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Monday, March 16, 2015

I will never understand how a driver misses all the signs of an oncoming train


LiveLeak.com has additional footage and information

8 comments:

MATT said...

What a shame. Doesn't even matter now if the driver was trying to beat the train, or was distracted, it's still a shame.

2 people died as a result. Tragic.

Michael Suddard said...

Not making an excuse for this....

But why, at 13 seconds, is the lights and bells not activated on the signal?

C.J. Smith said...

This is why I hate level crossings personally.

You ride the crazy train, I only drive it. said...

re: Michael
It's difficult to see in the video but the lights & bell were indeed active the entire time.


Mostly like they were distracted as it seems they didn't even attempt to stop or speed up at any point.

Another possibility is suicide by train, I've had several of those myself. But that appears unlikely considering there was four people and must likely they would have gotten there somewhat ahead of time.

Quite frankly I'm amazed that there were any survivors at all. That may come off as being somewhat morbid, but what I mean by that is modern vehicle technology is quite amazing if it can allow at least some occupants to survive an impact with an object traveling at 40-50mph and weighing around 10-20 MILLION lb'. Also, after you've seen it happen multiple times in person, desensitization trends to set in. You can talk about these things in a very rational manner when events like this happen on almost weekly occurrence at the work place.

The one rail fan is really lucky to be alive as well. It the train had hit the cars engine compartment there may not have been as much plastic deformity of the vehicle and it might have careened towards him.


In any case I agree that these types of level crossing should be completely removed. Yes there are many signs that a train is on its way but the flashing lights are not always very visible during the day time and music can easily drown out the volume of the bells. As for the horn, if there are multiple crossings in an area people may presume the horn is being used for a different crossing and it is difficult to judge how far away and from what direction the sound is coming from with music playing or while carrying on a conversation. .

Anonymous said...

Just FYI - Most Metrolinx employees who read this site can't see the pictures posted here or the 2 posts below. They are blocked by a web filter :(

C.J. Smith said...

Yeah... I had someone tip me off a few years ago that instagram, Twitter and facebook are blocked and anything embedded is also blocked.

I used to screengrab the stuff but it's caused too much grief for me, plus there's the copyright issue. If I screengrab, it infringes. If I embed, it does not.

I'm sorry I can't find a work around for this.

Anonymous said...

Let Darwin's natural selection take care of that driver.

Richard Roma said...

No one ever commits suicide by train! They commit "trespassing incidents".