A pedestrian apparently absorbed in a cell phone call was struck and killed by an Amtrak train in San Leandro today after he walked around a lowered crossing gate and onto the tracks, authorities said. The victim, a man who was not immediately identified, was struck at 12:30 p.m. by a northbound Capitol Corridor train at the Alvarado Street crossing, about 8 miles south of the Oakland station, Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham said. None of the 20 passengers or crew aboard the train was injured. That train and two others were delayed and another Capitol Corridor train was cancelled, Graham said. Crew members aboard the Sacramento-bound train told authorities they saw the victim talking on the cell phone before he was struck, Graham said. The warning lights and gates at the crossing were functioning properly, she added.
One down, approximately 92.3 million to go.
I would like to have heard from the person on the other end of the phone conversation. What were the dumbasses last words? Was it like one of those cell phone commercials where the call gets dropped and the guy on the other line goes silent in the middle of the conversation? Or was the last word AAAAHHHH!thump.
What ? The stupid train engineer didn’t see the pedestrian? I want to own that engineer.
As soon as I saw the headline, I wondered how long it would be until someone cried “SPELLING ERROR.” Angel, you spelling bastard, you didn’t let me down. The very first post. WOW. Good one.
So, was the cell phone damaged? How many bars did he have? Was he roaming. Will AT&T still charge him for the call? If he used a Razor, would he only have had a “close shave”?
Trains lock all the wheels when they try an emergency stop. That puts a flat spot on all of them.
A train is not going to travel very fast without shaking the s**t out of the train and the tracks. Imagine a jack hammer that weighs hundreds of tons.
Another thing is that they probably had to wait until the crowd thinned before taking a fire hose to the train and the track area. Hosing down the moron’s remains would mean other morons scream about “insensitivity” and other BS.
They bury this guy with the cell phone crushed to the side of his head. Verizon calls during the wake and wants to know where the hell the payment is. All of the Verizon network guys are in the church including the guy dangling from a line in the rafters.
#35, Mister Panty Shield,
Love it.
Great image of the service too.
Is death a legal way to break an iron-clad AT&T/Verizon contract? Or will his heirs have to pay an early “termination” fee?
1. Amtrak and the passengers should sue the guy’s estate for the delay.
2. Train wheels often do not lock up even on emergency braking. This is particularly true of modern passenger equipment. A lot depends on the train speed, condition of the tracks, etc. I’ve been on a San Diego train when it went into emergency at 90mph, and other than the fact that we were obviously slowing down, it was very hard to tell. Another passenger who was an Amtrak employee knew in an instant that we were in emergency braking, but most of us did not.
3. Unfortunately, whenever you hit someone these days, you can’t just plow ahead. You have to wait for “investigators.” My preference in this case would have been to not use the brakes at all.
At least it may have given them a chance to hose the blood off the locomotive. :).
It warms my heart every time I read a story about someone gabbing on a cell phone getting run over due to a lack of attention. Cars, trucks, buses, trains and cyclists; kill every f*cking asswipe crossing your path while absorbed on their cell phone. The world will be a much better place.
Cars stop faster if the tires do NOT break traction, sounds like they changed the brakes on modern trains to match. Smart.
Train companies had to either scrap the flatted wheels or turn them on lathes. I just bet that cost a heck of a lot of money.
“Cars stalling on a train track”, I haven’t figured out that one, either. The people talking about that make it sound like tracks make a car motor quit running.
Suicide, more likely, or the car got off the pavement so the tires were trapped?
No, Phillep.
Speaking as someone who knows maybe one or two tiny things about cars, and particularly vehicle dynamics, you are in error.
The shortest stopping distance on a dry surface is achieved when all four wheels are locked up. However, at any appreciable speed, that will flat-spot the tires and ruin them. ABS systems, which keep the wheels rotating just short of locking up, only sacrifice a very few feet over full lockup, and make possible maximum braking on low-traction surfaces, where lockup would cause loss of vehicle control. So a few additional feet to stop on dry pavement is a no-brainer tradeoff for not destroying your tires and much better wet-pavement braking. But that still doesn’t mean that 4-wheel lockup doesn’t maximize braking, because it does. Physics 101.
Hello, Kitty! I didn’t know that about 4-wheel lockup. Very informational. I was never very good in physics class.
All I can say is that I hope you’re not the one responsible for all these drive-by postings by “mister” this and “mister” that. Very tacky, whoever is to blame. I’m sure the other real “mister” (Mister Fusion) would agree.
Mister Catshit is someone else – but I like the name! Don’t get your panties in wad Mustard.
#41 I think you’re wrong. If I remember well, there is this thing called friction coeficient or something along those lines. It tells you about the initial amount of force needed to displace an object aganist a surface. The amount of force needed to start movement on an object is bigger than the force needed to keep it moving.
When you lock-up a tire, you break such coeficent and the amount of force needed to keep the object in movement (against the surface) is lees than the initial amount needed to start moving (your car’s inertia). ABS prevents you from going over this threshold. Once you’ve gone over, your tires are skidding, instead of being properly “attached” to the ground.
Or so I think.
I agree.
Well, as with most things in this world, it’s a little more involved than it appears at first, and to be strictly accurate, I would have gone farther and specified typical modern tires. As sticky as most general-purpose or all-weather tires are today, locking them up creates a coefficient of friction than the fiberglass-belted bias-ply tires of years ago. So, yes, with tires of lower adhesion, locking them up would produce longer stopping distances than modulating them to the point just short of lockup; but today the steel-belted, radial-ply tire is the universal standard for passenger cars, current rubber compounds are way stickier than those of even 10 or 15 years ago, and today’s average tire has a much larger contact patch than the skinny jobs of my youth – so they will bring you to a shorter stop when locked, but they will also be utterly destroyed in the process. The tread is literally ground off of the carcass.
So actually it’s one of those yes-and-no thingies… and don’t ask me about trains. WTF does a cat know about trains?
You mean you’re not litterbox ‘trained?’
Only 2 of my heads know to use the head.
You’d think the other person on the phone would have said “Hey, I think I hear a train com…. oh, never mind.”
“Can you hear me now?”
RETRACTION
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa, in fact.
Seems that with the complacency of old age, I’ve been coasting a while on ill-informed automotive scuttlebutt and lore, not science. My bad, fo’ sho’.
No, yours truly has been talkin’ out his ass. I was curious enough to wonder about that slip factor and if it really made sense for it to continue to rise after the tire breaks it’s connection to the road’s surface.
Nope. Even with the stickiest tires, max braking – or acceleration – comes with somewhere between 10 and 20% slippage. Past that point AND all the way to total wheel lockup, braking force diminishes.
Oops. If anyone’s still interested in this off-topic topic, then you might enjoy this.
NOW I remember why I’m not a physicist. You guys are right, and I’m full o’ shit on this one. I’m also gonna have to review some of the other driving lore I’ve absorbed over the years. A wee dose of intellectual humility is in order, so for now I better stick a little closer to mine own specialties and keep speculation in other fields to a minimum, thereby immunizing myself from foot-in-mouth disease.
• • • • •
OK, lunch break’s over, everybody. Back on your heads. 😉
#4 & #9
I’m a spelling fan and I find the word “moran” as obnoxious as netspeak.
#51,
No, yours truly has been talkin’ out his ass.
OH NO !!! Mister THC is got Republicanitis !!! I hope you don’t get an urge to run for President.
OK, lunch break’s over, …
One of my all time favorite jokes.
Log truck drivers I know say they throw the truck in reverse if they want to stop fast, but that probably only works on gravel roads. I’ve wanted to see what happens when they do that – uhm, from a distance, and off to one side.
Yeah, on gravel and dirt, you lock ’em up and the stuff builds up ahead of your tires – and it does stop you shorter. This is something I know firsthand…! (No, not w/ a log truck, though…)
#54, Mister Phillep,
I would think that could lead to a jack knife if pulling a trailer. If anything, you want the trailer to have more braking than the truck / tractor. But hey, I’m noted more for my looks than my brains about such things.
Now that some time has passed, it should be notied that this was a 16-year-old kid. As silly as the story is, it’s still a tragedy. His parents are not wealthy and have several other children to feed. A fund has been set up at his high school to raise enough money to help his parents to bury him.
Yes, this is a prime candidate for the Darwin Award, but as this story is local to me, I have to look at it from a parent’s viewpoint. Don’t get your kid a cellphone unless you have taught them how to use it properly and responsibly.
Response to Comment #32:
You, sir, are an idiot. A train going that fast takes about 3/4 of a mile to fully stop, and the engineers don’t put the emergency brake on until they actually hit the person, because if the throw the train into emergency and don’t end up hitting someone, they will commit a minor operational error, which is sort of like a point on your driving record, too many and your licence will be revoked.
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