Last year in the two-mile stretch of Norfolk Southern tracks through Hamilton, McCormack said they “had 274 trespassers stopped that were warned and ejected off the property — they were told the dangers of being on railroad property and the proper way of crossing the tracks.”
The also arrsted 19 as repeated offenders, he said, “who decided to come back and trespass again after they were warned.”
“When you start getting numbers that high, you want to come out to the community, get the word out of the dangers of being on the railroad, before an injury or fatality happens,” McCormack said.
Nationally last year, 1,041 trespassers were injured by trains. Of those, 562 were killed. In Ohio, there were 35 trespasser casualties, 20 of them fatal. Those figures do not include people in vehicles that were involved in train wrecks. People trespassing on tracks leads to more fatalities across the country than train/vehicle collisions, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Within just two days in April, two local people were struck by trains — one of them killed, the other injured.
On April 23, Carlisle High School student Jamie Anderson, 16, was killed by a train.
RELATED: Carlisle student struck and killed by train remembered as ‘a very good kid’
On April 24, a man who was struck by a train near Heaton Avenue and Fifth Street in Hamilton when he reportedly tried to run around a train that police described as “slow moving.”
He was bleeding from the head and rushed to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
MORE: 2 train strikes in 2 days highlight safety around rails in the region
McCormack offers safety tips and observations about people trespassing on railroad property:
• the leading reason people seem to trespass on tracks is, “Everybody’s in a hurry to get from Point A to Point B.”
• people of all ages — teens, the elderly, even parents with young children — walk on tracks or railroad crossings where there aren’t signals.
• one reason not to cross at designated locations is the rough materials people would have to cross over, including large rocks, large wooden timbers and the metal rails. By contrast, designated crossings have smoother areas that are intended for people to walk on, without the rocks or timbers.
• walkers should wait until the gates go back up because when there are two or more tracks, a train may be coming the other direction.
• a freight train going 55 mph can take 1 to 1-1/2 miles to stop. When an engineer sees someone in the tracks, all he or she can do is hit the emergency brake, knowing the train will not stop in time, and lean on the horn, hoping the person will leave the tracks in time.
• people should always assume a train is coming.
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