Police Ride Metrolink to Patrol Rail Crossings : Trains: As part of Operation Lifesaver, officers scan the intersections for drivers trying to beat the gates.

Police patrolled railroad crossings from Simi Valley to Moorpark on Wednesday morning, riding locomotives to scan the sometimes deadly intersections for drivers trying to beat the gates.

The first shift was dead slow.

About the only action that Simi Valley cops saw from Moorpark to the Santa Susana Pass was the buzzard that their 370,000-pound cruiser shooed off some railroad kill.

But by noon, the police officers of Operation Lifesaver had warned or cited a pedestrian and 14 motorists--many for the risky crime of zooming through grade-crossings just as the gates slashed down.

Fines of up to $500 should make those drivers remember the law, said Metrolink spokesman Francisco Oaxaca. But the key reason Metrolink is running the special enforcement program throughout its five-county service area this week, he said, is to publicize its warning that ignoring crossing signals can kill you.

“In California there were 162 fatalities last year, 100 at railroad crossings, because people thought they could go through the gates and run around the train,” said Richard Stanger, Metrolink’s executive director.

Added Jim McInerny of the California Public Utilities Commission, “If you race a train to a crossing and it’s a tie, you lose.”

Motorists gave lame excuses Wednesday for blowing past flashing red lights, clanging bells and descending gates, said Simi Valley motorcycle patrolman Dave Cowan.

“ ‘I was confused,’ ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ ‘I didn’t want to stop in the middle of the tracks,’ ” he said, to quote a few. “I’ve heard them all.”

Cowan and a handful of other patrol units lurked near Simi Valley’s nine crossings while Lt. Jon Ainsworth and Officer Jeff Malgren cruised back and forth across the city beside a Metrolink engineer.

While the officers on the train served as observers, the officers on the street spotted nearly all the violators, Ainsworth said.

As the officers leapfrogged ahead of the train from violation to violation, Ainsworth marveled at the mounting number of motorists caught for straddling the tracks as they piled up at stoplights.

“We have all the tracks posted with signs that say ‘Do Not Stop on Tracks,’ ” he said. In all, they caught nine motorists for speeding across tracks in front of 10 Amtrak, Metrolink and Southern Pacific trains, he said.

Meanwhile, Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Bud McCracken cruised Moorpark’s five crossings as Senior Deputy Jim Hill rode the rails in another unlikely undercover vehicle--a linked pair of Southern Pacific freight engines.

Hill spotted gate-runners from the train and radioed McCracken, who then pulled them over.

While the Simi drivers got tickets, Moorpark’s motorists were let off with warnings, McCracken said.

“Usually we’d cite them,” he said. “But this being more of an educational process, we decided we’d give them warnings and say, ‘This is what happens the next time you go around the gates.’ ”

Two motorists were warned for stopping on the tracks--a common problem at Moorpark Avenue, where cars pile up at a stoplight, oblivious of the danger, he said.

Three others sped past the warning signal’s flashing red lights even though they had time to stop, and one was warned for driving around the gate after it was already down, McCracken said.

That man was driving on a restricted license because of a recent drunk-driving conviction, McCracken said. “I think it scared him to death to realize that we had an officer on the train that observed it,” he said.

Metrolink engineer Larry Todd said he was glad to see the officers on the train.

When a car darts across the tracks ahead of his train as he rounds a blind curve at 60-plus, “My first reaction is my heart rate about doubles. It scares the bejesus out of me,” Todd said. “If I hit them, I risk killing them or derailing the train. Then when I’m past them, my fear turns to rage. You’re mad, like, ‘What the hell are you doing there?’ ”

Thousand-ton freight trains take a mile to stop from their 50-m.p.h. cruising speed, Todd said, and with top speeds of 79 m.p.h., the Metrolink trains he drives now are even more likely to hit someone trying to beat the gate.

“In 10 years of driving freight trains, I only ever hit one car,” Todd said. “In my first year on passenger trains, I hit five.”

Sooner or later, he says, his train will kill someone stupid enough to ignore the grade warnings. And it will haunt him, as it does fellow engineers, who cannot bear to go back to work for as long as a year after a fatal wreck.

Scofflaws save only 14 seconds by beating the gate for a Metrolink train, and no more than 90 seconds for a slow-moving freight train, he said.

Sometimes, they mistake a freight for an express.

“The only thing they see is the headlight. They can’t differentiate, and they think it’s a slow, old freight train,” he said. “And then here we come at 79 miles per hour, and we nail ‘em.”