Agree’d @Bing. We had two viaduct roads that went over the tracks…one on each end of town. The tracks went parallel to the highway and if you figured you’d be held up by the train that is traveling with you, you could take one of those roads.
They had to rebuild one about 15 years ago because it was still a wooden deck.
They also cut down on the cost and accidents by making most streets dead end at the tracks. Then there were about 1/3 the crossings and the railroad was more than willing to put up gates at the remaining crossings. I think there may still be some very small streets (2-4) with only the flashing lights.
Illinois state police put officers in the locomotives of trains moving through the labrynthe of tracks and local roads in the metro area across from St. Louis last year to videotape and officially document drivers violating train crossings when warning lights and gates were active. The troopers were in radio contact with officers in cars working in tandem to pull over and ticket or arrest crossing offenders. Lots and lots of expensive tickets issued. Never heard if it had any real beneficial effect though.
I would absolutely hate to be a train engineer and the last thing I see before the vehicle I’m about to hit is some soccer mom with an SUV full of kids. Kids are a real sensitive issue with me and other than giving up trains forever I’d probably be in therapy for the rest of my life.
Years ago when I wrecked my Corvette I was horrified in that manner although there was no train involved. Some woman pulled a pickup across 4 lanes of traffic and I didn’t even have time to grab the brakes at 50 MPH.
The split second that I had showed a number of kids riding in the bed of the pickup and a couple up front in the cab. Next thing I know the car is wiped clean out in a cloud of steam and fiberglass dust and I’m sideways in the road after a direct broadside hit.
After shaking the cobwebs my first thought was “OH XXXX! There’s kids dead…”.
I crawled out the window and never felt so relieved in my life as I was when I found that every one of those kids was unharmed although scared badly. They had all just left a pee-wee football game and were still wearing their uniforms and helmets.
The mom who caused this was bleeding quite a bit from a head gash but nothing life threatening after jumping the curb and ramming a brick home on the corner.
Even though it wasn’t my fault I would have never gotten over the death or serious injury of even one of those little boys. Imagine if the woman had pulled that stunt in front of a train.
@ok440 Dear God, what a horror that must have been.
@Bing East St. Louis and surrounding small east side communities. Yep, rough areas but surprisingly close by are rather nice, if modest, neighborhoods all in low lying, poorly draining flood plain.
I did damage assessment with Red Cross Disaster Services in the flood of 1995, after working dispatch in the great flood of 1993. Driving through the gritty heart of the east side slums and walking the housing projects as part of teams was a real eye opener even after having been in and out of NYC years ago when living in NJ.
Ferguson is on the MO side in north central St. Louis County. Not a great neighborhood but actually not a bad one except for one small pocket of the now infamous apartment complex and some pockets of troublesome neighbors in adjacent areas. Not an area I want to be in but nothing as bad as much of St. Louis City.
The advent of modern interstate highways, despite the benefits, accelerated the demise of those neighborhoods, cutting through and isolating neighborhoods. Whether using the area’s extensive network of interstate highways or staying on local surface streets it is wise to drive around certain locales or if unable to bypass them drive through without stopping and definitely do not go there after dark.
Even emergency braking of trains makes for a pretty slow stop. It might alarm a few passengers, but isn’t likely to do much more. Unlike hitting a vehicle, which often causes derailments and serious injuries. No engineer ever wants to hit a person or vehicle, but it is part of the job. It would be great if we could separate traffic and trains, but there are tens of thousands of roads crossing tracks. If you look at where the accidents happen, they are often at very minor grade crossings that could never be eliminated. The wreck in Oxnard happened at a very busy crossing that locals have wanted to turn into an overpass for years. But that is more the exception than the rule.
Eventually I feel it will be a safety solution involving the car’s computer, much like lane warning and blind spot warning devices and pedestrian warning devices are today. Train traffic awareness can be integrated into a car’s computer using it’s GPS system and a standardized comunication system between trains and cars. Heck, traffic reports can be relayed with ease now. It doesn’t take much to include train traffic along with initiating some automotive intervention system to stop or advise the driver how to reroute.
I feel you can “make” a car safely stop at any crossing…I agree with @shadowfax that it will take govt. Mandates but the fixes aren’t anywhere near as hard or expensive compared to rerouting lines once you make the effort to do it. It is a cheap fix compared to physical intervention.
In the words of comedian Lewis Black, " if you can down load three million ( pornographic images) on a hand held device, you can easily do (stuff ) like this." He curses a lot so you have to do a lot of blank filling…but you get the point when it comes to exchanging information easily for the public good and safety. The technology is there.
I did a tiny bit of searching and came up with completely unreliable information, as usual, but for argument’s sake it appears that a locomotive can weigh in excess of 200 tons and a freight car, assuming it’s carrying something, might weigh an average of 130 tons. So a big freight train could easily weigh 10,000 tons. It does not seem that hitting a vehicle that weighs even 10 tons, square on, should be enough to cause a multi-car derailment.
Not being a physicist, and the last class in physics I took involved slide rules, I have no idea how to do the math, but the kinetic energy of 10,000 tons is enormous, and a 10 ton object parked in the way should not really knock the whole thing off the tracks.
I do agree that the challenge of creating a device to stall the engine of a vehicle near a crossing, when a train is coming seems very manageable these days. Sure, there will be fools who will still get on the tracks somehow, but lots less. Heck, they could even make the crossing gates long enough to block the whole road, curb to curb, instead of just the lanes properly going toward the track. Or gates on all 4 corners of the intersection, so Bozos don’t try to go around.
The weight of the train as a whole is irrelevant in whether a vehicle causes a derailment. All it has to do is get a solid bit of the car to where the locomotive wheels will pass over it. Each wheel is only supporting 1/12 of the weight of a locomotive (most have six axles) Once one car or locomotive has derailed it often damages the track and causes sideways forces on the following cars. Derailments are not especially rare events, and a fairly common result of running into a vehicle, especially a truck.
I agree that active train/car communication will be a help in the future, though some of the worst accidents have been caused by vehicles getting stuck on the tracks, stalling, or by drivers committing suicide. Most of these situations won’t be solved by electronic aids. They might prevent a few accidents where careless drivers at unprotected crossings fail to check both ways or where gates or lights fail. It also would help if the train crews could be notified of blocked tracks when they are far enough to at least get slowed down quite a bit. This Oxnard crash might have been prevented by such a system as the truck had been stuck on the tracks for some minutes before it was hit.