Train Tracks

Roy Kirk is a train buff. So when he heard about Friday night's collision in Silver Spring, he readied his video camera and drove from his Reisterstown home to the scene."

A NEW traffic light recently installed by SHA on Route 97 at the intersection with the off-ramp from Interstate 70 prompted James Walsh to complain. "That particular signal is probably needed 6 hours per day, 5 days per week," he said in a recent e-mail. "Instead, that traffic signal operates 24-7. It's particularly vexing for traffic turning from northbound Route 97 onto the ramp to westbound I-70; those drivers have to wait for a left-turn arrow. At 8, 9 or 10 p.m., I will often see two or three cars waiting for the signal to permit them to make that left turn.

When he heard metal crunching metal outside his front door, Gary Fischer turned away from his television to peer out his living room window and across the dimly lit street to the train tracks beyond.What he saw was the bright blue and red stripes of an Amtrak engine toppled on its side.What he felt was a flood of grim memories."I thought, 'Oh my God, it's happened again,' " said Mr. Fischer. His home is among the closest of many in this tightly knit community that lies near the train tracks in Chase, in northeast Baltimore County, just south of the Gunpowder River where yesterday's crash occurred within 100 yards of a 1987 train collision that killed 16 people and injured more than 170.As he grabbed a pocket-sized flashlight from under his kitchen sink, Mr. Fischer's thoughts went back to that January afternoon four years ago, when ambulances were backed up 10 deep on his narrow two-lane street and injured passengers had to be carried and helped like wounded soldiers into his house and back yard, where they were treated.

MOSCOW - Two bombs exploded under a suburban commuter train filled with students on their way to school in southern Russia yesterday, killing at least four people and wounding 44 in what authorities said was probably a Chechen rebel attack. The blast was the latest in a series of explosions that have brought the war in Chechnya home to Russians. It left the area around the train tracks in the Stavropol region strewn with shredded notebooks, textbooks and body parts, witnesses said, and hospitals flooded with casualties, at least 12 of whom were critically wounded.

The layout of train tracks and signals in the vicinity of today's Chase train wreck is a standard one throughout the industry and required no changes in the wake of a fatal passenger train crash near that same spot in 1987, a federal safety official said."

BLOOMINGTON -- This town knows death -- usually by trucks. Proof is found in 18 faded white crosses at the foot of Cemetery Hill, each marking the fatal crash of a truck whose brakes failed. But today, this tight-knit community on the border of Garrett and Allegany counties and West Virginia is burying Eddie Lee Rogers, a 15-year-old who died in an unexpected way last Sunday when an out-of-control coal train smashed through his house just yards away from the tracks. "No one ever dreamed that the train would run off the track," says Alice Howard, Bloomington's historian and one of its oldest residents.

For nearly two decades, the antique cabooses have sat near the train tracks on Hammonds Ferry Road. Children have swung up the metal steps to play conductor and all sorts of folks have sat on the cabooses to watch the passenger trains speed by or count the cars on rumbling freight trains. Although their paint is chipped and fading, the cabooses are a landmark, Lansdowne residents say, and a reminder of the important role that trains have played in this southwestern Baltimore County community, once home to many employees of the B&O Railroad.

I disagree that Amtrak is responsible for keeping up a fence along their track ("Hey, Amtrak: Good fences make good neighbors," Feb. 1). For years I have heard about kids and adults being run over. Kids have climbed box cars and been electrocuted by the overhead wires. But you can't fence the entire railroad. Why don't we see more fatlities from people crossing I-95? Because no one would ever think of crossing it. So why can't people learn to stay off the tracks? A fence won't work.

I n the coarsened, unforgiving society the United States has become, many of us seem to have lost sight of the fact that a 14-year-old is a child. In the wake of the recent death of Kenwood High School freshman Anna Marie Stickel, my e-mail box filled with messages quickly blaming the girl for her lack of "personal responsibility" and her parents for their failure to control her behavior. Many were quick to absolve Amtrak, the school system or anyone with power of the slightest blame for yet another fatality on a Maryland railroad track.