TV Actor Killed By Train

With all the abandoned track, lengths of rusty rail and rotted ties from nowhere to

nowhere, around here, you'd think these shot-stealers could find verifiable unused

sections of track to flount the law.  Not that I am advocating shot stealing, but if

hobbyist can find them...hey, I am not far from a high, rusty iron trestle that has

no rail access from either end...(they could bungie jump off this if they wanted to, I'd think even with a pocket change budget they would not pick a known, active commuter line.

Hmm movie actors and trains.... its like sending kids into a machine shop with no safety training...

 

Darwin award candidate.

This guy was not an idiot.  Not many of us could get into West Point.  He served five years after he graduated, so he wasn't your typical self-absorbed Hollywood jerk either.  He made a REALLy bad/stupid decision (smart people do this all the time...) - he thought he was safe in an area he was not.  Sad, and avoidable, but I'm not going to bash his IQ or his character.  

How much longer do you think it will be before some crusading lawyer is going to either try to shut the rail system down, or force the railways to somehow "idiot-proof" their tracks?

 

Trespassing is no longer a valid defense for land owners. What's mine is everyone else's in today's society. Someone comes on your property and steals a bunch scrap metal, and the cops want to prosecute YOU, even if you caught them red-handed.

There is already a thread on this topic.

 

Fitness model killed on tracks in LA

 

Stuart

 

 

Fair enough. I like to think of myself as smart but almost burned my house down over the holidays by starting a chimney fire. If what you say is true then it was probably his ego that killed him. By that I mean as a West Point grad and veteran you HAVE to believe you are invincible to some extent if you are going to survive an occupation where other people are trying to kill you. Like you said, sad.

had kids come into my photography class years ago.

they had pics of box cars inside and out and tops and bottoms.

I said

WHERE DID YOU GET THESE?????????

they were poking around the Adirondacks and said they found some

old "abandoned" box cars. there were about 100.

I said they were NOT abandoned. They were parked on a siding by a

railroad and you guys were trespassing. I lit into them and they were surprised I was so mad.

I told them rails and rail yards and sidings are no place to be playing.

I burst their bubble!! POP!

Popi, it doesn'y just apply to kids. When I was involved in the effort to get Zakk a handicap van I cam across a professional photographer who routinely posed his clients on railroad tracks.

He even had small children as young as 3 and 4 posed on the tracks along with moms to be. I seriously hope he doesn't do this anymore.

 

Jerry

Get a load of this photo that my friend shared on FB.

 

 

Stuart

 

 

Just read some latest information concerning this tragedy. The "Bodybuilder", Greg Plitt, was reportedly trying to duplicate a "Superman" trick where he "out runs a train", and Burbank was selected for the video shoot, because he felt that the Metrolink passenger trains tend to operate slower through that area. This according to his friends.

 

Sooooooo, just maybe, he wasn't quite as smart as some people think?

 

This info from todays LA Times, gleaned from TrainOrders.com.

Hmm, I have done some dumb things as well but a work out routine in an active rail yard is asking for trouble...

Your "he" is actually a she...Growing like Weeds {Teresa Borrenpohl Photography}. That logo should be the first clue.

I served along, over and under West Pointers on active duty. Trust me, that is NOT an exclusive indication of intelligence based on my experience with them.

Custer did...

 

Jerry

LMAO Go Navy!!

That video was rediculous, isn't that what a gym is for??? Whats the advantage of doing pushups on train track over anywhere else?

 

It is ridiculous. I suspect that the producers wished to illustrate that one doesn't need a gym to workout, rather, one can workout safely anywhere, which obviously is untrue. Also, no set to pay for.

Being a photographer I see this types of shots posted all the time. It always sets of a debate between the "Hey that's illegal!" photographers and the "Screw you I'll do what I want" photographers. Great for a bunch of reading either way I did make sure to post link to this article when it occurred in those groups, just to keep the fires going

Just because he went to West Point does not exempt from being judge a fool. He made multiple training videos near tracks, it seemed to be his "style"   Doing something illegal over and over makes you

a) a criminal
b) stupid if you don't realize it is illegal
c) and a real idiot if you know it's illegal, and you keep doing it and in turn give others the idea it's cool to do.

He was deliberately trying to outrun a train??  I do remember that it is tricky trying to run along railroad ties, due to spaces between them, which can vary in depth and width. What were those old Burma Shave signs, or that one that says if you and a train tie, you lose?  As a kid I played on and around the roadbed all the time, but, from a railroad family, I knew to look both ways before trying to cross tracks.  This in a small, rural community and NOT where there was any commuter traffic. My brother and I only got chewed out once, by the station master, and then by our mother, when we were around the track entrance onto the trestle, and the SM thought we were out on the trestle, and he knew a train was due.  Nowadays, lawed to death, I guess Big Brother does not permit that.  No wonder kids have no familiarity with railroads nor interest in their models.

About 12-15 years, Lionel came out with a catalog with a boy holding a locomotive standing on a multi-track main as the COVER photo. Behind the boy was a signal bridge with all lights green, meaning the photographer had his back to any approaching trains. Lionel caught a lot of flack over it.

Related to a another reply to my post, just like Custer.   Not stupid people, but vulnerable to ego and poor/foolish decisions as a result.  I said in my original post:  smart people make stupid decisions all the time.  I just didn't want to paint the guy as an average everyday "idiot"  He was probably a pretty smart dude.  I have an idea of what it takes to get a West Point appointment in the 20th century - a few of my friends went through the process.  They were at the top of their class.   I've done stupid/foolish things WITH them on numerous occasions.... fortunately they didn't cost us our lives.  

 

Pays to read every post; just saw this.  If this is factual, then he earned it.   Still think he was probably an intelligent individual at one point.  Got good grades, served his country.  One bad decision is all it takes.  I try to hammer this into my kids EVERY DAY.

 

As for getting good grades and serving his country, that's hardly the cutoff for intelligence. Ask anyone who's served, some of the people who adapt to military life the most can be some of the most brain-dead people you're likely to meet. There's a reason that NCOs have to be tough as nails, because of the type of people they have to control. Nothing is more dangerous than a soldier with time on their hands.

It's bad enough this person used railroads as a gym; I seriously hope he never actively encouraged others to do the same in his workout videos.

Apparently these incidents are more frequent than we think, according to this article.

"Faster than a speeding bullet."

"Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."

"More powerful than a loco-THUD...

 

Jerry

 

Jerry, I really like how you think! 

I do not put any stock in rustyrails of a few messed ties.I have seen freight trains long trains on rusty rails.The railroad might be doing repaires on the main line.So they reroute the trains on less used branch.People should always think about the weight of a trains.Your talking about something that weights hundred or thousands of tons.And they can not stop like a car can.Its very sad when stuff like this happens.

There's something of the old hobo in popular culture that seems to attract the non-thinking to railroad tracks. It's the done thing, what could be wrong with it? That FB pic with the third rail in the background is a classic example of basic railroad ignorance.

 

I remember reading about loaded coal or ore trains using flange oilers and dynamic brakes that coast almost silently, especially in wooded country. Maybe some members in those geographical areas have experience of this.

Perhaps US railroads need to take a cue from Great Britain and fence off their tracks.  It probably wouldn't completely keep trespassers at bay, but it's the most obvious way of saying "this area is off limits."

 

I believe this "incident" occurred at a Metrolink station, thus how would a passenger station be "fenced off" yet still allow passengers to board a passenger train?

 

With a little under 140,000 miles of track in the U.S., this would be prohibitively expensive and quite impractical, even if you limited it only to populated areas.

 

I grew up in a town that is bisected by NS mainline.  Every year in elementary school, we had a RR safety lecture from our teachers.  And in my years living there, no one was ever injured, let alone killed, by a train.  IMHO, it is education that prevents tradgedies like this, not fences.

 

Andy

While I have seen fenced RR track in GB, I have also walked around small town GB station properties where there was ample opportunity for "Custer" above to have attempted to make his movie.  Noone was around.  And remembering the panic of my grandfather when his cows got through a damaged fence and out unto a road and the railroad track on the other side, much U.S. track, in rural areas, is fenced.  Much is not.  As a kid on that farm, I climbed many of the fences to shortcut through a field

to wherever I wanted to go....remembering which field had a bull in it!  So anything

but possibly razor wire or an electrified fence is not much of a deterent.

I’m sometimes reminded of the old Saturday Night Live skit where the company’s IT guy gets impatient with the worker having a problem and yells “Move!”,  as he takes over his place at the computer. Nerds, be they computer or train nerds, often share this impatience with and sense of superiority over the general public. The problem is that the knowledge that we characterize as common sense often comes from a familiarity that we have which is derived from our employment, hobbies, etc. The more you become involved with trains, as either a railroader or a railfan, the more blurred the line can become in your mind between what you know about them and what the average member of the public knows.

 

As my children approached driving age, I continually cautioned them about pulling in front of large trucks. While working for a tree service I had opportunity to drive large flatbeds loaded with either logs or 1000 gallon spray rigs, or dump trucks filled with chips, and had many a white-knuckled scare trying to slow or stop them after being cut off. The average driver doesn’t appreciate what it takes to slow these rigs and that same lack of appreciation of danger applies to railroads.

 

Unfortunately, tragic accidents will always be with us, for a variety of reasons and not limited to stupidity.  Blanket insults on the victims rather than looking for possible solutions, such as education, physical reduction of threat, etc., often reflects more poorly on us than it does on them.

German, while we may be more aware of the dangers than the general public, it doesn't take an Einstein to know that a large fast moving metal vehicle on rails is not something to play with. There's something to be said for personal responsibility, I didn't know is no excuse for breaking the law.

 

Jerry

Absolutely. I was in no way relieving anyone of personal responsibility or suggesting breaking the law was to be tolerated. I wasn’t even claiming that there are not people out there who are stupid enough to be destined to die in another accidental manner if not by train. I was merely pointing out the slightly more complicated reality that exists than some suggest and addressing the casual and sometime callous attitudes often expressed here.