Deaths among railroad trespassers. The role of alcohol in fatal injuries

10 year evaluation of train accidents

“…[3] Alcohol intake is common in train accidents. [1,5,7,13,15,17,23,25] and intoxication is related with a mortality rate of 80%. [15] Although the frequency of alcohol intoxication was low in our study, with a rate of 4.5%, likely as a result of the low alcohol consumption in our population, among the 7 deaths, 2 of them were intoxicated (28%).…”

Analysis of fatal train-pedestrian collisions in metropolitan Chicago 2004–2012

“…The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted two such studies in the 1990s in North Carolina (Pelletier, 1997) and Georgia (CDC, 1999). Subsequently the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) commissioned a report that matched up 61% of the trespassing fatalities (unintentional deaths not at grade crossings) in the FRA national database for 2002, 2003and 2004with coroners' reports (George, 2008.…”

The Economics of Railroad Safety

“…One is a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB, 1978a) study of 280 fatalities that occurred between March 1976 and October 1977. The other examined coroners' reports for all of the 138 trespasser deaths in North Carolina for the years 1990-94 (Pelletier, 1997). The results of the two studies are almost identical.…”

“…But it is also worth considering a more favorable estimate of possible fatality reduction from fencing the right of way in urban areas. The best estimates from existing sources (NTSB, 1978a;Pelletier, 1997) suggest that about 350 trespassing victims a year are neither residents of rural areas, undocumented suicides who would likely kill themselves in other ways, or people who already had to climbed a fence to trespass. Of this 350, a realistic estimate of the number of lives saved by fencing might be the ten percent of victims who are children, and the twenty percent of persons who so inebriated that their fence-climbing skills are diminished.…”