when visibility is great, and at crossings that are guarded by flashing lights and crossing arms that block the road.
The crashes happen because drivers ignore the lights and drive around the barriers.
Fortunately – or unfortunately – we didn’t get much of a show Wednesday. We didn’t see any really crazy Hoosier drivers in action.
That’s probably just fine with Ron Drudge, the engineer who was driving the train. He sees plenty of it – every day, he says – drivers trying to speed across tracks as the train approaches – drivers weaving in and out of the gates at railroad crossings; drivers passing other cars that have stopped and trying to beat trains.
Drudge has been an engineer since 1970, and in that time he’s had nine collisions. They call them collisions, not accidents.
Two of the crashes have involved fatalities. The last wreck happened a couple of years ago. It was near the airport. A woman going about 70, Drudge said, blew past a small line of cars that had stopped and tried to beat the train. She missed. She hit about halfway back on the engine.
It mystifies Drudge.
“They’ll stop for stoplights. They’ll stop for other cars. I’m 10,000 tons, and they won’t stop for me.”
People have been looking for excuses for car-train wrecks for a long time. They blamed the standard transmission, when people were distracted while changing gears. Then they blamed car radios. Then they blamed cell phones, Drudge said.
The fact is, people just don’t pay attention. Flashers mean nothing, he said. Gates mean nothing. Kids, young drivers, think they are infallible. They don’t think that their car might weigh 2,500 pounds and the train is carrying 20 million pounds of mass.
Doug Wiley, who has been an engineer for 34 years, has seen the same thing that Drudge has. He’s been involved in three fatalities as a railroad engineer, one a suicide.
“It’s part of the territory,” Wiley said. “If you can’t deal with that, it’s not a good place to work.”
But Wiley, who has won the railroad’s top safety award, tries to drum into people’s heads how risky it is to take a chance at a crossing. A jet coming in for a landing, Wiley says, looks like it’s going slow because it’s so big, though it’s going 200 mph. Trains are the same way. Wiley shows students movies of two trains, one going 30 mph, one going 60. They can’t tell which is going faster.
If you misjudge, he says, it’s the equivalent of a car hitting a pop can. The weight ratios are about the same.
If there’s good news, it’s that since Operation Lifesaver started, there has been a 50 percent reduction in crossing crashes.
But accidents still don’t stop. This week, for example, a kid in Marion tried to hop a train. He slipped. The train cut off his foot.