Courtesy Chicago Sun-Times
With hopes that the disturbing image will save lives in the future, Metra today released a video of an accident that killed a woman and baby girl as they ran across a set of tracks last Saturday.
The lights were flashing, the bells were clanging and the train horn was blowing, but still a group ran in front of the train to get to the other side of the tracks.
As you can see in the video to the right, embedded from the SunTimes website, the first three people made it across. The fourth person, Blanca Villanueva-Sanchez, 34, and the 1-year-old child she was carrying, were hit and killed.
The baby killed was the godchild of Villanueva-Sanchez. The others who made it across safely included her teenage daughter and husband.
The video camera is mounted on the train's cab and gives you a view of what the engineer saw as the train barreled towards the North Chicago station. The train was on an express run and was not scheduled to stop there. Investigators think the group did not realize that, and they hurried across the track thinking they had a chance to board it.
The engineer, of course, stopped after the accident, but there was nothing he could have done to avoid hitting the woman and baby. Trains take an average of about a mile to come to a complete stop after the emergency brake is pulled, according to Operation Life Saver, the national railroad safety program.
Something else to keep in mind is the optical illusion created by a train as it comes towards you. You know when you look up in the sky at an airplane and it appears to be moving very slowly, even though it's really flying several hundred miles per hour? It's the same illusion with trains. They look like they're moving much more slowly than they actually are.
Illinois has steep fines for both pedestrians and motorists who ignore the flashing lights and other warnings of an approaching trains. First offense tickets for motorists carry a $250 fine.
Metra's website has a lot of good safety information including links to the Operation Lifesaver and the Common Sense initiative. It's worth a quick review for yourself and your family.
Below is another infamous video from a local train/car accident in Hammond in 2007. The woman in the van was trying to beat a west bound train and didn't even see the east bound train as she turned on to the tracks. She and two of her children were killed. Two other children in the van survived.
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