Deaths on Tracks Exact Heavy Toll for Conductors

San Diego-based Amtrak locomotive engineer Leonard Robidoux will forever be thankful for the time a co-worker embraced him.

It didn’t come after Robidoux’ 1,000th run, or his 10th anniversary with the company, or after the birth of a child.

It came the morning after Robidoux’ train struck and killed a suicidal woman who had positioned her car directly in the path of his locomotive. Robidoux is still haunted by that experience and clearly remembers the color of her eyes: blue.

“I knew it would happen sooner or later,” said Robidoux. “But I didn’t know what it would be like until it did happen. The wobbly knees, the shaky voice--it was a feeling I’d never had before.”

The next morning, two other locomotive engineers met him for breakfast. “Normally, they’re kind of stoic and macho, but they opened themselves up to me, talked about their incidents, helped me accept what happened.

“Then one of them gave me a hug. A supportive embrace. I didn’t expect it from him. But it really helped.”

This angel in steel-toed work boots was a fellow railroader who previously had been at the throttle of a locomotive that had killed. He provided the empathy that a professional therapist could not.

With increasing frequency, railroads today are dispatching co-workers to the scenes of trackside fatalities, to help engineers, conductors and other train crew members deal with the sense of guilt, the anger and the grief of becoming unwilling attendants to death.

They are called peer counselors in some circles, peer supporters in others, and professional therapists say they offer the most effective, genuine and comforting support for stricken engineers.

The need for them is unrelenting. Of the estimated 30,000 locomotive engineers around the nation, one in six was involved in an accident last year--and one in 30 witnessed a fatality, according to railroad industry and government statistics.

Around the country last year, in fact, a locomotive engineer was 15 times more likely to be involved in a trackside death than a Los Angeles police officer was to be involved in a fatal shooting.

“There are two kinds of railroad engineers,” says Amtrak’s Chuck Glick. “The ones who have hit people and the ones who are going to hit people.”

Indeed, there is growing awareness that, for each of the hundreds of people who are struck nationwide each year by trains, there are an equal number of forgotten victims: the engineers.

“The sound of a human getting struck,” Glick says, “is like no other.”

The engineer wonders whether he can forgive himself and rise above the depression that he delivered death--or vent the anger that he was an unwilling accomplice to suicide.

That attitude marks a distinct departure from the old days of railroading, when engineers were expected to shrug off a track death as just another hazard.

“The old heads [veteran engineers] trained the younger guys to just suck it up and keep going and to not let a death get to you,” said Sam Holley, head of the employee counseling services at Union Pacific Railroad, which in 1989 became one of the first railroads to begin training engineers in how to offer support to co-workers. “But the culture of railroading is changing.”

The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad established its peer support program in Southern California four years ago, and Southern Pacific Railroad began its program about two years ago.

The development of the programs acknowledges the number of engineers whose trains have killed and the resulting toll on railroad employees.

Nationwide last year, 1,048 people were struck and killed by trains--including 78 in California, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Nearly half of those were considered trespassers--people jogging, walking, standing or resting along the private railroad right-of-way where they had no business, and where engineers would least likely expect to see them. In no known case was the engineer later found culpable for the death.

The fatality figures do not reflect the number of people who committed suicide by putting themselves in front of trains--more than 100 nationwide, based on anecdotal information from various sources.

When a Metrolink commuter train kills--and they have, 50 times in their four-year history, including 15 suicides--Tommy Wong usually gets the call. He has been involved in eight fatalities, while running freight and Amtrak trains, and now he’s a supervisor at Metrolink.

When Wong climbs into the cab to console the engineer, who is replaying in his mind those last indescribable moments and wondering what he could have done differently, he runs this drill:

“I ask the engineer, ‘What do you see [at the control console]?’ And he’ll identify the whistle, the bell, the lights, the brake, the throttle. And I’ll ask, ‘What else do you see?’ And he’ll look at me, confused. And I’ll say, ‘Do you see a steering wheel?’ No you don’t. You couldn’t steer out of the way. What happened was not your fault.’ ”

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Dave Torres is another Metrolink engineer peer counselor; his qualifying tragedy occurred a year ago--after 22 years of nonfatal railroading--when his 79 mph train hurtled toward an elderly man, his daughter and his granddaughter, who chose to walk across the tracks in Glendale rather than take an overpass.

Torres was sounding his train’s horn even before he saw the trio--and hit the brakes as soon as he spotted them--but was still traveling at about 60 mph when the train slammed into them.

“I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t look because I didn’t want to see their faces for the rest of my life,” Torres said. “I turned away and remember thinking, ‘Please don’t be there, please don’t be there.’ Then you hear it, and three people are dead.

“I thought I was doing a pretty good job of maintaining [composure] afterward, but people told me I was [screwed] up. I had become depressed and short tempered.

“Someone told me that I was looking for someone to say it was OK, that I didn’t kill anybody, that they killed themselves. I was looking for that forgiveness, even though I didn’t need any. I got it from a peer, someone who’s seen it, who through his eyes told me he understood the hell I was going through.”

Six months later his train struck and killed another pedestrian. “It doesn’t get any easier,” he said.

Some engineers who have been involved in multiple fatalities become so emotionally raw that they retire early. Other engineers become increasingly--and necessarily, they say--more calloused.

Earlier this year, Amtrak--whose engineers operate the Metrolink trains--became one of the last major carriers to adopt a formal peer-support program and is now training volunteers for the duty.

But the crew members are still offered follow-up professional counseling. In Los Angeles, it is provided by Roger Melton, who has 20 years’ experience counseling police officers, firefighters, rape victims and war veterans.

An engineer, he said, feels much the same guilt experienced by soldiers in war.

“Soldiers tend to blame themselves when a buddy dies. They feel they should have somehow been able to prevent the buddy’s death, even it meant getting in the way of the bullet,” Melton said. “Engineers feel the same guilt--that somehow they should have stopped the train. It’s compassion for the victim.”

Support for traumatized engineers frequently comes from police. Metrolink’s Wong recalled his first fatality, when a vehicle struck the side of his Amtrak train in Anaheim.

“Four people died in that car, and the driver lived. He had run through a crossing guard gate. A young Anaheim cop walked me away from the crowd and asked me if I was all right.

“I said I guess so, but I had a cigarette in my mouth and I was trying to light another one in my hand. The cop called the driver a son-of-a-bitch and said he’d better be dead.

“My conductor came running over to get him to stop, and the cop said, ‘I’m not done yet.’ And he told me that it wasn’t my fault, and he was the one who told me not to blame myself--because I didn’t have a steering wheel.”

While police frequently are among the most supportive of engineers at death scenes, the tables were turned last month when a Santa Fe freight train struck and killed Brea Police Det. Terry Lee Finscher, who was searching for criminal evidence along the tracks in Yorba Linda.

The engineer on that train declined to be interviewed, but his acquaintances said that after he brought the train to a halt, he encountered an uncomfortable situation: Some police officers, already at the scene with Finscher, were weeping, while others climbed aboard his locomotive and sternly confronted him.

The engineer radioed his dispatcher to send support for him, and peer counselors arrived. “He was being hammered by the cops, because one of their friends had just been killed,” said one of the peer-counselors present. “If I had gotten there soon enough, I wouldn’t have allowed them to do that to him.”

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Even with co-workers’ support, strong emotional feelings will linger.

Jim McHood, now an engineer supervisor for Burlington Northern Santa Fe in San Bernardino, is still livid that a 21-year-old foreign exchange student rested his head on the rail in front of his train.

At the time, McHood’s sister had cancer and was battling to survive even one additional day, and McHood said he was furious that another person would so easily give up on life.

“How dare he involve me in his death,” McHood said. “How dare he have me sitting at the controls of his instrument of death.”

The memories can be worsened if engineers still confront constant reminders of the death.

Metrolink engineer, Danny O’Connell grows anxious every time he approaches a boarding station and sees a dark-haired woman in black pants and white jacket--as a woman was dressed the day his train struck her.

Union Pacific freight engineer Don Archuleta can’t shake the time an 18-year-old girl was killed when, looking down at the pavement and listening to music on her headphones, she rode her bicycle past the lowered crossing gates and into the side of his locomotive in Pomona.

His voice cracked as he related the incident. “I went back to work four days later, but I wonder--every time I approach that crossing--if the people there will stop. Do they see me? Do they hear me? I have to keep from putting my train into emergency [braking] every time I see somebody near the crossing gates.”