They very nearly did! I was thinking in the moments before the train ploughed through the wreckage that they are a) standing way too close and b) right in the path of any bits of wreckage seeking to take a head off.
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Passenger trains in the United States are very heavy. “Crashworthiness” regulations require it.
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Yep. I saw an interview with a bystander who didn’t understand that these trains don’t stop on a dime. (“The train never even slowed down!”)
I feel like that comment explains why we have train accidents with pedestrians.
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I’m sure that Death will not bear a grudge, right?
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I was on a Caltrain heading south down the peninsula, leaving early from a conference because my house got burglarized earlier that day. The train I was on, the first baby bullet of the afternoon, hit some kinda light pickup that was stalled on the tracks. As the train killed the passenger, the truck did a number on the locomotive, cutting hydraulic lines and generally breaking all kinds of stuff underneath. We were stranded between stations for hours before a ‘tow truck’ locomotive came and limped us to the next station (which, IIRC, was Palo Alto). Those caltrain trains are HEAVY but still took a beating. I was in the second car behind the engine, didn’t feel a think when it struck.
In this incident, the pilot and the cops were lucky, geez, scene right out of a TV show.
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Oh, it’s very possible that the insurance claim will get complicated – was the airplane totaled before it was hit by the train? Well, if not, you’ve got two accidents, so you’ll need to pay your deductible on each one. (There was big litigation on whether the attacks on the WTC were one terrorist attack or two – there were hundreds of millions of bucks riding on that, both about the deductibles and the limits).
That was incredibly heroic of those cops.
But it’s 2022. And the whole time I couldn’t help thinking about how they hadn’t somehow forgotten to turn their bodycams on, or how their bodycams didn’t mysteriously malfunction.
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They may have tased and pepper sprayed him half to death for all we know. Department policy, natch.
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Landing on train tracks is expressly forbidden.
Take him down to the station and book him Danno.
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I assure you they do. PTSD amongst train drivers who ran over people and/or objects is a thing.
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And where was Michael Bay when all of this was going on, huh?
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Remember that movie Blue Thunder where Roy Scheider intentionally parks a helicopter on railroad tracks so it gets destroyed? At the least attempted murder of the switcher engineer…
Body cams only malfunction when the cop is doing something bad, not when they can make PR hay from the footage. It’s all a coincidence of course, definitely not intentional.
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Obviously I understand why, but that rapid rough non-SOP manhandling won’t’ve done the poor chap any medical favours.
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