Car vs. Train

I suppose as a renewed car driver I have a special sensibility now to such topics and I wonder whether I would have bothered to make a blog entry about this happening a year ago, but that’s also the beauty of it – change! I love change. (Or I try to love it, it’s not always easy to love change).

Anyway, the story is this: On Wednesday morning, 29th of Jan., I had to get up earlier than usual for a big work event and arrived punctually at the office at 8:45 only to hear that many of my colleagues coming to this event from the Saitama region north of Tokyo were hopelessly delayed. There was a big accident on the Tobu Tojo line between Ikebukuro and Kawagoe. I lived on that line for four years, by the way, in a town called Shiki between Ikebukuro (one of the hubs of Tokyo) and the (very pretty) partially historical town of Kawagoe.

The only news I heard during the day was that a car had collided with the train but nobody had been hurt. Hu? That’s kinda odd, right? That nobody had been hurt.

Anyway, it was big event day at work and after lunch many of the missing people from Saitama arrived at the office, complaining that it had taken the train forever to get running again.

In the evening, I watched the 23:30 news at NHK (that’s the modern news with tweets from the audience and iPads etc.) and the incident had managed the national news.

So – the driver of the car, a lady, stopped at a railroad crossing, because there was a post office next to it. Her intention was to drop off some mail in the post box and drive on again.

Now, the lady forgot one very important thing… she did not put the shift lever of her automatic transmission car into “P” = parking, but left it in “D” = drive and she also did not pull the handbrake and what did her car do? It moved… It rolled in walking speed onto the rails and there came the train and poooooof!

OH SHIT!

There was a video taken by a security camera (hope it works and you can see it, the accident itself is shown in the last few seconds of this 1 min something video).

Luckily, nobody was in the car and nobody on board the train was injured either, so, in a way this is an accident you can to a certain degree laugh about.

The lady of course will not laugh about it… she lost her car and some incredible action followed when heavy equipment had to scrape her car from under the train. I guess her insurance will cover something, but I bet not all of it… This story is quite likely her financial ruin. I have no clue how many million Yen the operator of the Tobu Tojo line will invoice her and her insurance company.

And then the pain of having made the national news, the pain of knowing that you caused thousands and thousands of people a horrible morning on the Tobu Tojo line, not to speak of the shock of the train’s driver who probably thought for a while he had smashed a human being to pulp in that car. The same shock for the passengers on the train, who must have received quite a jolt and also thought their train just killed someone. And the pain of having the JAF – the Japan Automobile Federation, whose member I have become a month ago – to issue a statement that was also broadcast nationwide saying: Put your shift lever into “P” when you leave your car, please!!!

Jeez, the poor woman… I do really feel sorry for her. I hope she will get through this incident somehow… She of course did not do this on purpose and it was a very unlucky combination of circumstances (and her negligence).

But here it shows again, one single moment, one tiny thing, can change your whole life.

As an author I love this kind of stuff – one tiny thing and everything goes to hell – the sheer beauty of that. The fly that falls into the type-writer and changes the name from Tuttle to Buttle (or was it the other way round? ;-)) in one of my favorite movies of all times “Brazil”. Tiny and yet epic stuff like that are the jewels at the heart of great stories. The one moment where the lady forgot to put the shift lever into “P”…

And as a new car driver and owner – damn! I will pay super extra attention whether I put the shift lever into “P” and pulled the handbrake, I can tell you that!