Crossings on Foot Continue on Rails Where Train Killed 3

It was as if the gruesome deaths of three people hadn’t happened a day earlier. Pedestrians on Tuesday were still taking the shortcut across a Metrolink track in Glendale, opting for convenience over safety, at the very spot where three members of a family were struck and killed.

“I was a little bit shaken,” Rene Nettles, 27, said Tuesday as she made her way to work across the tracks where a 7-year-old girl, her mother and her grandfather were killed Monday.

“I felt sorry for the family,” Nettles said. “But I just went ahead and took that chance. This way is faster.”

Between 7 and 8 a.m., Nettles was joined by a dozen others who walked through a break in the fence designed to keep pedestrians off the tracks, which are on private property.

All made it across safely within a few seconds.

But on Monday, Antonio Juan Pina, 79; his daughter, Maylem Blanca Villanueva, 37, and granddaughter, Francis Villanueva, 7, were not so lucky.

They were the latest in a string of pedestrians killed by trains across the country as railroad use rebounds in crowded urban areas where it had faded from consciousness as a relic of a bygone era.

Last year, 523 pedestrians, joggers and bicyclists nationwide were killed by trains, 98 of them in California, more than twice as many as in any other state. In addition, 626 motorists were killed at highway rail crossings, 36 of them in California.

In Orange County, at least four people have been struck and killed by trains since April. Three were suicides and one was an accidental death.

On Easter Sunday, a thrill-seeking Buena Park teen-ager lined up on a trestle with friends, seeking to feel the rush of wind from a passing train. He died after he lost his footing and fell into the train.

The following month, in separate incidents less than a week apart, a 28-year-old Laguna Niguel man and a 17-year-old Irvine girl committed suicide by placing themselves in the paths of passing trains. And last week, in Santa Ana, a woman killed herself by standing on a narrow railroad bridge and letting a Metrolink train strike her.

A sizable proportion of California’s cases last year were ruled suicides. But the deaths have increased concern among federal officials over railroad safety, prodding Congress to address the number of rail-related fatalities.

Pedestrians and motorists hoping to beat a train to a crossing often fall victim to the difficulty of judging the speed and distance of trains that travel at the pace of freeway traffic but appear to be going much slower, said Herschel Leibowitz, a psychology professor at Pennsylvania State University who has studied such accidents.

“We make mistakes in judging large objects like trains,” he said. “The only cue you have is the increase in size of the object,” which appears to get bigger as it approaches, Leibowitz said. “And that really is a very poor cue. It increases very slowly, even at 60 m.p.h.”

And pedestrians often expect the trains to stop for them, he said.

“They put the responsibility on the trains. For some reason they assume the train will stop, but the train really can’t do much about it,” he said.

It takes a typical Metrolink train about a quarter of a mile to come to a stop from a speed of 60 m.p.h., Metrolink officials say.

In Monday’s accident, witnesses said, Pina, his daughter and granddaughter took the shortcut over the tracks to avoid the effort of climbing to a pedestrian overcrossing and then either ignored or did not hear the horn blasts of a southbound Metrolink train traveling at 60 m.p.h.

Although train horns are loud, the wind, surrounding noise or even an intense conversation can mask the sound of an approaching train, rail safety experts said.

The family’s doctor, Elizabeth Remedios, said Tuesday that the grandfather suffered from a recently broken hip, Alzheimer’s disease and hearing loss, so he may have not known there was a train coming or could have been unable to get out of the way. Maylem Villanueva may have been distracted by the difficulty of dealing with both her father and her daughter, the doctor said.

“Imagine trying to get your father off the tracks. He might be listening to you but not following your instructions. And you are trying to get your little girl. And a train is obstructing your view,” Remedios said.

Monday’s deaths brought Metrolink-related fatalities to 21 since the service’s inception in 1992. Nine of those deaths have been ruled suicides.

Metrolink officials Tuesday stressed that their tracks are private property and that those killed while trying to cross them are trespassing. Since the rail service began, sheriff’s deputies have issued about 3,000 citations and made 1,000 arrests, primarily for trespassing violations along Metrolink rights of way.

However, no warning signs are posted at the site of Monday’s accident. The pathway across the tracks, leading from a sidewalk that runs right to the break in the fence, is virtually unobstructed.

The area is patrolled regularly, but keeping trespassers away is practically impossible, said Lt. Marc Klugman of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Metrolink bureau.

“How do you fence the entire length of the track?” he asked.

Last year, Metrolink erected a two-mile-long fence in the northeast San Fernando Valley to help prevent accidents along a seven-mile stretch where six fatalities occurred within 14 months. Since then, there have been no fatal accidents in that area, spokesman Peter Hidalgo said. But it has not yet been decided whether to expand the fencing project, he added.

Fencing is not common in other parts of the country, according to the Assn. of American Railroads. Currently pending in both houses of Congress is legislation that would give incentives to local governments to close dangerous crossings and fund education programs.

Hidalgo said Metrolink has been trying to educate the public in large part by distributing flyers to schoolchildren and residents living near the paths of trains.

“We are as best as possible trying to patrol the area and educate the community,” he said.

Train accidents involving pedestrians or cars are sometimes ignored by national news organizations, which concentrate on more dramatic derailments even though non-derailment accidents account for 90% of all railroad-related fatalities, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.

“Derailments are very high-profile accidents,” said the agency’s Luis del Rio. “The daily story is actually the fact that every 90 minutes there’s a collision between a train and a motorist.”

Dawn Soper of Operation Life saver, a nonprofit organization based in Alexandria, Va., that promotes railroad safety, cited two accidents Aug. 3--an Amtrak derailment in New York with no injuries, and a collision between a freight train and a car in Wyoming that killed five teen-agers--saying the derailment received more news attention.

Federal officials and rail safety advocates blame many of the non-derailment accidents on a lack of attention to the issue in the news media and in schools.

Trains are often portrayed in class and in the media as relics of the past, not as a mode of transport still in use, officials said.

“We’ve all grown up with the railroads as part of our romantic and nostalgic past,” with Rockwellian images of “a small boy with his dog walking along railroad tracks,” Soper said.”It tends to tell readers or viewers that this must be acceptable behavior.”

Times staff writers Julie Marquis, Josh Meyer and Richard Simon contributed to this story.