Readers Share Own Stories of Death on the Tracks

A front-page article last week by our colleague Matt Flegenheimer about subway operators whose trains fatally struck people drew nearly 200 comments. Some called for installing sliding barriers on the platforms, a proposal that transit officials said would be “both expensive and extremely challenging,” though not out of the question. Some readers wondered why trains did not simply slow down sooner, even if it meant delaying commutes.

But many readers chose to share their own stories, or those of loved ones, of what it felt like to bear witness to â€" and then live with - a violent and seemingly unstoppable death. Here is a selection of comments, some of them fairly graphic:

In 1993, I was in the front car of a train pulling into Penn Station that hit and killed a blind woman. She had fallen onto the tracks and there wasn't enough time for the train to stop.

Everything that happened in the seconds before the accident is frozen in my memory forever. The cries from people on the platform, their arms waving to warn the motorman, the faces of my fellow passengers who stayed turned toward the platform, the jerk of the train, and that horrible sound. My heart goes out to the M.T.A. employees who unwittingly become part of such tragedies.
- Susan, UWS

I am a survivor of an attempted “suicide by train.” In December 2010, I attempted to kill myself at the Hollywood/Vine station of the Los Angeles Metro. I had planned the suicide for months, and I thought there was no way I could survive the attempt. As I was planning, I took into account my family, my friends, my landlord, my neighbors, everybody I could think of. Everybody but the Metro train operator. I cannot imagine the anguish that I must have caused that person! As I jumped before the train entering the station, I looked right into the operator's eyes, something I'm told is nearly universal in suicide attempts. I cannot fathom how that must have felt to the person who was hopelessly about to hit me in that tunnel. I have spoken to bus drivers who refused to transfer to the subway, because of that hopelessness. The bus driver can brake and steer, but the subway operator can only brake, knowing that the impact is inevitable.

My permanent injuries have been limited to the loss of an eye, some facial disfiguration, and some slight mobility issues on my left side. Thank God, I am recovering from the alcoholism that led to the hopelessness I felt at that time. I have been sober nearly two years, now. I'm doing O.K. I can only hope that the poor soul who hit me that December day is doing as well.
- Ron Iseli, Los Angeles, CA

I was a train driver on the London Underground for over 31 years. On the 4th day after I qualified as a driver, a boy of about 19 jumped under my train. Just before he jumped, I had this feeling that he was going to jump. I dropped the dead man's handle, the train started to slow and then I saw him jump. I heard the thud as the front of the train hit him. When I got out and looked under the train, he was lying unconscious across the tracks but the train had not gone over him. He survived with minor injuries. Cut a long story short, sometimes in my dreams, I still see that boy jumping in slow motion in front of my train. This took place in 1978! After that incident, I was involved in dealing with 3 more suicides. We were given 3 days to recover from the ordeal and then expected to get on with it. We got no compensation, no one had heard of counseling. It took me years to get back to some sort of normality, but at work, we had to have this macho facade, in the canteen we had to behave as if the “one under” (as we called it in those days) hadn't affected us at all.
â€"didar, Brisbane

It's a wonder there is not an early warning system from the platform to alert a train if a person has fallen. If the technology does not already exist it could not be very difficult to create.
â€"Mrs Mandelbaum, New Haven

With friends at Astor Station years ago, heard a boom as we walked down the curved platform. In raced the train with a woman “jumper” attached at front, a rag doll-ball rolling with the curve, spiraling along the side of the train, flailing, down impossibly, into the small gap between that train and that platform. And then she disappeared.

For the next six months I was afraid of cars, trucks, bikes, trains… anything that moved. People (myself included) take for granted that this behemoth called the subway train can be controlled.
â€" Kevinizon, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Trains can be scheduled to enter the station at a crawl. This would add more time to commutes, but perhaps we are a little too interested in getting to work on time to advocate for this solution. Another solution is to create public service ads telling people what to do if they fall onto the tracks. We already have them about what to do if the train is stopped in between stations, or if we see something suspicious.
â€" Neil, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Many years ago I was a passenger on a train that hit someone. I will never forget hearing the motorman say, “We have a jumper.” Those words almost sounded callous until the motorman walked through the train and I saw the look on his face. All I could think was that he had to live with this. The passengers had to walk forward to exit the train and then past the victim, who someone said was still alive (I could not look). My day was ruined; I'm guessing it was a lot worse for that poor motorman.
â€" ddempsey1, N.Y.C.

I am a train operator for the D-line for New York City Transit. I had one person lay down in front of my train wor king the Q one night while entering the Kings Highway station southbound. When I saw the man, my heart just entered my mouth. I couldn't even get the strength to turn the key to open the door to climb down to see if the person was all right. I couldn't even draw the breath to speak on the radio. I had my conductor talk to control center for me. Fortunately the man survived, was in one piece and barely a scratch. Weirdly enough, there was another 12-9 in Astoria within the same hour. Another time last summer, I pulled into 34th Street and somebody came to my window to report someone that fell onto the tracks across the platform on the F local track. I rushed to take a look and saw a man frying to death on the 3rd rail. I went back to my cab and reported it. I was freaked out for days. It somehow wound up on YouTube and I got to watch it. Somehow it made me feel a little peace knowing that it was already too late when I got there and there was nothing I could do. The man was d runk, took off his shirt and laid down across the rails with wet hair against the third rail. Probably a suicide. These things happen so much and rarely catch media attention.
â€" banjfoxx007, New York

This is an old, old, very sad story. My late father was a motorman for nearly 40 years, from the '30s to the '60s, with time off for the war. All the “old-timers” had similar stories. My father once told me that over the course of his working life he “had killed” a total of 5 people. They had all jumped in front of his train. But think about that phrase: he felt that he had killed them. The last suicide occurred the day before Thanksgiving in 1965, and I will never forget how he looked when he came home that night. His face was as gray as concrete. He sat in his place at the kitchen table, staring, saying nothing, his 17-year-old daughter pleading, “Daddy, Daddy, please, it wasn't your fault.” He finally spoke, and said, “I saw him jump, but I couldn't stop. I tried to stop, but there wasn't enough time. His wife was there. I saw her on the platform. She kept saying, ‘He didn't have to do that.' I wanted to talk to her, but the supervisor wouldn't let me.”
â€" patsy47, Bronx, N.Y.

I once saw a man fall into the subway tracks in Boston, and I was the only one in the station who saw him faint. Fortunately, Boston has a train approaching announcement system, and I eventually rounded enough fellow passengers willing and not afraid to jump off the elevated platform and drag him out. Boston subways are also nowhere as crowded, and the trains arrive in the station reasonably slow. I visited N.Y.C. the weekend after this incident, and I became hypersensitive and agoraphobic in N.Y.'s subway system. The trains in N.Y.C. arrive at the station incredibly fast, the platforms are narrower, and the crowding is ridiculous. Sometimes I feel like I'm tightrope walking along the yellow line. Surely, if the city can afford to revamp Times Square and add disability ramps, they can consider diverting revenue to more safety measures.
â€" ShareNCare, Boston