Amtrak train kills teen

I was on this train, Amtrak 516, Portland to Bellingham, yesterday. So I'm gonna post (ok ok, rant...) about this article and a little about the incident itself.

From the article:"Passengers aboard the train were not even aware of what had happened."

Totally untrue. I felt a thump, and we immediately began to slow to a stop. As the train is just about stopped, the conductor announces "Centralia" over the speakers as if we were arriving at the platform. In retrospect this was likely done by the conductor in a complete state of shock since we were still a mile away from Centralia's passenger platform.

Then we saw the conductor and someone else running fast back to the rear of the train. We sat there for a bit. A police car arrived. An announcement was made shortly after the impact that we had hit a pedestrian.

I had the window seat, and the old man sitting next to me kept fidgeting and looking as to how to lean over me to try to gawk out the window. No way am I gonna let this guy invade my personal space just to rubberneck at some potentially gory scene. He finally just lunged across my lap straining to see towards the back of the train, for which he got a snort and my icy glare of hate. He didn't do it again, and eventually wandered the car a bit.

We got updates about every 10-15 minutes, mostly with "we're still waiting for investigators to finish before we can be cleared to leave" message. About an hour in, we were informed that the coroner had arrived, so at that point, any passengers that were "not even aware of what had happened" probably numbered about, oh lets say, zero. (This story is slightly more accurate in terms of the people on the train.)

Word had obviously spread at that point as townsfolk began arriving at the scene. Some holding their foreheads, some standing agape with their hands over their mouths.

The things we did not know is the age or gender of the pedestrian, that there was a bicycle involved or the circumstances of how they had gotten into the path of the train. Knowing what I know now, I suspect the bicycle was the thump I heard and felt, since I was in the second to the last car.

There were media camera crews waiting on the platform in Seattle to interview passengers from the first and second cars coming off the train. I'm happy to just be off the train at this point. Rob was supposed to pick me up at the station in Seattle so I could hang out at the dress rehearsal for tonight's Mahler Festival concert, but obviously that didn't happen. I figured I would just walk the five miles from King Street Station to UW thnking it shouldn't take that long. Wrong wrong wrong. The route to walk it is 4 miles of uphill and one mile of flat or downhill. I got there at 10pm, just as dress rehearsal finshed and Rob was calling me to find out where I was. sigh.

Another gem from the article: Many neighbors say it is time for the railroad to lower the speed limit of trains passing through the residential area, so that no one else has to die there.

No disrespect to the kid or his family, I feel bad for them. But to these neighbors? Give me a fucking break. He both saw and heard the train, he tried to beat the train and he lost. I'm sick and tired of people blaming or expecting other people to do something when shit happens. How about some personal fucking accoutability? This kid exercised poor judgement, suffering the delusion (sadly like most teenagers do) that he was invincible and that death only happens to other people. But you just can't protect everyone from themselves. You can't save everyone.