Trains. You may have grown up playing with them. You may still laughingly label them “choo-choos.” Your child may enjoy DVDs of the lovably animated Thomas the Tank Engine. And you may like to consider your spunky self “the little train that could.”

But such warm-fuzzy feelings about trains should not eclipse a basic truth: They’re dangerous. Trains weigh many tons, they move rapidly, they stop slowly and they cross busy streets regularly. You simply don’t want to mess with trains. Yet many people do, by illegally crossing railroad tracks just before trains pass, or perhaps by hitching a ride. And often these people don’t wind up chuckling over choo-choos. Instead, they wind up dead.

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What will it take to get the message through to Americans that we are slaughtering each other on our roads, highways and train lines, and all for the sake of a phone call or a text message that could have waited?

Perhaps a catastrophic train wreck will be our wake-up call? Or perhaps school bus carnage? Actually, both such things already have occurred this month.

These horrific accidents could have been avoided if the driver of a semi truck and a commuter train had been paying attention, rather than being distracted by using a cell phone.

In Florida, four young students are in critical condition and a 13-year-old eighth-grade girl is dead because a man driving a large semi truck was talking on his cell phone and slammed into the back of a school bus as it was stopped to let students get off.

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It’s  bad enough that cell phone and text messaging distractions have meant many fatalities and serious injuries on America’s roads and highways. Now such driver distractions also may be to blame for up to 25 fatalities in a horrendous train collision in California.

A commuter train slammed into a freight train last Friday reportedly due to human error by the commuter train’s engineer, who failed to stop for a red signal. Now authorities are investigating the possibility that the engineer was text messaging to two teenagers — who were train enthusiasts — just before the fatal crash which also took his life. (more…)

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