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presents the options of being squashed like a roach, sucked under the moving wheels by the slipstream vacuum, blending into a rock

_ cliff or leaping into the Skeena River.

All of this appears to be an alarming

public safety problem, and it is. In Canada

last year there were 254 accidents at legal CN rail crossings, in which 47 people died

-and 171 were injured. Terrace, more than -

most other communities, is a chronic safety problem simply by virtue of its design, and

the CNR has come to the conclusion that the

people here need reminders and need educat-

‘Ing.

Using a proven technique that Smithers

- “locomotive engineer Calen Delain calls-"the. _. domino effect", a group of CN workers have - been speaking to elementary and primary '

school kids in Terrace area schools the past two weeks — they’re at Parkside today — telling children that they and everyone they

- know should take trains seriously and just

keep away from them except as paying pas-

-sengers. Delain has been working with

Smithers conductor Milt Mahoney much of

.the past year on CN’s Railway Student

Awareness Program in the Northwest. The

pair have been through the Smithers-

Hazelton area schools, and in Terrace they are working with Terrace conductor Don Hall and engineer Al Harkins.

"The key words," says Mahoney, coordinator for the program, “are, "Never be unsafe.’ " Each pair of railroaders spends

_ about a day at each school, talking to groups of about 30 kids at a time. Their props

include videos, pictures, posters,

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Hall, Mahoney, Delain, Harkins: Hoping for the domino effect.

- colouring books and © stickers. Mahoney says they tell the kids to stop, look and listen at level cross- ings, and never to play around the tracks or cross the yard. "We're try- ing to educate them to the dangers and instill respect in them, not fear," Mahoney says.

"We work on this equipment, and we know how lethal it can be.”

Terrace is infamous up and down the line. "The yard’s been here since day one, and it’s right in the middle of town," says Harkins. He’s been working here for 10 years as an engineer, and he knows the dangers of the area and what a moving freight train can do. Loco- motives alone weigh 325,000 pounds. At track speed (45 mph) a 14,000-ton coal train requires a mile and a half to come to a full stop; at five mph with full emer- gency braking it will still take 15 car-lengths, or 900 feet. "To bring it to a standing stop, just like that,

at five mph would have the same momentum of impact as crashing a 747 at cruising speed into the side of a mountain," Harkins says. "It doesn’t take any speed at all."

"The general public seems to. think they’re like cars," adds Delain. "They're not.”

The school program was initi- ated last spring after three years of development by CN employees, the ones who are out there living with the possibility that their day’s work

Terrace Review — March 13, 1992

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