Two killed on rails at Spencer

sad people do dumb things like the young man in maine who thought lighting a large fire work off the top of his head would be fun, I don't have to tell you how that ended.

Not good.....can't imagine that there.....two, and its a small town with mostly the

museum....

Sad

The families will sue. You can count on that.

Another candidate for the Darwin Award!................Rogerw.

The mug shot ID'ing the first person killed says a lot, which I won't go into here: http://www.wbtv.com/story/2948...-by-train-in-spencer
It appears they weren't killed on the museum grounds, but awfully close to them. I hope this'll have no impact (no pun intended) on the museum itself.

Wouldn't that depend on how you take your own life?

Someone please make me understand, why would you want to go and sit on ANY railroad tracks? Just because you don't see or hear a train doesn't mean that one may be coming down the tracks. I'm quite sure that these unfortunate individuals have seen trains traveling along these tracks. What could possess them to think that it's ok to sit on ANY railroad tracks? Maybe I'm the one that doesn't have any common sense.............Rogerw.

No Marty, we will all be harder on you than anybody so you may want to go out with style

Suicide by train.  An almost identical suicide happened a couple of years ago near where I work.  The poor engine crew watched helplessly as the guy walked onto the tracks and sat down right in front of them.

 

Andy

Think suicide.

... or drunk out of your mind or high on Drugs.

No, Roger. The fact that you don't get it is a good thing. Just like someone told me when I made a similar reaction to a story about someone doing something truly awful to a kid, he said, "Take it as a good sign that you don't get it, because that means it'd never cross your mind to do it yourself!"

I thought he had a great point, there...

38 years ago there was an incident on the LIRR, where someone stepped onto the tracks and stood with his back to an oncoming MU train. As usual, the engineer tried everything he could do to avoid the inevitable, but there was no chance.

 

The unfortunate engineer was given a leave of absence to help deal with the trauma of this "suicide by train".

 

On the very day he returned to work, operating the very same train at the same location, the suicide's girlfriend followed his lead and killed herself the exact same way..

 

The poor engineer was unable to return to his job and resigned from the railroad.

 

Update: I was apparently fuzzy on a couple of points.

 

1)The guy was laying on the tracks, not standing. His death wasn't a suicide. He had apparently fallen from a station platform in a drunken state.

 

2)The girlfriend did commit suicide. She stood facing the train with her arms outstretched like a crucifix, then covered her ears just before impact.

 

3)The engineer did not resign and in fact had been involved in a total of 5 train versus pedestrian incidents at the time of a later 1994 New York Times article about counseling engineers involved in fatal accidents.

 

The first death occurred on July 30, 1977 and the girlfriend followed eight days later.

 

Here is an AP article from the August 11, 1977 Milwaukee Journal, detailing the story.

Hi Guys well a bit more pleasant story about sitting on rail-tracks. When I was a kid here in Scotland I used to stay at my Gran's house some days while my parents were at work. There was an old abandoned railway station in the village (Meikle Earnock ,central Scotland). I used to spend many a happy day with the local kids playing on the tracks,climbing the old signal poles etc.,etc., this was the late 50s/early 60s. Steam locomotives were still king here at this time. The American TV programme Casey Jones was one of our favourite TV programmes and a must for kids interested in trains. Anyway we'd form lines and run up and down those "abandoned" tracks playing at casey jones.. None of us had ever seen a train on that line. Anyway, my pals were up there one day and decided to park their butts on the old line ,light a wee fire in the centre of the tracks and proceeded to roast some potatoes or "tatties" as we called them. Everything was goin fine till one of them spotted a plume of smoke advancing in the distance around a bend in the track,took them a few seconds to realise that a train was coming, a panicked evacuation rapidly took place. The line was abandoned,BUT this was a demolition train come to start the track removal as it turned out. A few weeks later the whole line was gone and a cherished part of my childhood gone too. Happy days.

 

 

I find this to be so sad.I don,t know what to say about this.But this seems stuff like this is on the rise.Can not even tell how many times people have got killed on train tracks.I rember the story where a girl got hit by up freight train. She was taking a shortcut to get school.She had earphones on despite the fact the crew blasted the whistle.The girl just didn,t hear the train.Anybody rember the 2 wemen walking on a long train bridge.To me one of the most dangerous train tracks is the so called abandon tracks.As I have stated before I find this to be very sad.People have to keep in mind trains can not stop like a cat or truck can.The main thing is they should not been on the track in the first place.

Suicide by train is a big problem in the SF Bay Area.  Cal Train which operates the commuter line between San Francisco and San Jose (about 60 miles) hits and kills about one person per month.  Many are teenagers committing suicide.  A single high school in Palo Alto had several kids commit suicide by train last year.  This is just one sad aspect of our modern life.

 

Here is a link to an article about Cal Train suicide prevention measures:

 

http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/...ides-on-train-tracks

 

NH Joe