Train Tracks

"Immediately after the incident, Detroit executive fire commissioner James Mack told the Detroit News, "I'm very upset. I'm going to make it known that this is not acceptable and we'll do some training," he said."

"Do not park fire trucks on railroad tracks. Any questions?"

PS -- I have to get a bell for my bicycle. Walkers tend to forget that the world exists outside their cellphones or when talking with their walking partner. I have called out, "Bike on your left!" and still surprise people. A lot of new walkers and bikers this past year! But generally, bicyclist should not consider mixed-use paths as personal speed-training routes.

Yeah. Not sure why. Probably from something on TV, or a story I overheard.

Vaughn said:

PS -- I have to get a bell for my bicycle. Walkers tend to forget that the world exists outside their cellphones or when talking with their walking partner. I have called out, "Bike on your left!" and still surprise people. A lot of new walkers and bikers this past year! But generally, bicyclist should not consider mixed-use paths as personal speed-training routes.

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My bike came with a bell. I can’t hear it and I doubt the geezers walking along will either. I need something with a deep tone.

juan said:

My bike came with a bell. I can’t hear it and I doubt the geezers walking along will either. I need something with a deep tone.

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Air-Horn.?

The high speed passenger trains we have in UK where they can the max line speed is (currently 125mph) At that speed a train will take up to 1.5 miles to come to a halt and that is on dry rail. On wet rails the distance can be double. If a driver travelling at max speed allowed, i.e. 125, is on a straight section of line, by the time he sees a vehicle or people on the line, it is too late to stop,

Figures from Network Rail who are responsible for the lines and the running condition give these figures from a report dated 2019/20

When I was working as police officer between 1990-2000 in South London, there was an area where there were 3 mental Hospitals very close to the main line into London. We dealt with on average around 2 suicides every 3 months. When a train travelling at 90mph, hits a person the results are not very nice. Identification was sometimes very difficult!

Of the fatalities on the railway in 2019/2020:

• Six occurred on a level crossing (Where a road crosses the track)
• 17 involved people trespassing on the railway
• 283 were suicides or suspected suicides.
• These do not include those who are hit by a train, but luckily survive, usually with life changing injuries. Nor do they include engineers working on the line. (my words in bold)

We have a 2 track UP lune running through our town which has a lot of train traffic. Over the weekend a lady who was under the influence of drugs , alcohol ,,or both , decided that her SUV could be drove on the tracks. The SUV got stuck on the tracks so she went home to bed. An eastbound UP train quickly removed her SUV from the tracks. Among the charges she is facing should be idiot .

The trains through here are anything but quiet .I'm a block and a half from the tracks and I can hear and feel almost every train as it rumbles through.

BMbikerider said:

The high speed passenger trains we have in UK where they can the max line speed is (currently 125mph) At that speed a train will take up to 1.5 miles to come to a halt and that is on dry rail. On wet rails the distance can be double. If a driver travelling at max speed allowed, i.e. 125, is on a straight section of line, by the time he sees a vehicle or people on the line, it is too late to stop,

Figures from Network Rail who are responsible for the lines and the running condition give these figures from a report dated 2019/20

When I was working as police officer between 1990-2000 in South London, there was an area where there were 3 mental Hospitals very close to the main line into London. We dealt with on average around 2 suicides every 3 months. When a train travelling at 90mph, hits a person the results are not very nice. Identification was sometimes very difficult!

Of the fatalities on the railway in 2019/2020:

• Six occurred on a level crossing (Where a road crosses the track)
• 17 involved people trespassing on the railway
• 283 were suicides or suspected suicides.
• These do not include those who are hit by a train, but luckily survive, usually with life changing injuries. Nor do they include engineers working on the line. (my words in bold)

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I was once on a subway train here in DC when someone decided to jump in front of it as it was entering the station. Half of the eight car train ran over him before it could come to a stop. Shockingly he survived. The trauma to the driver has to be even worse than the trauma to the jumper, because they had to witness the attempt knowing there was nothing they could do to stop it. In my instance, the jumper hit with sufficient impact to the front of the train that his body broke the driver's compartment window AND smashed the drivers' side head lamp on the train. Then he fell down and the train rolled over him. And as powerful and heavy as those trains are, hitting him nearly derailed the train - it didn't just crush/slice him with the wheels. I remember wondering if we had just hit a bomb (it was maybe 2 years after 9/11 and I was still working in the Pentagon at the time)- the train lurched to one side and each car tilted at a 30 degree angle.

CMoore said:

Air-Horn.?

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Klaxon, or a reasonable replica of the fog horn from San Francisco. You can hear that puppy for MILES.

juan said:

My bike came with a bell. I can’t hear it and I doubt the geezers walking along will either. I need something with a deep tone.

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Here you go! These are very loud. But really meant for navigating auto traffic, not scaring geezers out of their shoes! https://designbydelta.com/products/arizound-horn

BMbikerider said:

The high speed passenger trains we have in UK where they can the max line speed is (currently 125mph) At that speed a train will take up to 1.5 miles to come to a halt and that is on dry rail. On wet rails the distance can be double. If a driver travelling at max speed allowed, i.e. 125, is on a straight section of line, by the time he sees a vehicle or people on the line, it is too late to stop,

Figures from Network Rail who are responsible for the lines and the running condition give these figures from a report dated 2019/20

When I was working as police officer between 1990-2000 in South London, there was an area where there were 3 mental Hospitals very close to the main line into London. We dealt with on average around 2 suicides every 3 months. When a train travelling at 90mph, hits a person the results are not very nice. Identification was sometimes very difficult!

Of the fatalities on the railway in 2019/2020:

• Six occurred on a level crossing (Where a road crosses the track)
• 17 involved people trespassing on the railway
• 283 were suicides or suspected suicides.
• These do not include those who are hit by a train, but luckily survive, usually with life changing injuries. Nor do they include engineers working on the line. (my words in bold)

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I wish we had a lot more passenger trains. We have a system called BART, but it is woefully inadequate. It needs to be triple the miles.
It was supposed to have been.....long story..... politics and shortsightedness reduced its coverage at birth.
We have spent BILLIONS on a "High Speed" train that is way over budget and nowhere near complete.

Where I live here in Toronto, there are rail line just to the north of me,to the east of me and to the west of me. I hear the trains on all lines very clearly. The odd occasion they sound their horns for some dimwitted,moron types who feel they have a right to walk wherever they feel. When they are caught and told they are on private property, the usual excuses come out "I didn't see the signs,You can't tell me where I can and can't walk, and my favourite Go Bleep yourself".

I've seen people waiting at the level crossing near me, get impatient when a train stops while entering the yard west of me and actually go around the gates and climb over and /or under the train. Some idiot a few years ago did that and the train started to move while he was climbing between cars and there just happened to be a railway cop waiting for him on the other side.

You can't teach common sense to anybody these days. If you do said idiot will just swear at you or threaten you so why bother. I just tell them "Its your life and I haven't seen a good splat in a long time"

Doug

We've known a few Engineers. An emergency stop can cause a lot of problems even if the vehicle leaves the crossing and never gets hit. They said they generally don't try an emergency stop unless they actually hit something.

If they hit something it would probably be too late to use the emergency brake, that is if they were still working. An impact often destroys the braking system. If the train was forced off the track by the impact using the brakes would be pointless Either you have misheard the 'engineer' or they have been fantasizing. It is also a natural instinct to hit the brakes not plough on regardless.

A few years ago in Germany, an I.C.E. train (Inter City Express because of a failure of the integrity of the vehicle's construction, it left the line and hit a bridge with one carriage being catapulted through the air. In those circumstances using the brakes would have been impossible but when they can be used it would be almost criminal not to use them rather than carry on regardless which is why I think there is doubt with that anecdote.

Apart from fatalities where people are on the lines illegally, I also worked on 3 major train crashes in the south London area and each one was at slowish speed certainly no more than 25mph. 400 tons of steel even at that speed can cause an awful lot of carnage.

Vaughn said:

Scale, my friend, scale. That's 140,000 miles of track in the US vs 10,000 miles of track in the UK...

Ok, did the rough math(s)...we got 14x the track and being the USA, 3x the deaths/mile...we fully exercise our rights to be idiots.

As a bicyclist, when out of town, it is the sound of the car tires on the pavement that I usually hear first.

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Route miles of track possessed by one country or another is only one factor. The one I would look at is the intensity of the number of trains passing certain spots over a 24 hour period. I can think of several places in UK where the number of trains passing major areas exceed over 1000 per day. The greater number of route miles in America were also largely constructed because of the vastly greater geographic distances that have to be covered, so that comparison hardly justifies it's inclusion.The trains travel on lines through country which we describe as MAMBA country. (Miles and miles of bugger all!)

ANYONE that messes with a 600 ton missile is an idiot. In addition there is the added danger in some area where the main traction is electricity drawn from a raised 3rd rail system (about 12-15inches above the running track) which carries up to 700v DC. When that bites it rarely lets go!

I used to have to cross the tracks everyday to get to my paper route as a child. I used to find that the tracks had a whistle or tone that you could hear for about 2-3 minutes before the train showed up. That was with young ears. Might not be able to hear that high pitched tone these days.

BMbikerider said:

If they hit something it would probably be too late to use the emergency brake, that is if they were still working. An impact often destroys the braking system. If the train was forced off the track by the impact using the brakes would be pointless Either you have misheard the 'engineer' or they have been fantasizing. It is also a natural instinct to hit the brakes not plough on regardless.

A few years ago in Germany, an I.C.E. train (Inter City Express because of a failure of the integrity of the vehicle's construction, it left the line and hit a bridge with one carriage being catapulted through the air. In those circumstances using the brakes would have been impossible but when they can be used it would be almost criminal not to use them rather than carry on regardless which is why I think there is doubt with that anecdote.

Apart from fatalities where people are on the lines illegally, I also worked on 3 major train crashes in the south London area and each one was at slowish speed certainly no more than 25mph. 400 tons of steel even at that speed can cause an awful lot of carnage.

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Holy Cow.!
You have been involved with some bad wrecks.
Sorry if i missed it, but what do you do for a living.?
Thank You

CMoore said:

Holy Cow.!
You have been involved with some bad wrecks.
Sorry if i missed it, but what do you do for a living.?
Thank You

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.

During this period period I was a police officer, (now retired) but worked principally on the rail network so had a very close insight of the problems that some people with less intelligence than a block of wood caused.

At the time there was no issue, with what went on around you or the aftermath, you just got on with the job. The only ones that affected me later were when children were involved. Our job in the main was to keep the site clear of non emergency workers so that paramedics and fire and rescue could get on with the job. To give you an idea of what we did in the aftermath at Clapham, was to identify and list, literally tons of property lost by deceased, injured and those lucky not to be hurt then where we could, return it to the owners. .

If you google Clapham Train Crash 1988 there is a report and pictures of the carnage caused.

If you wish, also google Tattenham Corner Rail Crash which happened a few years later, I and colleagues worked on both. The Clapham crash was due to faulty signals, blamed upon installation engineers working excessive hours and were tired so mistakes were made. The Tattenham crash was due to the driver being drunk at work at the time, falling asleep and hitting the platform at the end of the line. He was sent to prison.

Ces1um said:

I used to have to cross the tracks everyday to get to my paper route as a child. I used to find that the tracks had a whistle or tone that you could hear for about 2-3 minutes before the train showed up. That was with young ears. Might not be able to hear that high pitched tone these days.

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As a kid there were a couple stores that used high frequency noise to keep teenagers from hanging out. Going into the stores, my mom could not hear it, but it was very annoying to me.