Train Accident

Right after I arrived back in the Bay Area from Montana I had another near death experience that I will never forget. I was driving my car after a morning of shopping and I came to a railroad crossing on Virginia Street in Berkeley. I had to stop behind another vehicle to wait for a train to go by. I spaced out with my vehicle in neutral. I was just staring in front of me at the empty train crossing. The Berkeley train station is just South of this intersection and trains sometimes stop at the station to load and unload. In this case the train coming from the South and heading North did stop at the train station. I could see the engine of the train to the right or South just on the edge of my vision. The crossing barricades were still down and the lights were blinking red but the train came to a complete stop at the station. The vehicle in front of me decided not to wait for the train to finish loading and went around the barrier to cross the tracks. I was watching but not paying any attention to the scene in front of me. Then all of a sudden there was a train barreling along going South. The train was a high speed Amtrack passenger train going about 65 miles per hour. At the same instant I heard a loud screeching, crunching, scraping squealing kind of sound coming from my right to the South. I quickly turned my head and looked in the direction that the sound was coming from. I could see a crusty steel building and some towers for the cement plant near there. Then I saw some debris flying through the air. I looked closely at the items flying through the air and I noticed a car battery and some other parts that looked like parts of a vehicle. Then my brain started to assemble the whole picture for me. The car that was in front of me was struck by the high speed train and the debris flying through the air were parts of the vehicle. The sound was the noise from the impact bouncing off the steel building to my right and reflecting back at me. I crept forward along the street so that I could look South down the tracks. I saw a ball of steel about the size of a garbage can spinning to a stop about a hundred yards down the tracks. It had to be the vehicle that had been in front of me.

I started to respond with some confusion since I was looking right at the vehicle when it was struck by the train but it had happened so fast that it did not even register in my brain. I figured it out and by then the train was gone and the barriers went back up and the lights turned themselves off. I turned and drove along the side of the tracks to a spot as close as I could come to the ball of steel on the ground. I got out of my car as about twenty other people came out of the buildings in the industrial area to see what the loud noise was. I pointed at the ball of steel and some of the people started to gather about thirty feet away from the ball. Nobody wanted to get close enough to see the mangled body or bodies inside. I talked briefly with the people there and then I volunteered to go look closely at the ball of twisted metal. to see if the driver and any passengers were inside or possibly thrown out or something like that. I slowly walked up to the used to be a vehicle ball expecting to see tons of blood and gore from crushed bodies inside. There was a sunroof or moonroof whatever that miraculously was still intact. It was right on the end of the garbage can sized ball of metal like a lid on a sardine can. I crept up and glanced down inside the tinted glass of the sunroof. What I saw surprised me so much I kind of jumped back a bit. Inside the glass I was expecting to see red gore but instead I saw a bright, shiny, glittery, silver colored woman with long straight hair who wasn't moving at all. My first thought was that she must be dead. I then tapped lightly on the sunroof window and said,"This might be a dumb sounding question, but are you alright?"

She shocked me when she responded, "I think so."

I told her that help was on the way and asked if there was anything she thought I could do to help her. I also asked her if she was injured anywhere that she knew of. She told me she thought she was fine but that her head hurt a little bit. I had to laugh at her when she said that. She had just been hit by a train going 65 miles per hour and she could still talk. Then all of a sudden my mind figured out that the silver color was from the dust used in the airbag to help it deploy at the high speed needed in an accident. She was totally covered in the silver dust. This airbag had clearly helped her survive by creating a pocket of air pressure that was at the center of the ball of steel wrapped around her.

The fire department arrived and they stood back while I was talking to the women. They wanted me to keep talking to her to try to keep her calm. Like my racing heart could calm anybody but I kept talking to her. The fire fighters wanted to wait for the jaws of life to arrive but then I told them that I thought she was completely unpinned and if we just took off the window we could slide her out of her little cocoon. One of them came up and looked at the situation and agreed with me. He and I carefully pulled off the rubber seal around the window and lifted the glass away. At that point I stepped back and let the professionals take over. They slid her out and put her on a back board to transport her. I was told to wait there for the Southern Pacific agent to give a witness statement. I told them I would do that.

The Southern Pacific representative told me it was a miracle that she survived. He told me he has been investigating collisions with trains his entire life and he had never even heard of anyone ever surviving a hit by a train going 65 miles per hour to say nothing of surviving virtually unhurt like this lucky woman did. I had to wait until all the emergency vehicles left before I could get my car out of the place where I left it. I needed the time to unwind from this experience. I was a bit hyped up from all the tension over the last hour. I got in my car and some of the workers from the area that I first saw thanked me for my help and I went home thankful for still being alive. Later that night on the news I found out that she was the only passenger in the vehicle and that her only injury was a detached retina in one eye that was surgically repaired at the hospital before they released her. She was one lucky lady.