Rant #1,764: Train Wreck

The recent train catastrophe in Hoboken, New Jersey, was another horrible episode in a long line of such episodes that have hit our nation's rail lines.

Many injuries and one death came from this tragedy. The woman who was killed wasn't even on the train; she was on the train platform, and when the train veered off, she was a goner.

This shouldn't be happening, not in this day and age of electronics checks and balances, but it happens, and it happens way too frequently.

The black boxes pulled from the train should tell the whole story, but one of the black boxes did not work correctly, and is useless.

Here's hoping that the second black box gives investigators everything they need to piece together what happened, and why.

Whenever I hear about such an event, I have to flash back to what happened to me more than 30 years ago.

It was a life changer for me, and while it wasn't as devastating as the recent train wreck in question was, it was bad enough.

It was in 1980, I believe. I was in 23 or so, working in Manhattan at a job that I didn't like at all.

It was another workday wasted, and I was coming home on the Long Island Railroad train that I always took home if I could squeeze onto it.

It was the old days of the bar cars and the smoking cars, and I tried to avoid those cars at all costs, because they reeked of cigarettes and beer and sweat and drunkenness.

I was lucky that day, getting my seat in a regular car, and we were whisked away, as we normally were, hoping to get home by slightly after 6 pm.

In other words, this was a day like any other day I worked in Manhattan. Nothing unusual was going on that day, nothing to lead me to think that anything untoward was going to happen.

Once we got to Jamaica, it became a local train, with stops in a variety of municipalities in Nassau County on Long Island, including Bellmore, Merrick, Wantagh, Seaford, Massapequa, and then my stop, Massapequa Park.

We bypassed Jamaica--the main stop in Queens for the Long Island Railroad--but sitting in the back car, something was funny.

We heard some grinding and then we heard some other roughness, and all of a sudden, as we pulled out of Jamaica--my old stomping grounds, as I grew up in nearby Rochdale Village--it was clear that our car was off the tracks, and the engineer up front did not know it.

We veered off the tracks, and I saw Jamaica Avenue come into view. We were going over the side!

If not for the courage of a passenger--a short guy I went to school with who had the wherewithal to jump up and hit the emergency button as all of this was happening, I still have no idea how he had the composure to do this--we would have actually tumbled over the side, and I might not be here now.

We stopped right before going over the side, and we all progressed off the train, waiting hours for another train to come our way and take us home.

Yes, another day at the salt mine, so to speak.

I remember that as this was happening, it was almost an involuntary thing, my mind wandered through my life. In a second, I saw my family, my friends, things I had done and experienced ... it was frightening, because you don't purposely think about it, but when such danger looms, it just happens.

Happily, nothing happened, but it could have.

It was right then and there that I decided that working in Manhattan was not for me, and I vowed never to do it again (I was going to graduate school, and I hoped to secure a teaching job on Long Island, one which never came, but I didn't work again in Manhattan until the 1990s, when I worked there briefly for a woman who ended up stealing my money--another story for another time, and another reason not to work in Manhattan ever again.)

And that was more than 30 years ago.

Today, with advanced technology, you would think that these things wouldn't happen, but they do.

Do they have to do with mechanical error, human error, or a combination of the two?

Who knows, and hopefully, they will find out what caused the latest catastrophe.

It shouldn't happen, but it does, and the question is, why?

I don't know why my event happened, I don't know why the latest event happened, but having been through one such catastrophe in my life on a train, I think that every time I board a train, I think back to that one early evening, where the furthest thought from my brain was a derailment.

But it can happen, and it did back then and it did just a few days ago.