Cars vs. Trains = No Contest!
The following post is a brief excerpt from my book, ALL ABOARD-The Complete North American Train Travel Guide.
Motor vehicles of all kinds are hit by trains with a frequency that is astounding – several times a day, every day. The circumstances vary, but the outcome doesn’t: the train always wins! You want a graphic analogy? An Amtrak engineer told me that a train hitting a car is roughly comparable to your family car running over a mail box.
Most of these accidents occur during broad daylight, with good visibility, and with the warning signals working perfectly. Furthermore, most of the time the driver of the car involved is sober.
Even more surprising, in about a third of all the car/train collisions which occur at night, the car drives smack into the side of a moving train! Speed is almost always the critical factor in these accidents, because the driver of the car is “overdriving” his headlights – that is, by the time his headlights reveal the train, he’s unable to stop before reaching the crossing.
It’s sad but true that an unknown percentage of these incidents are actually suicides or attempts at suicide, as are many of the pedestrian accidents (which are not included in these numbers). Even so, I think we could agree that those deaths and injuries are all equally unnecessary.
