My first real job out of college was riding trains as a brakeman in the Colorado Rockies. Immediately, one learns as a railroader that a speeding coal train – at a mile-and-a-half long and weighing in at nearly fifty million pounds – doesn’t stop on a dime. It takes a long time and a lot of space to even noticeably slow all that mass down.
Oftentimes when a car or truck straddled our tracks at a crossing over a mile away, the engineer and I would soon become very concerned if the vehicle didn’t move after we began blowing our horns of warning.