There are certain kinds of traumas that become your own obsessions after awhile, because they bothered and obsessed your parents. For me, one such horror is the train-car collision. My Dad used to fret about these a lot when I was a kid, I think, because he once witnessed one himself when he was young. Maybe more than one - maybe several. He instilled a life-long fear of these things in me. So, even today, I still get the heebie-jeebies when the rail crossing arms come down, or fail to come down, or when people go around the arms, or park on the tracks, etc., etc.
The recent tragedy in Riverbank is enough to give me the hives:
Bill Ingalls, 50, of Modesto, was stopped on the opposite side of the tracks from the SUV when the accident happened.
"The bar came kind of like on her windshield, and I then I started waving for her to go back, and she didn't back up," Ingalls told the Modesto Bee. "So I started to go back, thinking I knew there was going to be an impact.
"So I went back a few feet, and still looking at her, and she still wasn't moving. She still wasn't trying to get backwards out of the way," he said. "At the last second she pulled forward. She didn't really accelerate to try and beat the train or anything. She just pulled forward, literally right into the train."
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