There were countless ways to get killed, and sleeping on the trackbed was definitely one of them. Drunks and suicides and teenagers with headphones get hit all the time between the rails but there are less obvious dangers as well. Metal strapping can come unlimbered from its load and perform a kind of spastic dance alongside a moving train that will cut you in half. Steel wheels going 140 and bearing many tons of weight can shoot chunks of rock sideways off the rails like bullets. Cargo dangles and flails and falls from cars; an engineer was almost killed by a piece of timber that worked loose
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