Blood on the Rails: Engineer’s Nightmare

Joe Cassidy remembers exactly what happened the day he killed a man.

He was driving a 200-ton locomotive at about 45 m.p.h when the man walked out from between two train cars.

“When he stepped out, he stepped between the two running rails and all he did was look up at me,” Cassidy said. “I remember the terror. I was screaming inside the cab.”

Cassidy’s locomotive rolled more than a quarter of a mile, he said. After he stopped, it was a while before he noticed that he was still pulling on the whistle.

Cassidy’s trains killed three people in the years he was an engineer for the Long Island Rail Road. Now, as general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, he knows that other engineers have suffered from the same trauma.

“I was told when I was hired that I could expect to kill three people in a 25-year career,” he said.

Nationwide, 700 people were killed by trains in 1990. Metro-North, the Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, the three commuter railroads that run from New York City, reported 58 deaths in 1990, according to the Federal Railroad Adminstration. (The New York City subway, not monitored by the federal government, logged 180 deaths in 1990, but they include homicides, deaths by natural causes and fatal accidents inside subway stations but not on trains.)

Such statistics are easily gathered, but the toll on the engineers is harder to determine. Some engineers said they never told their families about the incidents, yet they can recall every detail of them. Some engineers said they suffer from flashbacks.

“For the first year after the accident, every time I passed that place, that was the first thing that I thought of,” Brian McDonough, a Metro-North engineer, said after a recent trip into Grand Central Terminal.

McDonough was heading through the Bronx when he struck a homeless man who was collecting cans in a tunnel.

“I was in shock,” he said. “I felt sad because I didn’t feel that bad. He shouldn’t have been there. I said I was OK, but I was shaky.”

William Kennedy, a retired Metro-North Railroad engineer who killed six people during his 44-year career, understood early on that train-related deaths were part of the job.

“It’s something you never forget,” Kennedy said. “Every time you go back through these areas there are flashbacks. “From the moment I found out that people got killed and I was going to kill them, I sort of inured myself,” Kennedy said.

But, he added, some who kill at the throttle are traumatized. “I’ve seen some good men let it bother them,” he said.

Engineers who have been involved in fatalities are provided with counseling from the railroad’s employee assistance program, as well as a few days off if they need a break, said Dan Brucker, a Metro-North spokesman.

With suicides, Brucker said, “It’s not unusual for me to hear that the person stepped in front of the train and looked up at the engineer. Sometimes they bow down in front of the train or sit down. It’s not unheard of that they wave.”

William James Cunningham was involved with three train fatalities during his career. He told of the time his train killed a 12-year-old boy who was playing on the tracks with a friend.

The impact tossed the boy into the air. “It’s still very vivid to me,” Cunningham said. After he stopped the train, he looked back at the two boys. “I can still see the one boy picking up his friend’s arm. I can see how it fell back down again. And he runs up to me and says, ‘I think my friend’s dead.’ ”

Cunningham said it is not possible to stop a train quickly when it is traveling at 90 m.p.h. or 135 feet per second. And a train cannot swerve to avoid someone standing on the tracks.

“It’s not the nicest thing in the world,” Kennedy said. “Hopefully, you won’t let it ruin your life. You’re not proud of it, you just live with it.”