Rant #2,046: Last Train To Nowheresville

I am sure you have read about the horrific Amtrak train derailment in Washington State.

Multiple injuries--and six casualties--have been reported, and investigators are checking to see if excessive speed was the cause of this terrible accident.

Whenever I hear about a train derailment, I cringe, not only because of the blatant horribleness of such an occurrence--you are leaving the "driving" to someone else, and that person has failed you--but also because of my own experience in a train derailment.

I have told this story many times, but I am going to tell it again, because it is pertinent to the current situation on the rails in Washington.

It was 1980, I think it was in the late winter or early spring, I just don't remember that point exactly, but everything else about this incident remains vivid in my mind.

I was coming home from work, my first real job after college graduation, where I worked for a printer in midtown Manhattan.

I absolutely hated this job. It paid me all of $180 a week, but it was a job, and it took me several months after graduation to find it.

I knew I wouldn't be in the job for more than two or three years, simply because I had decided to go to graduate school and pursue education as a goal.

Anyway, it was just another day at work, nothing stood out, and at the end of the workday, I left work, took the subway about two stops to Penn Station, and waited for my train to take me home.

I always sat in the back car, and I generally got the same seat each day, in the tail end of that car pretty much in the middle, by the window.

I had my newspaper, and I had my mini-TV, and those things kept me occupied if I wanted to use them. If not, I just stared out the window, made sure I saw my old neighborhood--Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens--out the window at the Locust Manor stop, and whiled away the more than an hour it took to get to my home stop.

As I said, it was a normal day for me, the end of a regular day when I entered the car and sat down in my usual spot.

It was a direct train, so it made maybe one or two stops, and that was it, so I settled into my seat, and again, I don't remember if I read the newspaper, watched the TV, or simply stared out the window, but as we were approaching the Jamaica station, I was staring out the window.

We did not stop at the raised platform in Jamaica, so the train buzzed through that station, but as we were moving through the platform area, I heard a large "pop," and the car I was in was moving sideways, and I saw Jamaica Avenue moving closer and closer to me.

This lasted a very few seconds, and we would have gone over the side--evidently, the engineer in the front had no idea we were off the track--if not for the vigilance of this little, short guy who sat a few rows from me.

This guy--who I kind of remembered from high school, but I did not know his name--got out of his seat, jumped up, and hit the alarm on the ceiling, literally just as we were about to go over the side right after the platform.

The train stopped, and we were all saved.

We were led off the train, and a few people stayed around to talk to reporters, who had rushed to the scene, including one from the New York Daily News, where we were a page one story the next day.

Me, I waited for the next train, took it home, and vowed that this was my warning from God never to work in Manhattan again, a vow I broke several years later for a short time as a freelancer but one that I have basically kept to this very day, where I am looking for a job just about anywhere, including in Manhattan.

Anyway, when the train was creeping closer to Jamaica Avenue, I have to say that my life was coming out before me. You hear stories that people tell about facing death in an instant, and how their life unfolds out to them once they realize what is happening, and let me tell you, it is the truth.

In a flash, I thought about my family, my old neighborhood, and probably several other things that were allotted milliseconds in my mind during the few seconds that this took place in.

It is eerie, but it is true.

I can only wonder what people going down in a plane see--and feel-when they realize what is happening, and it is something I never want anyone to experience, myself included.

So again, whenever I hear about a train wreck, a derailment, or some other train mishap, I think about that day, coming on 40 years ago, when I thought that this was it for me.

It is a feeling I carry with me to this day, and even after another horrific accident--one in my car--that happened to myself and my family a few years back, I carry both of these things with me, and will to the day I leave this earth ... naturally.