Editorial: Taking on the special challenge of safety for rail 'trespassers'

Some of the statistics on railway crashes are stunning.

As our transportation writer Marni Pyke reported Monday, such collisions at rail crossings have declined from 10,769 in 1980 to 2,059 in 2015 - a drop of 81 percent. The number of deaths from such crashes has declined by 76 percent - from 734 in 1980 to 175 in 2015.

Yet, as encouraging as those numbers are for the railroad crossing component of all railway crashes, the figures for another subset are more troubling, Railroad collisions involving people who are on the tracks away from road crossings are little changed today from the numbers experienced in 1980 - and at that, not particularly for the better. The number of such collisions fluctuates from year to year, mostly hovering around 900, with deaths in 2015 actually slightly higher than the 457 in 1980. And this does not include suicides, which have been monitored for just five years and changed little in that time.

At the Oak Brook conference where Pyke collected these statistics last week, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said a special challenge for safety advocates is to generate more public concern for so-called "trespasser" collisions, which now account for nearly 20 percent of all rail crashes.

"It's that concern of the public that helps to generate that industry characteristic that anybody's accident is everybody's accident. Well, you don't have that with respect to trespassing," he said.

A DuPage County group does, though, and it has established specific goals reminiscent of John F. Kennedy's famously specific declaration often placed at the root of America's successful moon mission.

"We've set a goal today," said DuPage Railroad Safety Council Chairman Dr. Lanny Wilson, "that we are going to decrease trespasser and suicide deaths by 50 percent in the next 10 years."

Wilson has a bit of a personal stake in the issue. In 1994, his daughter was killed when the car she was in was hit by a train. Now, he heads a group of parents who've experienced a similar tragedy.

He has no illusions about the daunting task ahead, and Hart emphasized the difficulty by citing circumstances that make trespasser collisions so singularly problematic. But safety advocates can take heart in efforts that railroads and rail agencies are trying - including everything from the use of drones to employees in how to spot potential suicides.

If a solution were easy, the statistics on trespasser collisions would be as striking as the results on other types of crashes. But, on a journey that at times may seem as difficult as landing a person on the moon and returning him safely to Earth, at least the rail industry, regulators and groups like the DuPage Railroad Safety Council have a pretty good idea of where to start - public awareness and concern,

Perhaps as they build on that, we'll see the kind of dramatic reduction of sorrow from trespasser collisions in the next 10 years that we've seen elsewhere in the past 36. It's a worthy goal and a promising effort, in any case.