Metrolink Train Hits, Kills Man on Tracks

An unidentified man was killed Friday morning by a Metrolink train as he walked along the train tracks in western Glendale, authorities said.

The man apparently ignored the train engineer’s horn as he walked on the tracks near Doran Avenue, a little more than a mile west of the Glendale Metrolink station, said Francisco Oaxaca, a Metrolink spokesman.

“This was a situation where the individual was actually walking on the tracks, on the ties between the rails,” Oaxaca said.

The section of track on which the man was struck is not fenced, he said, noting the section of track skirts an industrial area and major roadways.

No passengers aboard Train 202, bound for Los Angeles from Lancaster, were injured in the collision, Oaxaca said.

“We’re not releasing his name because we’re not sure who he is yet,” said Chahe Keuroghelian, Glendale Police Department spokesman. “All he had in his pockets was a Social Security card, but we don’t know if it was his or someone else’s.”

The man is the 12th person this year to have been struck and killed by a Metrolink train, which operates on 416 miles of track between Oxnard and Oceanside, according to Metrolink officials. Since the rail line went into service in 1992, 45 people have been killed by Metrolink trains, excluding those deaths suspected to be suicides, Oaxaca said.

According to at least one witness at the scene, the man “staggered along the tracks, walking in the same direction as the train was heading,” Keuroghelian said. “The engineer blew his horn about 400 to 500 yards away but the man didn’t respond.”

The train was traveling about 79 mph when it struck the man, authorities said. The train eventually came to a stop a mile south of the collision.

“The engineer appears to have done what he could,” Keuroghelian said.

Authorities are not ruling out the possibility that Friday’s accident was a suicide. Three deaths on Metrolink tracks this year are considered suicides and are not tabulated in fatality statistics, Oaxaca said.

Since the deaths of two Upland girls who were killed by a train while they played near unfenced tracks last month, fencing around the tracks in residential neighborhoods has become a major safety issue.

Currently, about 65% of Metrolink’s rails in residential neighborhoods are fenced, according to Metrolink. The agency estimates it would cost roughly $7 million to fence the rest of the tracks in residential areas.

But officials said those who wish to cross the tracks can do so despite the fencing.

“There’s no fence in the world that would have kept this individual from getting on the tracks, assuming he heard the horn and wanted to be there anyway,” Oaxaca said.

Friday’s accident was the first train-related fatality in Glendale since Aug. 15, 1994, when a grandfather, his daughter and granddaughter attempted to take a shortcut across an unfenced section of track near Western Avenue and were killed by one of Metrolink’s commuter trains.