Caltrain death
This morning, a woman was hit by the train and killed in Redwood City. It happened 15 minutes after my train left the station (heading in the opposite direction), so I didn’t hear about it until a few minutes ago. Scary stuff.
This morning, a woman was hit by the train and killed in Redwood City. It happened 15 minutes after my train left the station (heading in the opposite direction), so I didn’t hear about it until a few minutes ago. Scary stuff.
February 3rd, 2006 at 6:24 am
Dude, spookiness: A man was hit and killed by a train about a half hour from my house — two days ago? Three?
The media reported that he was trying to snap a picture of the train and didn’t jump out of the way in time, but my brother said he was actually drunk as hell, had a fight with his wife, and went to commit suicide. And then ensued a conversation about police procedure after train v. pedestrian (or whatever the correct term for it is — maybe just ‘person’ in this case, since they’re on tracks and not a road?), which I won’t repeat.
Also, I’m getting this weird thing when I go to comment where this comment field is much wider than the screen shows, and as I’m typing my comment into it it vanishes for a while off to the right, but I can’t see it over there. There’s like two inches of white space.
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:41 am
They are still not sure if it’s a suicide, but there have been 21 suicides since 2003 for Caltrain. I didn’t realize it was so high (not that I was around to hear about them). There was a letter to the editor in the paper yesterday advocating Caltrain spending more money to try to prevent suicides, but according to an expert quoted in this article, there’s not really much they can do. And he’s a proponent of the suicide barrier idea for the Golden Gate bridge, which I’m not a big fan of. They build a similar barrier on the Prince Edward Viaduct in Toronto, which Steven Page called “a grand monument to suicide. And a very tragic monument it is.”
That’s really weird about the comment box. When I coded the page, I opened it in IE to check that it looked okay, but I never checked what happens when you type in IE. I’ll look at it tonight and make it not so crazy.
March 9th, 2006 at 1:33 am
Tonight, on my way home from Santa Clara, someone got hit by my train. They handle it almost too efficiently, and are extremely apologetic about the inconvenience of the delay while they pick up the pieces. It seems inappropriate, but I guess it’s necessary.
But it was SO CREEPY seeing everyone’s face pressed up against the windows trying to catch a glimpse of some blood and guts.
Completely surreal.
March 9th, 2006 at 10:02 am
There was another death last night? Wow, I think that wouldd be the second one in a week. I didn’t pay as much attention before I started riding Caltrain to work last year, but that seems really high to me. Not that I think there’s much Caltrain can do about it, unfortunately. I was talking to a guy while waiting for the train the other night, and he told me his sister had been hit by a train in Sacramento. His feeling was that both stupidity and suicide cannot be stopped by any amount of fences.