Is This Forum Really Worth The Time and Effort?

So if a carload of teens trys to go around downed gates and flashing lights and gets killed etc we are supposed to feel sorry for them? How about the one where the mother in a mini van floored it in a parking lot to try and get ahead of a freight train and got hit not once but twice by 2 trains killing her and her children.

Ryan said:

If not the tresspassers, who else could possibly be to blame?

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Not every death requires blame to be placed. Dieing doesn't always require malice or intent or the participation of a moron. Sometimes people just die. Even otherwise intelligent people who were simply at the wrong place at the wrong time or made a bad decision. Your need to immediately assign blame even before knowing the facts is a trait I don't share. Not every question has a simple and obvious answer.

Ryan said:

Oddly enough, I don't see Jim saying that anywhere. Perhaps you'd be willing to quit making stuff up and putting it in other people's posts?

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I didn't make anything up or put words in anyone's mouth. I simply asked a question. If every death isn't identical then how can one person's view of a completely unrelated event "sum up" what happened here?

I've been reviewing information on this every day since it happened and while no information has been forthcoming about why they were there, the general concensus of readers and Law Enforcement seems to be that they were taggers.

I feel bad for them and can't imagine what they were feeling as this whole thing unfolded. On the other hand, taggers seem to feel justified in roaming all over railroad property and tagging everything in sight, just because a train did not pass thorugh yesterday does not mean it will not pass through today.

I am amazed at how brazen they are in Chicago. I see tags on buildings and in places where they have to have been standing on the tracks...now I'm seeing tags closer and closer to the mouths of all the local stations in the area. Again the only way to do it is that they had to be standing on or right next to the tracks. Is the thrill of tagging something or cutting across active rr tracks worth losing your life? It may have been a thought going through 3 peoples minds the other night as well as everyone else lately.

daxomni said:

Not every death requires blame to be placed. Dieing doesn't always require malice or intent or the participation of a moron. Sometimes people just die.

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Agreed. Getting hit by a train isn't one of those circumstances.

daxomni said:

I didn't make anything up or put words in anyone's mouth. I simply asked a question. If every death isn't identical then how can one person's view of a completely unrelated event "sum up" what happened here?

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Yes, you did. This situation isn't "completely unrelated" to the one that Jay described, and nothing in Jim's post claimed that all deaths are identical. The question was loaded from the beginning.

Ryan said:

daxomni said:

Not every death requires blame to be placed. Dieing doesn't always require malice or intent or the participation of a moron. Sometimes people just die.

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Agreed. Getting hit by a train isn't one of those circumstances.

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Why not? We all make decisions that may be riskier than we realize when we make them. Not all of us are blessed with parents who are willing and able to teach us how to analyze and hedge against risk, even deadly serious risk. And then there's just everyday random life that sometimes screws us over. Strangers might give you bad directions that send you through a tunnel or over a bridge that was designed with no escape options. Maybe that means it's the fault of the people who directed you or perhaps the people who designed the tunnels and bridges with no reasonable escape options. Or maybe you simply misunderstood the directions or didn't notice or understand the safety measures provided. There are so many random things can result in death that aren't planned and don't serve as a reasonable guide as to what kind of people we were before we died. When people die it's impossible to get their half of the story, which means you're all the more likely to get it wrong if you act too quickly. That seems like such a simple premise to me that I'm surprised I'm even having to defend it.

Ryan said:

This situation isn't "completely unrelated" to the one that Jay described, and nothing in Jim's post claimed that all deaths are identical. The question was loaded from the beginning.

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It's unrelated in that it has none of the original participants from the first event and occurred at a completely different time and location. I don't see any reason to hold the engineers accountable, but neither do I consider them to be all seeing and all knowing, especially when it comes to events they were never part of. The way things work these days it will probably be a long time before we know enough to "sum up" any of this, and maybe we'll never know. That's just life.

daxomni said:

Maybe that means it's the fault of the people who directed you or perhaps the people who designed the tunnels and bridges with no reasonable escape options. Or maybe you simply misunderstood the directions or didn't notice or understand the safety measures provided.

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Nope. It's called personal responsibility. If you find yourself near railroad tracks, the only person responsible for making sure that you don't get hit by a train is you. The only exception that I see to that is passengers in a car that gets struck by a train, because the passengers didn't willingly put themselves in the path of a speeding locomotive.

Ryan said:

Nope. It's called personal responsibility. If you find yourself near railroad tracks, the only person responsible for making sure that you don't get hit by a train is you.

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I don't dispute that we all need to take responsibility for saving our own lives from obvious harm. I'm not asking that nobody be blamed so much as I'm asking that patience and due diligence be employed before assigning that blame. Unfortunately there have been enough threads on here for me to realize that no matter what happens or how little we know about it some folks on this forum will immediately jump to conclusions and blame whoever dies while mocking them for causing the engineer distress and slowing down the all important train passengers. Apparently that reactionary attitude bothers some folks who aren't part of the train cult, and I'm tempted to agree with them. Trains are pretty important to me, but endlessly blaming folks who have already paid the ultimate price seems rather pointless to me and in bad taste.

zepherdude said:

Ya know folks, I love trains, it is a great hobby, I like Amtrak and I like chatting about it with like minded people, knowing we have something in common. But today, I think we reached a real low here on Amtrak Unlimited. I read the bashing of three dead human beings because they had the nerve to be killed by a train while walking on the tracks and furthermore their stupidity caused the train to delay. Wow, how terrible for them! Shame on them!

The sarcasim reached a fever pitch when some **** got on and called them every name he could think of. Of course he was most pissed as their remains had to be scraped off the train and of course delayed the passengers. I am sorry but a life is a life, no matter how uninformed or careless it is used Why don't you take your loud mouth to schools and homeless centers and talk to people and explain why they should not walk on train tracks. Try education instead of bashing, talk to the homeless and tell them why they should not sleep on tracks. Talk to gangbangers and ask em why they draw graffiti under overpasses. Fix the problem instead of bashing dead humans. Ignorant or not, you have no right to judge them, that, my friend, is left to The Almighty.

So, I would just like everyone here to recount anytime in your life you walked on a train track and report for admonishment.

I am not coming back here, this was really enough for me guyz! So, dude you can bash me all you want, I don't care to listen to you. Lots more people are gonna die until you do something about it. After all, it is a free form. You now know my feelings.

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Chill, Bro: This forum is worth a lot of time and effort. There's no reason to get bent out of shape by one person's post.

Actually, I don't even think he was speaking literally. I think he was making a point that you might not have caught, since you don't know the guy.

Stick around. There's a lot more to be had by listening all the opinions, hints, and explanations rather than shoot yourself in the foot by booking just 'cuz you were offended by one guy's post. :hi:

A friend of mine works at the Chicago Metra offices. Even when there's a verifiable suicide (of the "someone lays down on the tracks" variety), somehow the Metra people catch the blame from the families. Now, I will grant that sometimes this is denial, and if it helps a bereaved family get through the roughest week or two of their lives to throw a bit of blame around then I won't begrudge them the help they need in coping.

That said, it isn't the railroad's fault unless something on their end failed. I know people are supposed to look both ways, but if the gates don't come down or something like that (particularly if the crossing is near a bend or other visual obstruction of some sort), then it's rather hard to assign total fault to them. But if everything was working and somebody still drives across the tracks or something like that? If there is fault to be assigned, it regrettably belongs with them much as in a tragic incident at my college, a kid who died diving into a shallow lake (that I think he'd jumped in before and it had been safe and he just hit a submerged rock that wasn't where it was supposed to be): Even if getting hurt wasn't part of the plan, the actions which led to it fall mostly or entirely upon the individual in question. To put this another way, just because someone is on the receiving end of an unfortunate circumstance does not automatically render them blameless.

guest_concerned said:

So according to some of these theories, it is "just life going on" when a parent or relative dies of cancer because he/she chose to smoke? Is it the person's fault or society's for promoting it? I guess it is wrong to mourn that then.... we are all "animals" huh?

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I don't know you, because you are a random guest who styles themselves to be concerned, apparently. If your family member dies, I doubt I'd care. Why? First, I'd probably never find out. Second, I don't know you and have no reason to out pour my emotional energy feeling sorry for somebody I don't know.

There are members on this board that I do know and, to some degree or another, like or dislike. If I know them, and something tragic happens to them, I'd feel sympathy for them. Even if their loved one died as an act of overt stupidity- it isn't the person I know's fault, and a loss is tragic to them irrespective. Even if it is one of the numerous members who I can't stand, I'd feel sorry for them- I'm not vindictive.

I don't know the family of the people who inadvertently killed themselves. As such I don't care how they feel. It means nothing to me. Does the emotional heart wrenching of family of a mouse you killed in a trap bother you? (And that, by the way, is murder.)

I've never lost a loved one to an act of their own idiocy. I couldn't even empathize. I have been on numerous trains that have killed people and destroyed road vehicles that crossed their path. I can empathize with that. I know, on a face/name remember-each-other-and-have-talked-privately basis, perhaps five dozen Amtrak conductors and engineers, and I don't even have a clue how many from other railroads. I know many that have been through that experience. I can empathize with the crew because I have seen it happen to crew I know.

So here's what I know. The family of people I don't know are suffering from a loss. I don't care because if I felt concerned for every family of people who died, I'd be in catatonic depression. Some people riding a train were delayed by the act of someone else's overt idiocy. I sympathize with them- I've been there. Crew members of that train had to suffer the emotional sledgehammer blow of dealing with that situation- I sympathize because I have seen just how hard it hurts, and who knows, I might even know the crew members on that train. Some idiots, from an act of either amazingly overt stupidity, or just plain Herculean carelessness, got themselves removed from the gene pool. Good riddance.

Oh, and lastly, some forum member doesn't have enough skin to ignore the ravings of an internet bum who has some (by other's apparent opinion) nutty perspective on the world around him- and consequently gets offended and wants to leave in grand fashion. It baffles me, but if you're that easily touched off...