They Won’t Forget : Two Men Who Lost Their Wives in a Train Accident Make Pilgrimage to Station on 1st Anniversary of the Tragedy

It was shortly after daybreak as the solitary man walked slowly along the train tracks outside the Del Mar station, a small paper bag around three bright yellow roses tucked under his arm.

As commuters rushed past in the pale early morning light, some darting across the two steel ribbons of track from a nearby parking lot, Hashu Waney stopped at a spot he has come to know all too well, and gently placed the flowers along a rail.

Then he lingered for a few moments in silent prayer--a simple gesture to recall the memory of his wife Usha, who was killed on the same spot a year ago as she ran from the parking lot to catch what she thought was a Los Angeles-bound passenger train.

Nearby, Lee Kaiser stood in a leather pilot’s jacket--a would-be hero who had also returned to quietly pay respects to his own wife, Roberta Halpern. On that terrible day last December, the newlyweds had tried in vain to pull the fallen Waney from the path of a hurtling freight train.

Roberta Halpern, 44, was struck and killed for her Good Samaritan efforts, and her husband was injured as scores of morning commuters looked on in horror.

Last week, these two former strangers hugged one another like brothers. They talked of the tragic moment they would always share. And of the women they lost.

“We talked about how fast the past year has gone by,” Waney said later. “For both of us, it’s as though it happened yesterday.”

For Waney, 59, who worked as a production manager at a fashion design company along with Usha, the past year has been one of keeping vigil for his wife.

On the fifth day of each month since her death on Dec. 5, 1990, Waney has returned to the station to lay flowers on the place where she died--long-stemmed roses picked from the front-yard garden they had planted together.

And then he waits for the departure of the 6:49 a.m. northbound train that his wife would have caught, once again bidding silent farewell to the woman he remembers as being as soft and gentle as the rose petals he leaves in her honor.

“I live with it every day--every morning I wake up and every night I go to bed,” Waney said of his wife’s death. “I come home from work to an empty house. It’s a huge house. But without her, it’s absolutely empty.”

But there is also an anger that has slowly turned his sadness to resentment.

Almost nothing has been done in the past year at the station to remedy the dangerous circumstances he says contributed to the accident.

Both Waney and Kaiser--who refuses to talk publicly about the accident--have filed lawsuits against Amtrak, the Santa Fe Railway, which owns the track right-of-way, and the operator of the adjacent parking lot. The lawsuit contends that officials knew of the popular but dangerous shortcut and did nothing to prevent people from using it.

Mike Martin, a spokesman for Santa Fe Railway, said he could not discuss details of the accident or possible remedies because of the pending lawsuits.

Shortly after the accident, the parking lot owner extended a chain-link fence across the old shortcut to the depot. But soon, anxious commuters blazed a new path around the end of the new fence.

Now every day, Hashu Waney says, scores of unthinking rail commuters continue to cross the tracks on their way from the parking lot to the red-brick station--within a few feet of where Usha Waney died.

That same fateful dash is what killed the 47-year-old San Diego clothing designer, who traveled frequently by train. At 6:35 a.m. on the day she died, Waney parked her car in the western parking lot--one of two lots that straddle the Del Mar station.

Mistaking the whistle of a freight train for her northbound passenger train, Waney and a group of others hurried to cross the tracks before the approaching train. But carrying a briefcase full of business papers and fabric samples, Waney tripped and struck her head on a rail.

Despite the efforts of Kaiser and Halpern to rescue her, the mother of three died instantly as the wheels of the 2,000-ton locomotive crushed her.

Halpern was sideswiped by the metal behemoth and died several hours later. Kaiser, a 37-year-old design engineer, suffered minor injuries.

Kaiser has made the painful return to the place now and then to commemorate his bride of three months. But it is Hashu Waney who has come back like clockwork.

In past visits, he has scolded nervous passengers who have stepped over the tracks right in front of him--some even using canes to make their way across.

“Every time I go there I see them cross,” he said. “It hurts me so much. Last month, I saw this old couple with their daughter cross a few feet away from where Usha died. I said, ‘Don’t cross here. I lost a very dear person here, doing the same thing at this very spot.’

“But they just looked at me blankly. And they kept on walking.”

As they waited for a northbound train last week, several commuters said they had not forgotten the violent accident that took place at the station. Still others merely scoffed at fate, saying they’ll continue to cross the tracks wherever they please.

“I wouldn’t care if 50 people got killed here,” said one man, refusing to offer his name. “I’ll still cross.”