Long Afternoon

Last night, I attended a friend's bday party, chatted and visited with people, had a couple drinks and played a murder mystery game.

This morning I woke up a bit earlier than I like to on March Break so that I could catch the morning train home to visit the parents.

Outside of Guelph, I was somewhere in between a state of sleep and wakefulness and staring out the window into the sunny, snow-covered countryside.

I was startled out of my reverie by the passengers ahead of me shouting "Oh my God. Did you see that?" and standing up in their seats, and turning their bodies so they could get a better view of what we were passing by. I shifted my gaze onto the crossroad that the train had just passed over and saw a mid-sized silver car, crumpled at one end, spinning into the ditch.

The train kept running for what seemed like an eternity. I thought that we had just witnessed an accident on the road that we had just passed, for I didn't feel a thing. The passengers ahead of me were saying "We just hit that car." Another passenger, a girl in her late teens, said "What? We just hit a cat?" and then learned that it was actually a car that was hit, and not a cat, although hittting a cat would almost make more sense since we did not feel a thing. Surely something as substantial as a car, carrying human lives, would have been noticeable.

The train finally came to a stop. After a bit of confusion, the conductor came over the PA and announced that we had hit a car and would likely be stopped for 2 hours.

After about 2 hours, passengers going on to Kitchener were taken to the train station by taxi. At some point, people from other cars walked onto my car and explained that they had heard that the car was trying to beat the train, it got nicked at the end, one passenger died and two others were taken to the hopsital. And, oh yes, hold onto your receipt because you'd get a discount next trip.

After about 3 hours, the conductor explained the OPP got permission to back the train up to the road so that we would not have to trudge through snowy countryside. Buses were on scene for passengers on their way to London and Sarnia; taxis were there for Stratford-bound passengers.

After piling into a taxi with some strangers, the driver explained that he'd already heard a lot of details about what had happened from the passengers he'd driven to Kitchener, and they were not pretty so he wouldn't be repeating them. There was a bit of silence, then some of the other passengers started talking again. I remember one woman saying at one point "We've been inconvenienced for a few hours, but in that same time some lives have been changed."

I thought about even though the three hours that I was delayed were insignificant to me, shorter amounts of time can be extremely significant. We had been delayed for about 2 minutes in Toronto because of track maintenance. I wondered about how if we hadn't been held back that two minutes, we would not have crossed paths with that mid-sized silver car that brilliantly reflected the sun's rays as it spun out of control.

(Read here for a report of the accident.)