Strictly speaking a mirror image would only reverse the image left to right. The siding would have appeared to her right instead of the left, but the train would still be on the track right in front of her, just shifting her to the other end of the ties. She was so close that there should have been no doubt she was on the same track, but we'll never know.

But in this case "mirror" means which way the camera is pointing; out the back of the phone (normal) or toward the face of the person looking at the screen (selfie mode). If she had the phone in the wrong mode she would have seen her own face, not the train, unless she turned around and pointed the phone to look over her shoulder, like the guy with the bike is doing.

There is one terrible thing about the drone video in this context. I do not see the woman move, even slightly, right through the moment of contact. She never flinches, never reacts, never seems even to realize what is there.

I think back to the autistic child who had to be removed from imminent contact on a previous excursion, or the fans at Harpers Ferry who did not hear the oncoming train. I wondered then what the outcome might have been had no one acted to get them out of harm's way. Now we have an example.

Maybe putting a little perspective on the situation, here in San Diego county, two people have been hit and killed by Amtrak trains within the last one week. One, probably a suicide, the engineer reported that the guy was laying face-down between the rails when he came into view. No details on the second one, other that it occurred near a station where commuter trains, not Amtrak, stop. Doesn't make it any easier on the train crew, but these things do happen fairly regularly.

Do you have any proof the youth in question (and we call it "youth" based only on stature) is an "autistic child"? Or that the people depicted at Harpers Ferry were "fans"??

There's an important point to my nitpickiness, if you're smart enough to see it:

Claiming "autism" or "fans" is a handy crutch, an "excuse" to rationalize the exceptionally stupid/careless/incredulous/jaw-dropping spectacles seen in said videos. In reality, this is what we're up against. Ordinary, everyday people being exactly this stupid/careless/etc.

You can cast your blame wherever you want--electronic devices, shortened attention spans caused by [cause du jour], our educational system, something in the water, contrails, whatever--but the "public" out there is getting collectively denser or stupider. Common sense is no longer so. Go talk to people who have to deal with the public at large for confirmation--park rangers, librarians, museum docents, police, etc.

I don't have an answer. And, more importantly, neither do the legal departments at UP, NS, Amtrak, etc.

I'm only providing enough reference for people on RyPN to remember the instances, or to find the relevant videos. Rather obviously, I'm not testifying about whether perceptions of spectrum behavior or propensity to foam have anything to do with endangerment, and frankly it is a bit silly to introduce those even as hypernitpickiness.

While I'd think it obvious I had no intention of tarring unsafe behavior as resulting from stereotyped kinds of attitude, I can go on record as saying I had no such intention, either for spectrum kids (I have one, before anyone starts harping on the subject before engaging their brain) or fans whether foaming or otherwise.

So true. In my twenty plus years of railroading, I have been involved in several train/streetcar vs. auto crashes and a couple of pedestrian strikes. You never forget those. The more you operate, the higher the probability that you will be involved in an incident. If none of them ends in an injury or fatality, you will be very lucky.

Steam locomotives present a special degree of risk by the nature of their design. The cylinder cocks are usually mounted in such a nature that they are not directly shielded from the possibility of being sheared off in an accident. Same goes for the steam appliance lines on the backhead. That's why (as far as steam locomotives are concerned), if a major impact is likely, it's better for the engine crew to unload from a moving locomotive than risk riding the accident out. The annals of railroad history are filled with accidents where the locomotive crew survived the initial accident, only to get cooked to death when they were entrapped in the cab.

Some of the newest cell phones (like mine) have amazing wide angle lens that are actually a REAL lens and not an electronic facsimile. When you use the wide angle lens it is truely hard to even find your intended target sometimes because the angle is so WIDE you loose perspective. They are maybe equal to a 18mm lens on a real (for example) Minolta SLR camera. If you remember using those deals they could indeed make you swimmy headed and loose your balance because they made you loose your perspective.

If our victim was using a camera and lens like that she may have lost her perspective to the curve of the lens. That might explain some things...but not really solve anything at all.

Something we all need to do is be more safety minded both in out actions and in our teaching. I know...like pouring water down a gopher hole but...we gotta do it.

T7

Perhaps that could lead to an answer.

As we know, there really is no way to make anything foolproof, whether it's something as simple as a pair of scissors, or a railroad system. Maybe that is the answer.

What I think we all need--the engine crews, railroad management, the lawyers, the insurance underwriters and investigators, ourselves, anyone else you can think of--is to accept that these things can and will happen.

We do it now with automobiles--and rock climbing, scuba and other diving activities, parachuting , and who knows what else. To a certain extent, those of us in this community, and the people who would work with us in a similar situation such as the insurance people, have an advantage. We know the risk is very small when compared to a lot of other things. We know what the preventative steps are.

This does not mean we say anybody really was stupid (even the most aware of can have a lapse of judgment). We, and the family members, need to mourn for a life ended before its time. Adding something about these hazards as part of Operation Lifesaver is certainly something to consider and act upon.

We just need to deal with these incidents as professionals and experts. . . and as compassionate humans.

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Me too. I think this fatality would be a result of not knowing the danger of his action and miscalculation of his feet. So a fatal error

I do, as well.
A decline in 'common sense' has been something people have complained about forever.
You just swap out one stupid type of thing for another as time goes on.
Like I've always heard, when someone makes something "foolproof", a more improved fool will come along soon after.

I'm forced to disagree with the disagreement.

I will concede that a certain degree of people have always been stupid, AND that we are now observing far more examples of such stupidity because of the fact that "cameras are everywhere"--security cams, webcams, smartphone videos, etc. (Those ever-present cameras have basically killed the Loch Ness Monster legend, BTW--fewer recordings even with 100X more cameras now....)

However,
1) The electronic devices are "making people stupider" by a combination of many factors (from a self-contained calculator to GPS to shortened attention spans), and
2) The previously-discussed increasing lack of exposure to the railroad environment by everyday Americans (and probably other countries as well) increases their unfamiliarity and the risk involved.

If people weren't getting progressively "stupider" (and attorneys more active and juries more sympathetic), we probably wouldn't be having this discussion, and we could probably still have open-window cars and/or open vestibule Dutch doors on a mainline excursion.

If we asked and dug long enough, I'm wagering we could spin off another thread on "things you could do around a steam excursion line or mainline excursion in the 1960s/1970s you'd never get to do today". Is the "Hello Dolly" open car still running at Strasburg, for example?

Not sure if stupider or simply replacing a more real life form of intelligence with a digitally based form that doesn't bode well for robust reliability when faced with the hazards of an analog world........

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