Promoting Train Safety in Wake of Deaths : Transportation: Seminar held for those wanting to spread word on rail hazards as husbands of victims plan own campaign.

When it came right down to it, Lidia Mayers was there because of her son. And, because she never, ever wants to see him hit by a train and feel the grief of losing her little boy.

The North County woman was among about 3 dozen volunteers--including a former school bus driver, railroad museum workers, transit workers and several bilingual speakers--who met at a Carlsbad hotel Thursday for the daylong seminar sponsored by a consortium of railroad officials and transit agencies throughout Southern California. They were there to learn how to teach others about train safety.

And that evening, in a scenic canyon home in La Jolla, the husbands of two women killed last week in a Del Mar train accident held a safety meeting of their own--to plan a grass-roots effort to stop trains in the North County from blasting their way through crowded passenger depots.

Mayers said she was prompted to volunteer when her 7-year-old came home from school after the deaths last week of the two women who were crushed by a freight train just outside the Del Mar passenger depot.

He had learned a difficult lesson that day. His teacher had read aloud from newspaper accounts of the tragedy. She described to the class how 47-year-old Usha Waney of La Jolla had slipped and fallen on the tracks as she ran to catch a train.

And she read about how Roberta Halpern and her husband, Lee Kaiser, had tried in vain to pull the older woman from the rails--to save a woman they didn’t even know. Until the train came and took both women’s lives.

“He came home and said, ‘Oh Mama! I learned something so sad today. Those two ladies died on the train tracks. And one of them was trying to save the other one!’ ”

Lidia Mayers saw the fear in her son’s eyes. So the 30-year-old North County Transit Service worker decided to do something about it.

She volunteered to participate in the “Operation Life Saver” program and go out to schools, offices and other public meetings to spread the crucial word about train safety.

After a day of classes, officials say, the new instructors will be qualified to address the public about train right-of-way issues--as well as hold classes for new instructors.

“Luckily, I’ve never witnessed a fatal train crash,” said Pat Benner, a state bus instructor who volunteered for the program. “But I have seen too many fools drive around barriers with trains looming close.

“It unnerves you to see just how close they get. I’ve got the experiences to put into words just how important it is to stay out of the way of those trains.”

The seminar is part of a three-pronged approach planned by Amtrak and Santa Fe Railroad officials, as well as various public transit groups and the Public Utilities Commission, to stem the tide of train-related deaths in the North County--where six pedestrians have died since October.

The other efforts include a study group investigating new enforcement efforts to keep people from ignoring safety signs and crossing signals. Another group will discuss engineering developments such as lighting and more frequent whistle-blowing to make trains more visable.

In January, officials will also sponsor a public forum designed for people to ask questions and address concerns or fears that they might have concerning freight and passenger trains.

“In nine years at my job, I’ve never seen anything like the spate of accidents we’ve had here in North San Diego County,” said Sharon Greene, executive director of the multijurisdictional Los Angeles-San Diego Rail Corridor Agency, or LOSSAN.

“We have to find a way to keep it from continuing in the future. Because, in the coming years, when more passenger, freight and local transit trains start running on those tracks, the potential for problems is only going to get worse.”

At the same time, the husbands of the two most recent train-accident victims have forged an unusual alliance through the pain of losing the women they loved to the same freight train.

They plan to draft a letter to local railway officials, asking them to examine the speeds at which trains travel through the North County.

“It’s like speed boats in the harbor,” Hashu Waney said in an interview Thursday afternoon. “They’re only allowed to go 5 miles an hour in the crowded waters for safety reasons.

“I own a boat, and I don’t like that rule one bit. But I follow it because there’s a solid safety reason behind it--so people don’t get hurt. That’s the approach we have to take here. There’s no way train engineers should be allowed to run through a station at 55 m.p.h.”

Waney recalled meeting Kaiser for the first time last week at Roberta Halpern’s funeral at a San Diego synagogue--which he attended with his son, Naveen, and his late wife’s sister.

“I just stood there as he came into the room,” said the 58-year-old clothing manufacturer. “He was crying. And he walked straight up to me, and we hugged. I whispered into his ear, ‘I sympathize with you, Mr. Kaiser. We lost two very precious women.’ ”

For Hashu Waney, the grief over his wife’s death is turning into a driven resolve to make trains less deadly in San Diego County.

On Thursday afternoon, Waney said, his grief turned to disbelief. For the first time, he returned to the Del Mar depot where his wife was killed.

To his satisfaction, he saw that the owner of an adjacent parking lot had built a small fence to block the path Usha Waney had followed when she dashed toward the tracks last Wednesday morning.

But, as he knelt to lay a wreath of flowers on the spot his wife was killed, he spotted a woman carrying both a baby and large suitcase as she crossed the tracks only a few feet to the south--at the spot where the new fence ended.

“I was speechless,” Waney said. “Nothing seems to stop them from crossing. That’s why Mr. Kaiser and I are going to try and collect all the supporters we can to stand behind us. We want the railroad to act in two or three days, not months or years.”

Sharon Greene says she can sympathize with the pain both husbands are feeling. But there are a few things about trains they and many people just don’t understand, she says.

“It’s difficult to be on the bureaucratic side in a tragedy like this,” she said. “Many times, I’ve formulated notes I’d like to send to such families, but I’ve held back because it might not have been appropriate.

“But, in this case, they should not have been there. It’s not just a matter of crossing the tracks. They were there knowing that a train was approaching in less than a minute. That’s the kind of thing we have to stop.”

And slower trains, she says, are no less deadly.

“Statistics even show that slower trains are even more dangerous,” Greene said, “because people are fooled into believing they can outrun them.”

At Thursday’s safety seminar, new instructors were coached on the difference between being safe and being irresponsible around trains.

They learned eye-opening tidbits about how trains work. For example, while it takes an automobile traveling at 55 m.p.h. about 200 feet to stop, a train cruising at the same speed will take 1 mile to come to rest.

They also learned that a train can crush an automobile with the same ease that a car could crush an aluminum soda can.

One group of volunteers circled around a large colorful chart as an instructor coached them on broaching matters of life and death with children. “You say things like, ‘You’d better be able to run 60 miles and hour, or you’re in trouble,’ ” he said.

“And what happens when you can’t run that fast?”

Greene and others stressed Thursday that education is not the only key to ensure that these tragedies don’t continue.

The enforcement task force will study whether stiffer fines for people who ignore crossing signals are needed--like the $246 fine levied against motorists who use freeway lanes, she said.

“When people do things like drive around a crossing bar, they’re apparently not thinking they could get killed,” Greene said. “Maybe they’ll give it a second thought if the chance exists they could be fined $246.”

LOSSAN will also seek federal funds to elevate or lower train tracks at 92 street-level crossings between Los Angeles and San Diego--roughly half of which are in San Diego County, she said.

The $736-million “grade separation” project along 128 miles of tracks is expected to take 10 to 20 years to complete and would make the rail line like a freeway--a route where intersecting roads go either below or above it.

Recently, LOSSAN completed a study of safety measures and educational programs taken at 31 rail agencies nationwide, looking for new clues to stop the pedestrian carnage.

Results of the study were to be presented to local officials late Thursday at a meeting of the North County Transit Board in Oceanside.

One outcome of the study, Greene said, was the continuing development of a bilingual warning symbol to be placed along the tracks by next year--a sign bearing the shadow of a locomotive bearing down upon a pedestrian walking the tracks.

But the survey did not point a clear direction in an issue that has recently loomed large in North County: whether tracks should be fenced off.

“The norm of the agencies we looked at was not to fence,” Greene said. “The idea is that fencing is redundant. The railroad tracks by themselves should be a signal not to trespass.”

Nonetheless, the fencing issue will not, necessarily, be decided soon, she said.

“As the 1990s become the decade of rail service, that public policy issue will be one of increasing debate,” she said. “But there will be no easy answers.”