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Men struck, killed by trains in Dorchester, Belmont
By adamg on Fri, 02/27/2009 - 8:58am
A man was struck and killed by a Red Line train around 11:20 last night at Savin Hill, the Globe reports.
A man was struck and killed by a commuter-rail train around 8 this morning in Belmont, the Herald reports.
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Comments
T Signage
(proposed new T signage)
1.
dear people, trains will kill you if you a. walk in front of them b. stumble in front of them and c. jump in front of them.
2.
trains are big and scary
Graveyard humor
A hypothetical exchange I remember from a book of jokes read in elementary school:
First person: Every twenty minutes, a man is hit by a train.
Second person: My! He must be made of steel!
hilarious
that is a real gut buster
The Fitchburg line schedule
The Fitchburg line schedule is FUBAR this morning- I (and many others in Waltham) ended up taking the express bus into town. A friend who took the 8:30a in from Waltham said when they passed through Belmont, the body was still on the tracks, covered with a sheet :^(
I was on Fitchburg train #404
...which was the one involved in Belmont.
I heard it was no accident.
The train came to a stop just after 7 am. Most of us were still on the train when your friend's 8:30 Waltham departure passed by. Shortly after that, an empty train pulled up alongside on another track, and we were transferred to that one to complete the trip in to North Station.
Why didn't the T put you on a 74 or 78 bus?
The 78 goes right by this crossing, and the 74 could easily have been diverted over to you from Concord Avenue. Either bus would have taken you to Harvard Square. Why didn't the T direct passengers this way?
for the same reasons airlines don't put people on buses
... for 100-mile connections
myopia.
T people think they are in either the subway business or the streetcar business or the bus business. Their options are therefore limited.
I don't know
and neither did the train crew.
The conductor at first (about ten minutes after we stopped) said the T was "sending buses" to pick us up. When asked which station we'd be taken to, she said she didn't know.
I checked the Commuter Rail Service Alerts from my phone, and found one had been posted at 7:09 saying that the buses would taking us to Alewife. Why this wasn't communicated to the train crew, and why passengers with internet access were better informed than the conductors themselves, is anybody's guess.
Sometime after 8--I'd say about 20 past--the conductor informed us that the buses were "stuck in traffic" and that the track next to us had been re-opened by the T, and a train would be stopping to pick us up and take us the rest of the way. A few minutes later, another inbound train passed by. We could see it had passengers aboard, but it didn't look full. That one didn't stop; it kept on going, and it wasn't until another ten minutes had gone by that an empty train pulled up alongside.
Did any passengers get off your train ...
... and seek out the 74 or 78 buses on their own?
Not many...
...but I did see some--maybe as many as ten or twelve people--who ignored pleas from the conductors to stay on board. They crossed over to the north side of the tracks where there was a gravel road, and started walking toward Alewife, which was only about half a mile away.
'Gravel road'
is probably the informal Fitchburg Cutoff Path, which the state plans to formalize and pave soon.
Multimodal Commuting On a Friday
I usually take my Bike Friday folding bike with me on commuter rail trains and, sometimes, on subway trains as well. I ride the mile between North Station and my office on it.
In situations where the train is stopped and everybody gets off, I can wait to be the last person off the coach, carry the bike off, unfold the bike, and get to my destination via another route (like the time I got off a red line train at central when we knew we were not getting any further anytime soon, and then rode downtown from there). I later found out that a coworker was in a different coach on the same train, and I beat her to work by over an hour.
As for "alternate routes", some conductors are more savvy than others. I approached a Lowell Line train at West Medford once, intending to board, but the conductor warned me that it was stalled out and not moving soon. I said something like "oh, in that case, I'll jump on the 95 or the 326 express". He then asked me a couple questions about the stop location and schedule, and within a minute about 50 people left the train.
Train passengers aren't transportation experts
This sounds like an attempt to blame passengers who didn't reroute on their own.
I know a great deal about my own day-to-day work, and am astonished that T employees and managers don't.
Presumably with a minute or two of effort, T employees could have determined:
- alternate routings for passengers (buses, shuttles to other T property)
- proximity and availability (How full) of buses running their regular routes
- pemission to board train passengers on alt modes fare-free
for feck's sake, the entire purpose of the organization is to move people from one place to some other place (well, to those of us on the outside). I know insiders see it as a place that gives them money and status and free rides and early retirements. But there are way, way, way more of us than there are of them. How does this continue?
(Unrelated, but related footnote: Yesterday's Globe reported that despite the state's financial crisis, and others, the legislature has convened for about 11 working hours since the first of the year. Maybe it's better that way).
huh?
I don't know where you got that from any of my comments here. Obviously the T should have directed these passengers to appropriate bus routes, but I was curious if any passengers sought them out on their own.
sorry, misunderstood
i got it from the bare question you left... I'm just accustomed to questions like that being paired off with a followup about something someone /should/ have done, but didn't.
Just to embellish my rant about how much I know about my own day to day work (and that many other people seem to, as well)... a passenger would have to be completely on top of optimal routings from every possible place a train could stop on his usual route, conditions on the other service, real frequency (versus theoretical) and so much more. The T's supposed to have all that at its fingertips, or at least within range of a couple of calls on a radio.
God. The T is such a massive, sucking failure. It's really breathtaking. How the hell does this happen in MA? Over and over?
I really am kinda "out" and it's getting easier and easier to just turn my back on these messes. Believe it or not, hubsters, there really are places in the world, even in the US, where most things more or less work pretty well more or less most of the time.
zbert, what planet are u from?
You have been watching too much CSI. Each time a train hits someone there are about a thousand little factors involved in the response. This is not TV. There are no buses on standby for emergencies, no button to press that instantly scans every bus to see which has few/no passengers. And, even if there were, how are they supposed to get to the scene quickly? You do know that there are traffic jams during rush hour, right?
lol and you're not doing enough thinking
I didn't say any of those things about "a button to press that instantly scans every bus"
so just a hint, a good way to have a discussion is to not begin by just "making s--- up"
ok now that we've got that out of the way
T workers and the presumably calm, collected and well paid people sitting in the big dark room downtown, are supposed to know all about weather, and routes of T vehicles. There's not a lot to know there. The weather conditions are roughly the same for all of the T's service area (and would not have been a factor the other day). The routes don't change.
So, given the time of day, the location of the stopped train, and the destinations of that train, the T should have been able to:
- tell riders about other T-based travel options, based on their destinations.
- get on the radio to a couple of the buses that were traveling in the correct direction (there are a handful of buses moving in a given direction on a given route at any time, it's a manageable task), find out how full they are / where they are)
Dude, trucking companies do much more complicated logistics than this with trucks that can be anywhere in the entire country, taking all kinds of routings (and changing them on the fly). The T runs vehicles that drive on the same path every single time they go out and come back.
So yeah, no more BS from MBTA people trying to make the case that this is particularly hard, or that it's particularly dramatic when they actually manage to move people from one place to some other place. As I already said, that's the entire point of their existence.
And if the T doesn't have /something/ on standby for breakdowns, well, that's just bad business. As a rule it costs more to service exceptional events (that you absolutely know will occur, you just don't know when), than it is to be properly prepared for them.
Maybe some of the show-off money they are wasting having security clowns dig through little old ladies' knitting at "random screenings" could be used to move people around, instead.
The Route 78 bus that goes
The Route 78 bus that goes near the accident scene runs every 17 minutes in the rush-hour.
http://www.mbta.com/uploadedFiles/Documents/Schedu...(1).pdf
A standard size bus has 39 seats and can hold about 25 more standees, about 64 people total for a full load. Presumably, by the time Route 78 reaches that location, some regular Route 78 passengers are already on the bus, lets say 20. That would leave room for 44 more people per trip.
A rush-hour north-side commuter rail train has at least 5 coaches with 122 seats, so could have about 600 people on board.
It would take about 14 trips on Route 78 to accomodate the passengers on the train, running every 17 minutes (it actually then goes to every 30 by 10 AM),it would take over 4 hours for Route 78 to eventually accomodate the passengers from the train if all of them were diverted to it.
I could see why the crew didn't just announce that everybody should get off and take the regular bus service. Obviously, emergency shuttle buses would be required. But as others have suggsted, they don't always have extra buses that just happen to be a few minutes away from an accident.
Sign of Spring?
People are getting out more, walking around more, and walking on the tracks more, too.
That's a way more cheerier
That's a way more cheerier explanation than the one I had, which was that it was a sign of the bad economy.
In either case it sucks, though, for the families, and the vehicle operators.
Brighton Street crossing in Belmont
An unimproved dirt trail, soon to be officially paved, abuts the north side of the railroad right-of-way, east of this crossing. It is called the Fitchburg Cutoff trail. There is fencing between the trail and the railroad tracks, but it isn't very high.
If a pedestrian or bicyclist wants to continue west from Brighton Street towards Belmont Center, there's a strong temptation to walk on the railroad right-of-way for a block to reach Channing Road, because a church has stupidly fenced off the end of that street from Brighton Street.
savin hill
I was on the train that stuck and killed a man at Savin Hill last night as it was pulling into the station. I was in the first car and heard the train operator yell, "My God, Oh my God!!" while he rang the bell frantically. Passengers knocked on the window and asked the operator if he was ok. He rushed out stating that someone had jumped in front of the train. A couple of passengers went to see if they could be of assistance while MBTA employees came running from everywhere.
I left the station and took a cab back to Ashmont from DOT Ave. I did not want to see a man dead on the tracks. I felt so bad for the driver. It certainly was not his fault but it must have been horrific for him. I have been looking for more info on this incident but have turned up nothing on line today except that the "accident" had occurred at 11:20 PM and was being investigated.
Belmont victim identified
Wicked Local Belmont reports he was an elderly man who routinely crossed the tracks to get from a White Hen Pantry where he'd buy the paper to visit some friends on the other side. He was deaf in one ear.
Brighton Street crossing
The White Hen Pantry is directly south of the railroad crossing on Brighton Street, while the Hill Estates are just north of the crossing. Both are on the east side of Brighton Street.
The crossing has bells, gates, and flashing lights. Long ago, there was a station stop here, known as Hill's Crossing.
I thought that a fence prevented people from crossing the tracks east of (behind) the White Hen building, but I'm not positive about that.
I saw chain-link fences
...on both sides of the tracks. In fact, I was wondering how far we'd have to walk to board the buses we were initially told were coming to get us.
The MBTA is asserting the driver of the train sounded the horn; however, I didn't hear it, and a couple of other people near me remarked that thy didn't hear it, either. We were seated at the forward end of the second car, and should have heard the horn unmistakably if it had sounded.
StreetView of the Brighton Street crossing
View Larger Map
Also on the train.
I was in the first car. If there was a horn, I didn't hear it; since we did hear (in retrospect a really awful) noise as something went under the train, and it was several minutes before any of us thought we were stopped because of what we hit and not, say, damage to the undercarriage (the noise was loud, metallic, and things were clearly being hit that shouldn't have been; it was sufficiently loud and metallic that I actually thought it was a bicycle that had gone under.) I'm fairly certain I'd remember the combination of horn followed by potential collision noise if it had sounded.
I'll second the "people keep saying there's practically a pedestrian crossing, but I saw fences"; we were between a stone wall topped with barbed wire and a factory with barbed-wire fences on one side, and a forest with a fence along it on the other. If people are crossing there, something seems badly wrong.
No Horn in Train Death in Belmont
I was seated in the first few rows of the first car in the train that hit the person in the tracks, over the front wheels. The sudden sound and thud, the jolt I felt in my seat, followed by rattling sounds under the train, were NOT proceeded by any warning, horn, or braking. It was clear to me as I looked a my fellow passengers all were taken by surprise.
I've been riding the train since 1995 and I've felt impacts of snowbanks, rocks, etc. and nothing compared to the dull thud of what I instantly was sure was something made of flesh and bone. I prayed it wasn't a person, but it was.
Due to the fact there was no horn or whistle and no braking I was left to conclude that either the driver A) never saw the person, or B) if they did, they realized that it was too late to stop and that more injuries could occur to the passengers (come on people, find a seat and sit down, standing doesn't get you to Alewife any sooner) if the emergency brakes were applied.
If the driver didn't see the person I'd have to wonder why. The track is straight where he was hit. One reason is that at the point the train is going right into the sun making it hard to see. He might have seen him and he stumbled unexpectedly onto the tracks. Or possibly he was distracted - not by cell phones or texting, but by the people in the cab with the driver where conversations are common.
Even if the driver did see the pedestrian
and didn't sound a horn or whistle, this is a protected crossing with gates, flashing lights, and bells. The pedestrian shouldn't have crossed the tracks here if any of those devices were working.
Also, it takes much longer to suddenly brake a train from full speed than it does for a pedestrian to wander onto the tracks.