Rail suicide

Train drivers in particular, effectively forced into being accomplices to the suicide they witness, often suffer post-traumatic stress disorder that has adversely affected their personal lives and careers.

[d] They theorized that people attempting rail suicide used the stations primarily to access the tracks, wanted to ensure that the train was traveling at a speed as high as possible, and that no one was able to interfere with them.

The paucity of suicides south of San Jose's Diridon station was attributed to the lower frequency of train service between there and the line's southern terminus at Gilroy.

[e] Instead, the Dutch researchers noted that suicides and attempts appeared to be concentrated on "hotspots", such as nearby psychiatric hospitals,[32] a phenomenon also observed in the later Belgian study,[30] as well as in Austria[33] and Germany.

[21] Similar incidents have been reported on the Kolkata Metro in India, where autopsies of many completed suicides show signs of electrocution in addition to the severe blunt force trauma caused by the train.

The most common was dropping personal belongings such as bags, suicide notes or identity cards, and avoiding eye contact, reported by half the respondents.

[37] One British study that interviewed 20 survivors of rail suicide attempts found that almost half had chosen that method because they knew of someone else who had; they also perceived it as likely to be fatal while easily available and accessible.

Several accounts implied a wish for agency to come from elsewhere, and in some the person described putting themselves in a situation where their fate would be left to chance, to impulse, or to people around who might or might not interveneAnother expressed the hope that their death might have been seen as an accident.

[21] Rail suicide is distinct from most other methods in having a wide effect in order to investigate the death and clear the tracks, forcing delays and reroutings of trains in the meantime.

[60] Even if the suicide situation is recognized at an early stage, the train driver is rarely able to prevent it due to the long braking distance and the inability to take evasive action.

[61][o][p] A German train with an 80-tonne (88-short-ton) locomotive traveling at 120 km/h (75 mph) takes 600 m (2,000 ft), and 18 seconds, to stop, more than enough time for drivers to make eye contact with a person on the tracks.

[67][70][71] Drivers often suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exhibiting symptoms such as sleeplessness, irritability, depression, anger, panic attacks, nightmares and flashbacks.

"You're generally the last one to see that person alive, and you're not prepared mentally or emotionally to see something like that," says John Tolman, an official with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a U.S. railworkers union which has in conjunction with railroads been offering peer counseling and other support services for affected drivers.

However, the older victims who had been drinking showed higher BACs at the time of their deaths, suggesting a correlation between greater suicide risk and longterm alcohol abuse.

Second, they were more likely to live in areas where a large segment of the population commuted to their jobs via rail,[75] offering support for Durkheim's theory that suicides lean toward using a method familiar to them from their everyday life.

[81] Second, until 2011 even those railroads were not required to report suicides to the FRA (although some did) as they were seen as voluntary acts that resulted from intent rather than indicating possible shortcomings in safety measures.

In its wake fans and journalists debated whether a football setback with the national team was to blame, or Enke's despondency over the death of his young daughter from a heart defect three years earlier.

[23] In 2013 the John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center published a report for the FRA on nearly 1,200 news articles it found online about rail suicides and trespass incidents in the U.S. over the course of a year.

While it understood that concerns about triggering copycat suicides were legitimate, it said "the ideal strategy is not to refrain from talking for fear of making the problem worse, but rather to learn how to discuss the topic responsibly.

Jo believed that many suicidal people in the city experienced stress, poor health, poverty, and social isolation, and that these underlying issues might be resolved or relieved without loss of life.

Research by the FRA found that only 20 percent of rail suicides had their cell phone on them at the time, suggesting that it might be better to have a dedicated telephone at crossings and stations, although that risks being damaged by vandals.

Signs with the dedicated 988 number (the North American version of 113) may still be of some efficacy in prevention as a significant portion of suicides had visited the station before, giving them the chance to call the hotline before their attempt.

[18] In 2010, Caltrain placed signs with a helpline number along some of the stretch the FRA had studied after the Palo Alto cluster, a 16-kilometre (10 mi) section between Menlo Park and Mountain View.

When they see these and report them to transit control, the next train to reach the station is given a slow order, so it enters at a pace no faster than a walk,[w] while staff approach the person and ask if they are considering suicide.

They called the earlier study "potentially misleading", noting that the researchers' news release announcing their results had failed to mention the 95 percent confidence interval.

[127][128] Similarly, Willa Cather's 1905 short story "Paul's Case" ends with its title character, having been unable to bring himself to shoot himself, walking onto a set of tracks and being struck by a train.

[129] In the 1944 film Double Indemnity, the two main characters, Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson, conspire to kill her husband and collect the large insurance settlement enabled by the title by making his death appear to have been an accidental fall from a moving train.

[130] The 1981 West German television series Tod eines Schülers ("Death of a Student") began with the title character jumping in front of an oncoming train.

In Oliver Stone's 2010 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Louis Zabel jumps off a New York City subway platform into the path of an oncoming train after the trading firm he owns has suffered a catastrophic loss in value.

The scene is echoed in 2023's Bird Box Barcelona, where passengers on an underground platform, under the influence of mysterious unseen creatures, descend to the tracks and walk into the path of an oncoming train.