In case you haven't heard, another person has been killed by a train in Norman. And no, not by the shitty mom-rock band Train that's pictured above. Although listening to their music for more than 30-seconds has driven some lab rats to commit suicide, I don't think they had anything to do with this. Unless, of course, Kiss FM was playing a Drops of Jupiter marathon over the weekend or something. Then all bets are off.
Anyway, via Andrew Knittle on NewsOK:
For the second time in a week, a person has been struck and killed by a train in Norman.
The death of an unnamed woman late Saturday night marks the seventh such fatality in the past three years in Norman.
Norman police Lt. Jeff Robertson would only describe the victim as a “white female” and couldn't say whether she was a college student.
“It's really hard to tell,” Robertson said. “I don't want to speculate at this point.”
Robertson said the incident was called in Saturday at 10:36 p.m. Two hours later, he said investigators, including representatives of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, were still on the scene.
The woman was hit at the Main Street railroad crossing, Robertson said...
Norman police Lt. Chris Amason, who was interviewed a week ago by The Oklahoman, said that Norman has a problem with people getting killed by the dozens of trains that pass through the city each day.
“We encourage our residents to stay away from the train tracks,” he said. “It is illegal to walk on the train track or to even be near it.
“And that's why these things happen … because people won't stay away from them.”
My friend Bryan and I kind of stumbled across the scene when we were walking to my car following Saturday's OU game. I parked northeast of Campus Corner on "the other side of the tracks" and the stopped train was blocking our path to the Patmobile. We didn't know why the train was stopped. We just knew it was in our way. Here's a diagram of our predicament:
(Note: The long red line marks the train that went on for infinity.)
After discussing what to do for a couple of seconds, Bryan took the initiative and jumped over a coupling unit between two rail cars. He was greeted on the other side by a very unfriendly police officer who shined a flash light in my eyes and told me not to do the same thing. Like I was that stupid.
The cop then gave Bryan a lecture on the dangers of train jumping and informed us that we basically had to walk to Moore before I could cross the tracks. He stated that if I was caught jumping between cars, I could get fined $800. So we started walking north, on opposite sides of the train, until we could cross. After about a block, I stopped, looked around, and crawled underneath the train to the other side. I then ran up to Bryan, we walked to the Patmobile and headed home.
By the way, did you catch that? I crawled underneath a fucking train! I felt like Jesse Pinkman, only I wasn't siphoning methylamine or about to watch my friend shoot a kid. It was the most non-dangerous cool and reckless thing I've ever done in my life, if of course, you omit going down the 20-story escape slide inside the City Place building a few weeks ago.
Anyway, I'm not sure where I was going with all that. I guess I just felt like sharing a random story instead of trying to figure out how some idiot got hit by a freight train. I would bet it was suicide, because in my book it's pretty damn impossible to accidentally get struck by one. At last check, trains do go whistle whistle rumble roar. There's a reason tornado victims say "It sounded like a freight train was over my house," right?
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