On Friday, the train I was on from Boston to Providence was delayed because someone died. 

After the train stopped the passenger sitting next to me said, “I hope we didn’t hit someone.”

I remember feeling the train brake and then the sound of something scraping along the bottom of the train before the train could stop itself. At first I thought we had hit a branch or a large set of deer antlers or a bike.

After a few minutes of waiting, one of the train employees came over the intercom. His voice apologized and he said there had been a fatality. 

Everyone kind of looked at each other. One guy on the train said he once saw an elderly woman jump in front of a train. Another person said there had been a tragedy a few years earlier where a boy tried to run across the tracks to his mother and got hit and his mother watched her son die.

A year ago I had walked on the same tracks at night. I don’t think its as hard as people think to get hit by a train. There isn’t much time after you first hear an approaching train before the train passes.

In the few days since the person died, I’ve had little interest in reading news articles about who they were. I don’t want to know any of the details of their life or death. I’m not sure why.

When I was eighteen or nineteen I read a book by Henry Rollins of Black Flag. In the book he talks about seeing a guy who blew his brains out in the parking lot of k-mart. I thought of this when I was on the train and we weren’t moving.

People getting run over by trains has always been a popular story line. In every film I’ve seen that involved this the focus has always been on the the train, the person, and (if there is one) the superhero. I never gave much thought to the people inside the train. The people whose lives are delayed. Their reactions while they wait.

The most common reaction to the accident was the cell phone. A loud buzz grew from people calling other people.