What it’s like to be on a train that kills someone.
I wasn’t surprised that a commuter train killed someone, I just didn’t expect it to be my train. People get killed by the Metra all the time. Whether it’s an accident, suicide, or something more vindictive, it happens. People get hit by trains.
On August 8th around 4:45 pm, the train I was riding struck and killed two people who were collecting scrap metal on the train tracks.
Things were business as usual up until that point. You can never sit too comfortably on the afternoon BNSF line — especially if you have a connecting train to make. Trains will stop or be late for no apparent reason and you’ll be lucky if anyone ever explains to you why. But we were 10 minutes away from the station, and usually you’re locked in when you reach that point. Right as I was about to pack up my laptop and figure out what I was doing when I made it home, I caught the sense that something wasn’t right. I heard and felt something metallic clank through the entire train (after learning the details of the accident, I’m almost positive this was a shopping cart full of scrap metal being sliced apart by the train wheels), and then we slowly began to brake.
Now I haven’t always had the best experience with the Metra engineers. Just that week my train arrived on the wrong side of the tracks with no announcement, and the engineer I asked had no idea why (which seems to me to be a pretty critical part of your job, know which side of the train tracks you belong on). I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve ridden for “free” or observed the engineers decide that the train is too crowded to collect fares. Chances are if you’ve rode the Metra, you have too.
That being said, even though I’ve wished greater accountability on the whole Metra system for a long time, I would never wish what these guys had to go through that day on anyone. Never. Ever. No one deserves that.
The train lurched to a stop and two engineers nervously shuffled through the car towards the front — their faces were pale, anxious and distressed. I thought to myself, “Jesus — I bet we hit someone!”
Moments later the regular 4:03 engineer came out, who usually made his announcements in a thick, deafening Indian accent. He quietly mumbled that the train was stopped because of a pedestrian incident. A guy on the upper deck shouted out, “Holy shit are you serious? Did we actually hit someone?” The engineer then explained to our car that the train had hit 2 people. One was killed instantly. The “other…,” he paused and just shook his head. Which is a pretty heavy statement if you unpack it a little. The only way he would know if someone was killed instantly, is if him or another engineer saw someone get killed instantly. Even worse, the second person’s unknown condition meant they were probably gravely injured and needed help that never reach them in time.
What’s interesting in these situations, is observing how various people react. The guy shouting from the upper deck started fidgeting at the window and went to another car to get a better view. An old guy with what looked to be his grand-kids didn’t flinch, and he continued to watch movies on his iPad with the kids, like he was waiting out a planned layover. Another guy started guzzling through several bottles of cheap beer — (he probably didn’t intend to drink it all on that train car) and made multiple trips to the Metra lavatory, much to the ire of the passengers he had to keep stepping over. Most people went into a frenzy calling work and relatives announcing that they would be stuck on the train for the next few hours.
Myself? I went right on Twitter to see what updates were going on, and until I realized that I probably knew more than the anyone else, started Tweeting updates myself — sending some notes to traffic reporters, and then posting updates as they happened. I guess for me it was easier to deal with an unpleasant situation if I could just pretend I was a journalist and objectively separate myself from it.
That being said, it’s a hard duality to wrap your head around. Here, I sat in my car perfectly safe and comfortable, looking around at people reading, some kids arguing over an iPad, and outside two people just had their lives end. I took comfort in the fact that my train car looked like it hadn’t been washed since the 90’s, so I didn’t see anything through the grime that had caked on my window. I don’t know what a human body looks like after it has been struck by hundreds of tons of train-mass going at 60 mph, but I’m fairly certain that I don’t ever want to know.
What I know now, is that the people killed, a brother and sister, were looking for scrap metal on the train tracks, and one was allegedly legally blind. They think that the brother didn’t see the train coming and his sister rushed to get him out of the way of the approaching locomotive when they were both hit and killed.
Nothing about this situation is entirely surprising. People are careless around the Metra and end up paying with their lives all the time. The accident occurred in a rough neighborhood in Chicago. The community is poor. It’s the kind of place where you would expect some people to be collecting scrap to make ends meet.
I could write another post (let’s be honest, a book) about the reasons that some neighborhoods in Chicago are exponentially worse off, and how economic and social conditions lead to all kinds of tragedies that are unheard of in better neighborhoods in the city, and how most of us would rather look away, cover up our windows in dirt, then embrace the reality of the world around us. But the truth is that I think everyone had a hand in this tragedy — from the policies that have neglected populations in specific parts of the city so some people have no other recourse than to climb onto train tracks to gather scrap, to the individual choices you make when you act carelessly in dangerous situations and the consequences of those choices, to the rest of us who are filled with apathy when someone gets killed because we just want to go to work and get home to our loved ones on time.
This could have been avoided. And yet, just as I tried to make sense of the duality of sitting safe and sound in a sunny traincar going through the motions of my day, while someone was dead outside — someone who got up this morning like me and assumed they would sleep in their own bed that night like I did, in some ways this situation was unavoidable too.
That’s what I thought about at least, while I sat for two hours waiting for the police to finish their work. We finally lurched into into the station to a collective sigh of relief. Some people even cheered. I decided to cue the trope of the sad man sitting in a bar by himself, and headed to the an empty train station pub to wait for the next connecting. I planted myself for about a half an hour, drinking a Steigl Pilsner watching preseason football highlights instead of late season baseball, grumbling that America has lost interest in our national pastime, among other things. I was expecting the bartender to ask me how I was doing, so I could explain what I had just gone through. I would have had the chance to talk about my frustration, anger, and how sad I was at that moment, and maybe he would have offered some words of comfort or advice. Instead, he poured a beer and walked away. No one seemed to care about what I had just experienced. So instead I sat in silence, watched a football game that I didn’t care about, and slowly sipped my drink.
Then I went home, and took the train to work the next day.
