Get Off the Tracks!

Since last Monday morning, Metrolink --not the MTA, but the urban rail system--has been getting an earful from callers who profess themselves upset about the “lack of sensitivity” evidenced in a Metrolink spokesman’s comments concerning the deaths of two joggers.

The two men were running down the tracks in Corona on Sunday. Their backs were to the train as it came around a bend and laid on its horn. One of the men was wearing stereo headphones. Both were killed.

What the spokesman had said was this:

These deaths, frustratingly, underscored Southern Californians’ “casual attitude” toward the perils of trains. “These people who were on the tracks should never have been there in the first place. It’s these kinds of senseless acts that are incomprehensible and, quite frankly, Metrolink feels we don’t need to apologize for these kinds of incidents. You would never even think of running with a headset on a busy roadway or freeway.”

(If anyone had called to carp about using “Metrolink” and the first-person plural pronoun “we” with the third-person singular verb “feels,” I’d agree. But otherwise . . . )

The spokesman was blunt, all right, but no blunter than the force of a 450-ton train smacking into a 170-pound human being. Short of putting up customized alerts--”YOU IN THE BLUE NYLON JOGGING SHORTS AND THE OLD PUMAS WITH THE BUSTED LACES, STOP LISTENING TO THE CRANBERRIES AND GET OFFA THE TRACKS!”--how clear can the message get?

Taking a shortcut across train tracks is like taking a shortcut across Runway 25 Left at LAX, or trying to save a few minutes by zipping through the lion enclosure at the zoo.

Two years ago, in Glendale, three generations--grandpa, daughter, granddaughter --skipped the overpass built for the express purpose of traversing the rails safely, and cut across the tracks. The engineer hit the emergency brake and the horn at the same time, but the train was still going 60 when it hit the three.

The accidents and the suicides happen often enough for Metrolink to convene peer counseling among engineers. One of them, Tommy Wong, has been known to climb into the cab and demand that the shaken engineer recite for him all the equipment on the console: lights, brake, throttle, whistle. “Do you see a steering wheel? No you don’t. You couldn’t steer out of the way. What happened was not your fault.”

*

By law, a train horn must emit 96 decibels at a distance of 100 feet. At the halfway setting on the volume control, stereo headphones can average 94 decibels. A 13-year-old Fullerton boy walking the tracks with his headphones on didn’t hear the train’s whistle, but felt the track’s vibrations and jumped. The glancing blow broke his pelvis and leg.

Immured in a private world of music and motion, they keep dying: the 18-year-old woman in headphones, head down, who rode her bicycle past lowered crossing gates and into the side of a Union Pacific locomotive in Pomona . . . the 70-year-old San Clemente woman in headphones . . . the 19-year-old Moorpark man . . . the Camp Pendleton Marine.

In the weeks before Sunday’s deaths, the state’s railroads made a public service video designed to scare people into their senses. A jogging couple, he in stereo headphones and singing aloud, run alongside the tracks, then between two sets of tracks. One train passes, and the man moves to the right; he cannot hear a second train coming up behind him, nor the woman shouting.

Wham. Cut to the remains of the male jogger, knocked out of his headphones, out of his shoes, and obviously out of the world of the living.

*

My grandfather, for a time, laid track as a gandy dancer. My father and his pals were known to skate for miles out of town, until the steel skate wheels were nubs, and hop a train home. He knew it was foolhardy, and never let us closer to a moving train than 15 feet or so, where the force of its wake could still knock us off our small feet.

In those parts of the country where train tracks have always crossed and recrossed the countryside like the burrows in an Uncle Miltie’s ant farm, the motive power of a train is an understood and respected force, and such events as happened here Sunday tend not to happen there.

California, engrossed in its cars, was unprepared for the renaissance of rail and the physics of the train--the fact that it can take a third of a mile to come to a stop. It has been years since trains have been familiar beyond an FAO Schwartz catalog, a hobbyist’s basement or a wine country weekend.

But one thing we do know: the tort courts. An Encino man crossing the tracks to sneak into a drive-in movie tripped and fell, and was killed by a Metrolink train. Six months later the family sued for a million bucks.