March 23, 2008
A Caltrain Death, From Inside The Train
We were stuffing our stuff into a backpack as the train left 22nd Street at 4:30 this afternoon when the hissing started and the train slowed. All of the people in the bike car stirred; something had happened. The train stopped in the middle of the tunnel, and the conductor came over the PA. He sounded tense. "There is an emergency situation," he said. "We'll be delayed here for some time. Please be patient."
A minute later, he came on again. "Ladies and gentlemen, there has been a fatality. This train must stay here until emergency crews arrive. We will be exiting the tunnel, and then we will be holding. Please be patient."
So we waited, and the train pulled out of the tunnel, and we sat just south of 16th street for five minutes, then ten. An older man, chubby with a scruffy beard and battered baseball hat, started to yell.
"Get me the fuck off of this train!" he yelled. "I have to get off this train because I have a pain appointment. Get me off this train!" He accosted the conductor, who asked him to sit back down and, politely, to shut up. The guy stayed calm for a minute, then started yelling again.
He must have set off the teenaged girl with the spiked belt, who ran to the front compartments and hammered on the door until the conductor opened it, obviously tired, his radio going a mile per minute.
"I have to get off this fucking train!" she shouted. "Look, there's a street right there and I can just walk, and I have to get off the train right now! Please, let me off the train!" The old guy joined in, heckling her and swearing to sue Caltrain, the conductor, and anyone else who got in the way of his medical marijuana appointment.
"I have AIDS and I'm going to die in three months," he said. "I have to get up to get my marijuana before the pot club closes."
The conductor went back to the doors and came over the PA again.
"Everyone, please be patient," he said. "There is a reserve crew coming with another train - it has left 4th and King and is on the way. When it gets here, we will transfer you to that train, but this train has to stay at the scene of the incident."
The old man started swearing again. The teenager stayed quiet. After a few minutes, the other train pulled alongside, and our train began to exit out the bike car door. The conductor stayed at the bottom, helping with luggage, swinging children down the high stair, holding our bikes for us as we stepped down.
"Thanks, man," we said. We were the second-to-last off the train.
"No problem," he said. Beads of sweat were dripping off of his shaved head. Seven or eight bikers were gathered around another Caltrain employee.
"We can't really get you on the bike car," he said. "Are you guys ok to just walk up to Sixteenth and bike from there?"
To a cycle, we all were. There was no sign of blood or anything on the front of our train.
The ride home was beautiful - the sun shined through clean air. A smell of grilled burgers and the thrum of conversation came out of Zeitgeist. Two men walked arm in arm down Duboce as we rode up; one in shorts and sandals, the other in a bunny suit. The last of the cyclists from Caltrain split off near the Market Street Safeway, where two guys with shopping carts waited patiently with carts full of cans. We were an hour late, but gloriously, sweatily, happily alive.
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so what happened, basically? someone got ran over or someone died of a heat stroke?
Excellent story!
1)
At first, it sounds like somebody was hiding in the tunnel that goes south from 16th up to the 22nd Street station. There's *no* room for a person to hide in that tunnel (and no clearance between the side of the train and the side of the tunnel closest to the train). My guess is that whoever got whacked chose the wrong side of the tunnel to move to.
Or, actually now that I think about it, it's a likely suicide by somebody jumping in front of the train from the station (because every weekend train stops at the 22nd street station, and the train driver will be looking down the tunnel while s/he waits to move and the only way anyone will get run over is if they jumped right in front of the moving thing).
Suicides are hell upon those train personnel.
2)
People get far too wound up when taking public transit. Just take it easy. If you gotta be somewhere by a specific time, leave early. Or drive.
Hey Malcove,
I've never been on the train that hit someone. I have frequently been one or two trains behind and the delays can seem endless. The vast majority of the time people are pretty somber and quiet when it is announced that something like this has happened. The worst case I experienced was a nearly 3 hour delay after a particularly brutal suicide right at Mountain View station. People on my train were frustrated but were not taking it out on the crew. Hell, I was traumatized a bit when I we finally pulled into Mountain View and they were still clearing the scene. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the crew on the train that was involved, or the passengers at Mountain View who were waiting.
To your other point, the answer to problems caused by transit delays always seems to be to leave earlier or to drive. I take transit most of the time (especially since my car was stolen the other day). Most of the time, I do leave plenty of cushion but sometimes there is no additional time in the schedule. I still have 8 hours plus of work to do, whether the train runs on time or not. Weekend trains only run once an hour and I can't always leave a whole hour earlier "just in case." So please realize that those of us on transit do depend on some degree of reliability as we attempt to function in today's world.
Ouch!
I saw Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" this weekend. Very graphic scenes of being hit by a train.
i was once on a commuter train traveling from the north shore into boston that had a suicide. someone jumped in the middle of train, basically right underneath where i was sitting. i couldn't see anything but the faces of the medical crew that showed up... and they were awful expressions. we had to sit there and wait on the car for a few minutes right above where we knew the "incident" had happened until another train pulled up alongside on the other side to take us on our way. it was one of the worst experiences ever...
makfan - Caltrain is generally very reliable as you well know, if there is a fatality it must be investigated because it could very well be a *homicide* not a suicide. Moving the train away before the investigation is basically disturbing a crime scene.
It sucks. Strangely if there is a fatality on Caltrain, everyone yells at Caltrain. But when a tanker truck burns up the Macarthur Maze or Melts 101 in Redwood City, everyone gets pissed at the driver, not Caltrans.
hey redseca2....
thanks for spoiling it..
Loving the first person reporting here. This is one of the kinds of blogging I like best.
Just to make it clear - the train hit someone. The Chron has a small story here.
I agree with the other comments - a very well told story.
This is why Caltrain needs to fence every inch of the tracks. It won't prevent the suicides, but it will prevent a lot of the accidents.
Interesting comment by the sole commenter on the SF Gate story:
"This person should not be called a pedestrian as that is not a pedestrian tunnel. That woman was a trespasser and should be called that. Whether this was "suicide by train" or just plain stupidity remains to be seen."
We at CBS 5 avoid using the term "trespasser" to identify those hit by mass transit vehicles because it has not been determined whether someone was trespassing or whether or not BART, Caltrain or MUNI is at fault. MUNI will almost always refer the injured or dead parties as "trespassers," but that is bureaucratic word choices that should not be automatically adopted by the press. I find it interesting that the commenter as adamant about identifying the dead woman as such.
I think Caltrain averages about a dozen fatalities a year and most of those are suicides so the fence isn't going to help much.
I've been on several trains that have either hit people or being stopped because the prior train did. While Caltrain is generally reliable, some days you are screwed.
I'm rather disappointed with Caltrain's rather poor protocol in dealing with fatalities. They won't let people off the train because of liability issues, and they won't say what happened even though you might be able to surf the 'net on your smartphone and find out what happened (or call a friend).
Even something like a garden-variety delay seems to stump Caltrain. They won't announce late trains until they are really late (like twenty minutes), and then they say something like "The train is running late" (yeah, duh) through the platform PA. Then the conductors won't say which train it is; you need to look at the identifying number on the first car as the train rolls into the station. If you miss it, it's easy to hop onto the wrong baby bullet/limited service express.
In this case, I thought Caltrain did a fantastic job. Our total wait time was about forty minutes, and they did an announcement when we stopped, and another when we moved out of the tunnel, announcing the death.
Another ten minutes or so and the conductor announced that a rescue train was coming, and another fifteen or so for it to get to us. They spun up a random train on a weekend in less than half an hour. That's pretty good. And, the conductor was a model of professionalism, courtesy, and toughness in the face of two very angry, irrational passengers.
And thanks for the kudos, everyone. Writing that post was not fun.
Thanks, Dan. Glad I wasn't there, frankly.
I never get mad at Caltrain/BART/Muni when this happens. I just want people to understand that I can't always allow extra time when I take transit. We are constantly told to allow more time but we all get the same 24 hours per day. Riding transit, unfortunately, already sucks up a chunk of the day because it is so freaking inefficient in this country even without collisions and breakdowns mucking up the works.
I'm sure many others are equally time crunched. I try to keep my emotions to myself in these situations, but I am very likely to be frustrated or upset about missing an appointment, a Sharks game, dinner with friends or two hours of work that has to be made up some how. Too bad those two idiots couldn't keep themselves in control in a bad situation. That's all.
I'm surprised to hear that Caltrain was actually forthcoming in disclosing information in this particular instance. In the past, this as certainly not been the case, so I am pleased to hear that they are improving their disaster response protocol.
The passengers of this train were probably lucky that the replacement engineer lived in the correct town. I've been on trains that were stuck for a couple of hours because the backup person lived at the wrong end of the line (e.g., South Bay engineer needs to drive to SF trainyard to replace a southbound train).
Caltrain still has much work to do on the late train announcements, including using those fancy electronic signage as well as on-board announcements.
I will agree that Caltrain could get a lot of bang for very little money by improving their electronic signage. At this point they must all display the same message, they cannot be customized by location - it is silly that they can't have a "NEXT TRAIN in X MINUTES" and specific delay information.
Seems to me it's not very far beyond a Senior class project for a Stanford CS Student's capabilities. Definitely cheaper than rebuilding sets of tracks or platforms, and of great value to customers.
About all the signs do is say that train xxx left somewhere y minutes late. That helps a little, but if you aren't taking that particular train you have to guess whether your train is impacted by the delays or not.
What is really bad is that sometimes the trains get out of order. I once helped a bunch of people get off train 285 because they didn't realize that it was ahead of train 383. Train 285 does not stop at Millbrae and they were going to the airport.