Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.
I knew that it seemed like every other day somebody played chicken with the train. I did not know it was that bad.
My guess is that people down here is so used to cutting in front of somebody that they figured why not the train. They did not process that trains do not have ABS and rubber tires and takes them half a mile to stop.
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
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You’re not kidding about FL drivers. I used to love outside P-cola. Old folks would lie in wait on a side street. Then, when you were the only vehicle in sight, the would pull out in front of you. They would the drive about 20mph under the speed limit to the next turnoff. I am convinced they would reset for the next driver and repeat this pattern all morning.
They do the same thing here only its not just old people doin it…
Hhhhmmm. I guess in some parts of the world natural selection is alive and well. The old saying- if you gonna be dumb you gotta be tough… sad how stupid we have become.
From 2003 to 2009 I worked for a railroad here and there was lots of info then about car vs train.
When this happens, I feel sorry for the engineers driving the train. Usually there is nothing they can do, but still wind up with guilt if someone dies. It’s worse with the deliberate suicide-by-train deaths.
After a very exciting emergency stop* on an Amtrak I was travelling on a number of years ago I had a conversation with a conductor about this issue. Turns out that folks that live near tracks get complacent about racing freight trains to crossings. However, freights are [mostly] limited to 49 MPH and these folks misjudge passenger trains that can travel up to 79 MPH. The result is predictable.
O2
*The delay when Amtrak does an emergency stop is considerable. Under emergency stop conditions, wheels can lock up and slide, generating heat which can weld the wheel to the track once the train comes to a halt. For this reason, there must be a wheel-by-wheel inspection performed after an emergency stop that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. The semi (yes, a semi) that caused my particular emergency stop drove off happily while we sat there in the middle of nowhere forever.
I’m not shocked. Growing up in Miami, there were always the people going 100 mph up I-95, and zipping through traffic on US-1. I expect it is these same assholes that try and cut the train at the crossing.
I notice the headline seems to be deliberately crafted to make it appear the fault of the railroad. And given that it’s the only privately owned scheduled railroad in the country, it isn’t surprising that the Fellow Traveler Press would target it.
This happens all over. In Minneapolis it is the light rail line that they put in the center of some of the busiest commercial streets. (Of course, by the time that the two years of light rail construction are finished, so is every commercial business that was on that street. Imagine having all your parking disappear, and even your sidewalk access, all so they can put a rail track in the center of a boulevard. For two years.)
Since the trains go down the middle of the street, and half the many fatalities seem to be pedestrians too. They also found out a few years ago that the light rail engineers were legally immune from traffic laws after one of them blew a train stop light and mowed down a man in a car as he drove through the intersection with a green light. Yes, they wanted to try the engineer, but his lawyer showed that traffic laws were written to specifically immunixe railroad engineers.
I don’t know if the signs are still there (last time I drove through was in the late 1990s), but a railroad crossing in a small central Louisiana town sported a set of Burma-Shave style signs:
Remember this
If you’d be spared
Trains don’t whistle
Because they’re scared!