Someone posted on Reddit about a woman who walked in front of his Regional Rail train yesterday
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
And a commenter who says he works for SEPTA says you'd be surprised at how common this is.
Eric Harmatz via Flickr Creative Commons
Redditor Rel8y takes the Paoli/Thorndale train to and from work, and he posted a pretty intense story about how yesterday he had a view out the front window when a woman walked in front of the train in what he says seemed like a deliberate manner:
I was sitting in the front of one of the new Silver Liners, and it was still light out, and we had that big window in front of us. The woman sitting next to me suddenly yells, "Oh god!" I look up quickly to her and then follow her eyes and see a human on the tracks, and then see them disappear out of sight under our nose in a split second.
What's really wild about this, though, is that a bunch of people who claim to work for SEPTA or Amtrak replied suggesting that this is pretty common:
As a Conductor for SEPTA, I first off have to say sorry. No one should have to witness a tragedy such as this. But as sad as it is to hear, this is an extremely common occurrence. When you explain the engineer as being frank, that is the mindset we must carry by the familiar sight of death on the rail. Many other passengers have witnessed what you have and it doesn't get easier with every incident. When you explain that the Conductors are trained for this, sadly, we are not. ... And if you want to honestly hear the grotesque part of this, watch how fast the crew is pushed back to work.
And:
Someone I'm friendly with is an Amtrak engineer. The first conversation I had with him is how often people jump in front of his train.
There's a lot of questions in the discussion about why there was no news coverage of this; a good explanation for this can be found in this episode of the Freakonomics podcast about the correlation between the amount of coverage a suicide gets and waves of similar suicides in the same news-coverage area. Essentially, the idea is that every time a person reads or hears about a suicide, the idea of suicide moves another inch over from "impossible" to "possible." (We're going with that including the link to this in-depth look at the ethics of mentioning suicides in the media counteracts mentioning the Reddit post. We hope. Please, nobody kill themselves.)
