As a photographer I have actually photographed the aftemath of an accident involving trains and humans. It was at Bryn Mawr station on a summer evening in June 2010. I even wrote about it for Main Line Media News as an op-ed piece.

That night, a reporter I knew phoned to say there was a fatality on the tracks. I met the reporter at the scene after they were certain the victim had been removed. I didn’t want to see that because I have seen similar scenes in the past. I used to commute to New York City years ago, and especially between Thanksgiving and Christmas there were always incidents on the tracks, as there is literally a suicide by train season. One time in particular, NJ Transit and Amtrak weren’t fast enough to clean up an accident scene. That image is forever in my mind.

After this in my editorial I wrote In addition, in spite of horrible tragedies like this, so many people go up onto or get too close to live train tracks every single day. Every summer as soon as school lets out, part of the sounds of summer nights are voices on the train tracks — usually kids. Even during the school year it happens. You see it every day when people don’t want to take the time to take the stairs at stations to get to the other side — they just cross right in the middle.

On that Friday evening in 2010 I also thought of the family who would receive this tragically horrible news, as well as a local family who did receive news like this in May 2007. That was when young Brian Breskman was electrocuted by the third rail of SEPTA’s Route 100 trolley line in Bryn Mawr. Since Brian’s death, his dad, Ben Breskman, has tried to raise awareness for the need of increased safety measures around train and trolley tracks.

While I lived along the Main Line I  asked about increasing fencing at train stations and the dangerously open in-between stretches of tracks. Every time I asked I was told it’s never going to happen; it costs too much money.

Now that I am out here, I still wonder about safety and fencing along the tracks – for passenger rail and freight.  It is not like I live with a major rail line cleaving my neighborhood in two any longer, but you still wonder.  After all when you spend the better part of 15 years shooing teenage boys from the Haverford School off the tracks during the school year, and kids in general during the summer as well as some stupid adults I saw who used the tracks as a walking path, you will always wonder every time you see a train pass.

Yesterday there was a crazy tragic accident outside Ellicott City Maryland.  I started to watch it because of the fact it was a train derailment, and also I used to have cousins who lived in Ellicott City in this crazy awesome Victorian house.

What I learned this morning is one of the two teenage girls who were messing around near the tracks on a rail bridge and killed when the CSX coal train derailed was  a granddaughter of one of my mother’s friends.  Two friends of mine told me this morning.  Not that it matters in the end, it is just mind-boggling and tragically sad to think of two young lives snuffed out like this.

These weren’t crazy kids – they were two young women who were high school pals who made a dumb and deadly choice on a summer evening before going back to college.

See that is the thing, even good kids can do dumb things.  And no you can’t wrap them in cotton wool until they reach an age certain (and what age would that be anyway?), but I have to ask again, are the railroads in this country doing their best to keep people safe?

And to *think* there was talk a couple short years ago of a walking trail alongside freight train lines in Gladwyne.

Two young girls made a dumb choice.  And now they are dead.  I think part of this conversation should be as they investigate this derailment is why ordinary people can still access train tracks and railroad bridges so easily?

I am thinking that this should be a national issue.  You can’t fence every square inch of train tracks, no, but apparently something needs to be done as people keep getting smushed by trains. And there needs to be more attention to rail safety in general.  How do we know that CSX say had the right weight to haul for those tracks?  Were the tracks in perfect condition? Will the railroad try to blame these kids for the derailment and deflect accountability?

I am sorry  but you *can’t* just fluff the issue off by saying people should have more sense.  Of course people should have more sense but sometimes human beings do dumb things. And I am sorry but human beings doing dumb things are only part of the equation in this tragedy.

Ellicott City Train Derailment Victims Tweeted From Tracks Before Death ; Two young women, 19, died in an Ellicott City train derailment.

Two Young Women Dead in Ellicott City Train Derailment; Officials say more than 20 cars derailed.