Thanks. I'd heard the rumors but no confirmation. It's sad to hear he's gone. The development world has gotten too corporate, in the 90s/00s you could be different. He's a holdout from that era.
Man killed by train had tech following
By Neita Cecil
As of Friday, September 7, 2018
A man killed by a train in The Dalles in mid-August had a Youtube following and was a “minor celebrity” in the computer world for doing the Herculean task of writing his own operating system, a fan said.
Terrance Davis, 48, was killed Aug. 11 near West First and Terminal Avenue. He’d been homeless for some months and was schizophrenic. He spent 10 years writing his operating system, Temple OS, because God told him to, according to a 2014 tech magazine story on him titled “God’s Lonely Programmer.”
John McColl, a computer engineer from Sydney, Australia, said he hoped Davis would be remembered for his achievements and not his mental illness.
He said it was “kind of hard for a lay person to understand what a phenomenal achievement” it is to write an entire operating system singlehandedly. “It actually boggles my mind that one man wrote all that.”
He compared it to construction, saying a man could build a house by himself, but this was “like building a skyscraper by yourself.”
McColl was one of several fans of Davis who called the Chronicle to confirm his passing.
One video of Davis, in which he says he’s the smartest programmer in the world, has been viewed over 44,000 times. Commenters call him a “programming legend.” One noted that while Davis proclaims himself the best, he “built his own everything so I can’t really argue with him …”
Another fan, Kate Blue (not her real last name), said she wanted to keep anonymity because Davis was controversial.
“He had been repeatedly banned from Youtube because his schizophrenia caused him to say things that are very offensive. He couldn’t help it,” Blue said. “He was actually a genius.”
“I’m talking with some friends of his online right now and they’re devastated,” she said.
Blue, a computer engineer from Phoenix, said Davis’s operating system runs on a very specific part of a computer processor and is something unique that no one else has done before.
“It’s extremely quick. It’s very fast. It can only do a few things but what it does it does very quickly.”
The operating system is rudimentary looking, like something from the early days of personal computers. In the 2014 article, in Motherboard, Davis said all the aspects of it were dictated by God.
Blue said Davis could’ve been a Steve Jobs or a Steve Wozniak were it not for his mental illness.
“He did not want to be medicated, that was his thing. And anytime he was given medications he would refuse it,” saying they “stifled his creativity and turned him into a lump.”
McColl said he talked regularly to Davis, and when he was talking about computers, as he did with McColl, he was always lucid and showed no signs of delusional behavior.
Another fan, a clinical psychologist from Iowa who asked that his name not be used, said Davis worked as a lead engineer at Ticketmaster and lead software engineer at Graphic Technologies before his mental illness pushed him out of the workforce in the early 2000s.
He was homeless for a time in 2004, and did so to evade being hospitalized, the psychologist said.
He also became homeless earlier this year for the same reason.
Davis told him he became homeless “to escape the dog catchers.” He’d been living with his sister in Phoenix, the psychologist said.
During his homelessness, his fans helped him, bringing him supplies. But he refused offers of housing, including from fans in Atlanta and Houston.
Davis went to California, then headed to Portland sometime in April, and then walked to The Dalles, the psychologist said.
In June, The Dalles Police Department got a courtesy notification from the Portland Police Bureau’s behavioral unit that Davis may be heading there and could be a danger, since he said if God told him to kill, he would.
Police never found Davis at that time and never got any complaints about him, said The Dalles Police Capt. Jamie Carrico.
According to a police report on the death, on...
> sometimes he had things to say that were really profound. “The one that I keep remembering is, he said, ‘If you seek to lose your life you’ll save it, if you seek to save your life, you’ll lose it.’”
His mental illness clearly impacted how he thought, wrote and spoke but we can't deny this guy is a historically important to CS and software engineering.
This is an interesting point. Was he historically important to CS and engineering ? I certainly understand the sentiment and appreciate his talent, but can somebody be important if their work is only useful to them, if the only benefit of of their accomplishments is for themselves ? I see why people might say yes, but that's a no for me,dog. Historical is about people, and his work was about himself.
Just an fyi, there is a large conspiracy basically stating that he was "made" this way by internet trolling. Similar to the outcome of "Chris Chan".
Terry in many cases showed great fondness over several popular internet/youtube girls to which end he would live stream himself trying to email and make contact with them. And to this, trolls would spoof a response email somewhere along the line of "I only date black men with huge s".
It is very possible that through this trolling is what lead him to get kicked out of his parent's house and subsequently dying on a set of train tracks.
It saddens me that people are more comfortable watching videos of gore than a person suffering from a mental illness.
It saddens me that America lacks mental health awareness.
> I can't believe this is real.
About 1% of Americans suffer from schizophrenia [0] and for many of those, this video shows what they and their family face on a daily basis. You and the people around you probably don't ever experience what happens in those gore videos, but we are surrounded by people who suffer from schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
There is currently no cure for schizophrenia and the best treatment is therapy and antipsychotic medication. If the person who is suffering from schizophrenia decides to pass on the medication and therapy (for reasons related to the disorder or because the side effects are worse than the benefits), it can be difficult to prevent situations like the one in the video of Terry from happening.
Imagine you are in a room with 100 other people. It is likely that someone in that room has experienced paranoia or groundless thinking similar to what you saw in the video. Both them and their family have to learn how to deal with the symptoms and often do not get enough support. I encourage everyone to educate themselves on mental health and consider donating to an organization that supports people with mental illness [1].
Terry uploaded a video the day before he died [2] and also removed all of his previously uploaded videos from YouTube. That leads me to believe that he committed suicide. I don't know much about his situation, but I can't help to wonder if he would still be with us if he was given more support and resources to help him deal with his illness.
Thankfully Archive.org [3] has saved a great amount of videos and links related to Terry's life if anyone would like to learn more.
I’m going to puke if I see one more tweet from Fred Wilson saying “the startup community needs to be open to talking about mental health” and then he talks about some trendy, socially acceptable “depression”.
I had someone I cared about on a 5150 hold. That shit breaks your heart when you know you need much more then 48 hours, and you are helpless.
Terry had people that cared about him, and what ended up happening to him is an indictment of the system.
The system failed Terry and those that cared about him.
"This is not an issue of mental health in America. American society decided that Terry Davis was not a threat to himself or others, and thus permitted him the freedom to choose whether he would get help for his condition or not. That freedom may be clouded by his condition, but it is a freedom he is afforded none-the-less. Terry Davis is a success story in America being tolerant of the mentally ill." --random internet guy
I've seen this kind of thing in person. What I can't believe is that it was uploaded. I don't want to believe that someone like Terry would do this to themselves.
Let alone a black bar, enough people have flagged the submission that it's #38 (off the front page) even though it has 120 points after 3 hours, and no huge comment count to trip the flame detector. It seems many would prefer that Terry Davis be forgotten.
Someone cared enough to post a link* to this article today to confirm it. I asked them to submit it as an article. When they didn't do so promptly, I deleted my comment and submitted it myself.
I never expected it to make the front page. I just hoped to get a few more eyeballs on it as a courtesy to the community.
I don't think he is being dismissed and forgotten at all.
This is such a shame. I always loved watching his videos, and his website, and was always in awe at the source of TempleOS. The world, all of us here on HN included, could have treated him with more compassion.
My heart goes out to his family and those close to him, including all those who offered him the housing he refused. Terry has achieved well more than most of us could dream of, and honestly has left more of a net positive in the world than most of probably ever will. TempleOS singlehandedly got me interested in OS Dev, and the no doubt more than a few others as well, and with any luck many more in the future.
RIP Terry. For some reason, and I don't know why I find this somewhat shocking, but of all prominent deaths in recent memory, his death leaves me feeling the most emotional.
> RIP Terry. For some reason, and I don't know why I find this somewhat shocking, but of all prominent deaths in recent memory, his death leaves me feeling the most emotional.
It hit me really hard too.
I think it's because some of us witnessed that his spiral downward was partly because of him getting trolled by the 4chan crowd, we witnessed his helplessness, we witnessed him getting bullied.
He was a star, but he had his demons. It's such a great tragedy, to lose him now, and to have lost him earlier as well.
Oh, man, this hits hard. So tragic on so many levels. I am taken aback. Seriously will take some time to compose my thoughts.
OS on straight bare metal— a dream we morals can only speculate in our docker, VM’d, noisy neighbor lives. The purity of that. Protected memory, pashaw. Multi user?, svga? Bloat.
I’d heard that he died here, but suicide? Oh man, this makes me so sad for him and his family. Past the illness, he was interesting and smart, and it sucks that he felt like he had no other way out. TempleOS was one of those things that nobody else would have even tried to make, and most who tried wouldn’t have been able to.
To everyone who reads this on the Peninsula, this number should be in your phone's address book: +1 (877) 723-7245.
That is the number for Caltrain Transit Police.
To everyone who reads this in the City, this number should be in your phone's address book: +1 (415) 553-8090.
That is the number for SFPD Dispatch.
To everyone who reads this in the City, or the East Bay, this number should be in your phone's address book: +1 (877) 679-7000.
That is the number for BART Police.
If you see anyone go on to the track—who (for Caltrain) is not crossing and going on their way—you need to call the above number—or 911—immediately. Be sure to provide a location relative to a station (such as "100 feet North of Redwood City station"), or the city name and nearby street. Transit Police in particular, I believe, have a direct link to Caltrain Dispatch, who can make certain signals (normally those near switches/crossovers) fall to red, or at least warn nearby trains.
Similarly, when you're standing on a platform, you should not be looking down at your phone. Listening to music, fine, but you should always be looking around. If for no other reason, than so that you can make sure you don't accidentally get bumped by someone else.
There have been times when I've been at Palo Alto station, where I'm right next to the yellow bump strip, and had someone rush past me walking on the bump strip. I'm fairly big (wide, not tall), and so that couldn't have been much room. In cases like that, it's good to know someone is coming close past you, so that (if there's room) you can get out of the way.
Similarly, looking around will make sure you don't accidentally get in someone else's way. Again, taking Palo Alto as an example, I've seen people step back to make way for someone moving in front of them, only to be walked into by someone walking behind them.
>(I also take it you've never been on a subway in China.)
I've not, no, so I'd appreciate additional information! I should also clarify, I'm talking about the Bay Area in California, so the behavior of people here will be different.
I have no clue what you expect to do with police phone number to prevent train suicide. People don't just camp out on the track for an hour before the train comes. It's a last second ordeal.
"According to a police report on the death, on the evening of Aug. 11, Davis was walking along the railroad tracks, with his back to an oncoming train, when he turned and faced the train before it hit him. The train engineer considered it a suicide, according to the report."
In this incident at least, there might have been enough time to halt trains on that section of the tracks until police arrived. There are signals beside the track and radios in the driver's compartment. This happens semi-regularly in my city. The train operator will come on the PA and announce that we are standing while police attend to a person on the tracks at the next station.
I don't think it's really fair to characterize his death as a suicide. Given the nature of Terry's illness, he may have been unaware of what was going on at the time of his death. The police report just sounds strange.
We'll never know what he was feeling that night. It's so sad that he's gone.
Even in otherwise (mentally) healthy people such accidents happen with some regularity but with the history of this particular illness afflicting him and the nature of the incident (walking away and then turning back before impact) makes the police's statement sounds dismissive and reckless at best and a coverup for the train company and/or avoidance of some significant workload (investigation of an avoidable death by train company vs a suicide of a mentally ill person) for themselves.
People with such illnesses typically hear voices and at any given time they could be engaged in a rather deep conversation with them(selves). Even if he was not listening to music and such or was otherwise distracted by something else it would not be surprising for a person of his illness to not being able to hear the train approaching. When he finally heard it, he apparently did turn but it was - unfortunately - too late.
Someone with more insight into the manner of train suicides would hopefully weigh in with more informed opinion but as far as I understand the typical way is to jump (not always literally) in front of the train.
Simply walking away from the train provides ample opportunity for an alert driver to stop or slow the train both of which are undesirable for the suicidal person and one (the slow train running over you) could be much worse than the other options.
Rather it seems the train driver failed (some one with more technical train knowledge would correct me here if there are some other reasons for not applying brakes in train even after seeing an - apparently - oblivious man walking away from the train) to stop the train in time and prevent an avoidable death.
I could be wrong but there is the possibility that it would be much desirable for the train company and easier (given the history of his illness) for the authorities to dismiss his death as suicide rather than hold the person(s) responsible for the accident accountable for their actions.
Depending on the train, it could take over a mile to stop. In some cases a train never fully stops (even during shift changes) as to get it going again from a dead stop would waste time.
I once saw an young man with some sort of psychosis so distracted that he walked into traffic at 5th and Folsom. And didn't realize it until he was halfway across.
Other hand a friend of mine with psychosis threw himself in front of a BART train.
Also with a train there nothing to engineer can do since the coefficient of friction between the steel wheels and track is like 0.05 vs close to 1.0 for rubber and asphalt. The engineer can't stop the train in time. These accidents take a bad toll on train engineers.
"This is not an issue of mental health in America. American society decided that Terry Davis was not a threat to himself or others, and thus permitted him the freedom to choose whether he would get help for his condition or not. That freedom may be clouded by his condition, but it is a freedom he is afforded none-the-less. Terry Davis is a success story in America being tolerant of the mentally ill." --random internet guy
45 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 95.8 ms ] threadMan killed by train had tech following By Neita Cecil As of Friday, September 7, 2018
A man killed by a train in The Dalles in mid-August had a Youtube following and was a “minor celebrity” in the computer world for doing the Herculean task of writing his own operating system, a fan said. Terrance Davis, 48, was killed Aug. 11 near West First and Terminal Avenue. He’d been homeless for some months and was schizophrenic. He spent 10 years writing his operating system, Temple OS, because God told him to, according to a 2014 tech magazine story on him titled “God’s Lonely Programmer.” John McColl, a computer engineer from Sydney, Australia, said he hoped Davis would be remembered for his achievements and not his mental illness. He said it was “kind of hard for a lay person to understand what a phenomenal achievement” it is to write an entire operating system singlehandedly. “It actually boggles my mind that one man wrote all that.” He compared it to construction, saying a man could build a house by himself, but this was “like building a skyscraper by yourself.” McColl was one of several fans of Davis who called the Chronicle to confirm his passing. One video of Davis, in which he says he’s the smartest programmer in the world, has been viewed over 44,000 times. Commenters call him a “programming legend.” One noted that while Davis proclaims himself the best, he “built his own everything so I can’t really argue with him …” Another fan, Kate Blue (not her real last name), said she wanted to keep anonymity because Davis was controversial. “He had been repeatedly banned from Youtube because his schizophrenia caused him to say things that are very offensive. He couldn’t help it,” Blue said. “He was actually a genius.” “I’m talking with some friends of his online right now and they’re devastated,” she said. Blue, a computer engineer from Phoenix, said Davis’s operating system runs on a very specific part of a computer processor and is something unique that no one else has done before. “It’s extremely quick. It’s very fast. It can only do a few things but what it does it does very quickly.” The operating system is rudimentary looking, like something from the early days of personal computers. In the 2014 article, in Motherboard, Davis said all the aspects of it were dictated by God. Blue said Davis could’ve been a Steve Jobs or a Steve Wozniak were it not for his mental illness. “He did not want to be medicated, that was his thing. And anytime he was given medications he would refuse it,” saying they “stifled his creativity and turned him into a lump.” McColl said he talked regularly to Davis, and when he was talking about computers, as he did with McColl, he was always lucid and showed no signs of delusional behavior. Another fan, a clinical psychologist from Iowa who asked that his name not be used, said Davis worked as a lead engineer at Ticketmaster and lead software engineer at Graphic Technologies before his mental illness pushed him out of the workforce in the early 2000s. He was homeless for a time in 2004, and did so to evade being hospitalized, the psychologist said. He also became homeless earlier this year for the same reason. Davis told him he became homeless “to escape the dog catchers.” He’d been living with his sister in Phoenix, the psychologist said. During his homelessness, his fans helped him, bringing him supplies. But he refused offers of housing, including from fans in Atlanta and Houston. Davis went to California, then headed to Portland sometime in April, and then walked to The Dalles, the psychologist said. In June, The Dalles Police Department got a courtesy notification from the Portland Police Bureau’s behavioral unit that Davis may be heading there and could be a danger, since he said if God told him to kill, he would. Police never found Davis at that time and never got any complaints about him, said The Dalles Police Capt. Jamie Carrico. According to a police report on the death, on...
Profound and all but...that's just a Jesus quote.
Towards the end he said some racist nazi shit. Hard for people to accept that was a symptom of his mental decline. Hard to be tollerant about that.
I first discovered him circa 2006 when the OS was called LoseThos.
I prefer to remember him from those days when he provided this community with such a breath of fresh air- rather than during his end days.
Remove the shadow ban. Give him a black bar.
His mental illness clearly impacted how he thought, wrote and spoke but we can't deny this guy is a historically important to CS and software engineering.
RIP.
Just an fyi, there is a large conspiracy basically stating that he was "made" this way by internet trolling. Similar to the outcome of "Chris Chan".
Terry in many cases showed great fondness over several popular internet/youtube girls to which end he would live stream himself trying to email and make contact with them. And to this, trolls would spoof a response email somewhere along the line of "I only date black men with huge s".
You can see a similar situation involving Dianna "physics girl" here: http://ia800600.us.archive.org/31/items/TerryADavis_TempleOS...
It is very possible that through this trolling is what lead him to get kicked out of his parent's house and subsequently dying on a set of train tracks.
It saddens me that America lacks mental health awareness.
> I can't believe this is real.
About 1% of Americans suffer from schizophrenia [0] and for many of those, this video shows what they and their family face on a daily basis. You and the people around you probably don't ever experience what happens in those gore videos, but we are surrounded by people who suffer from schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
There is currently no cure for schizophrenia and the best treatment is therapy and antipsychotic medication. If the person who is suffering from schizophrenia decides to pass on the medication and therapy (for reasons related to the disorder or because the side effects are worse than the benefits), it can be difficult to prevent situations like the one in the video of Terry from happening.
Imagine you are in a room with 100 other people. It is likely that someone in that room has experienced paranoia or groundless thinking similar to what you saw in the video. Both them and their family have to learn how to deal with the symptoms and often do not get enough support. I encourage everyone to educate themselves on mental health and consider donating to an organization that supports people with mental illness [1].
Terry uploaded a video the day before he died [2] and also removed all of his previously uploaded videos from YouTube. That leads me to believe that he committed suicide. I don't know much about his situation, but I can't help to wonder if he would still be with us if he was given more support and resources to help him deal with his illness.
Thankfully Archive.org [3] has saved a great amount of videos and links related to Terry's life if anyone would like to learn more.
[0] https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions/Sch...
[1] https://www.nami.org/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH41gGBVpkE
[3] http://ia800600.us.archive.org/31/items/TerryADavis_TempleOS...
I’m going to puke if I see one more tweet from Fred Wilson saying “the startup community needs to be open to talking about mental health” and then he talks about some trendy, socially acceptable “depression”.
I had someone I cared about on a 5150 hold. That shit breaks your heart when you know you need much more then 48 hours, and you are helpless.
Terry had people that cared about him, and what ended up happening to him is an indictment of the system.
The system failed Terry and those that cared about him.
"This is not an issue of mental health in America. American society decided that Terry Davis was not a threat to himself or others, and thus permitted him the freedom to choose whether he would get help for his condition or not. That freedom may be clouded by his condition, but it is a freedom he is afforded none-the-less. Terry Davis is a success story in America being tolerant of the mentally ill." --random internet guy
3 days ago
600+ points
200+ comments
Someone cared enough to post a link* to this article today to confirm it. I asked them to submit it as an article. When they didn't do so promptly, I deleted my comment and submitted it myself.
I never expected it to make the front page. I just hoped to get a few more eyeballs on it as a courtesy to the community.
I don't think he is being dismissed and forgotten at all.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938802
>[flagged] Terry Davis, Author of TempleOS, has passed away [unconfirmed, mods please rm] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889547
and it took a while before people believed it
My heart goes out to his family and those close to him, including all those who offered him the housing he refused. Terry has achieved well more than most of us could dream of, and honestly has left more of a net positive in the world than most of probably ever will. TempleOS singlehandedly got me interested in OS Dev, and the no doubt more than a few others as well, and with any luck many more in the future.
RIP Terry. For some reason, and I don't know why I find this somewhat shocking, but of all prominent deaths in recent memory, his death leaves me feeling the most emotional.
It hit me really hard too.
I think it's because some of us witnessed that his spiral downward was partly because of him getting trolled by the 4chan crowd, we witnessed his helplessness, we witnessed him getting bullied.
He was a star, but he had his demons. It's such a great tragedy, to lose him now, and to have lost him earlier as well.
His blunt honestly with stuff in his own life helped me in my own. We've certainly all screwed up.
OS on straight bare metal— a dream we morals can only speculate in our docker, VM’d, noisy neighbor lives. The purity of that. Protected memory, pashaw. Multi user?, svga? Bloat.
C code on a terminal line strait into ring 0.
He died as he lived.
That is the number for Caltrain Transit Police.
To everyone who reads this in the City, this number should be in your phone's address book: +1 (415) 553-8090.
That is the number for SFPD Dispatch.
To everyone who reads this in the City, or the East Bay, this number should be in your phone's address book: +1 (877) 679-7000.
That is the number for BART Police.
If you see anyone go on to the track—who (for Caltrain) is not crossing and going on their way—you need to call the above number—or 911—immediately. Be sure to provide a location relative to a station (such as "100 feet North of Redwood City station"), or the city name and nearby street. Transit Police in particular, I believe, have a direct link to Caltrain Dispatch, who can make certain signals (normally those near switches/crossovers) fall to red, or at least warn nearby trains.
Similarly, when you're standing on a platform, you should not be looking down at your phone. Listening to music, fine, but you should always be looking around. If for no other reason, than so that you can make sure you don't accidentally get bumped by someone else.
You're going to have to explain this one a bit more. (I also take it you've never been on a subway in China.)
Similarly, looking around will make sure you don't accidentally get in someone else's way. Again, taking Palo Alto as an example, I've seen people step back to make way for someone moving in front of them, only to be walked into by someone walking behind them.
>(I also take it you've never been on a subway in China.)
I've not, no, so I'd appreciate additional information! I should also clarify, I'm talking about the Bay Area in California, so the behavior of people here will be different.
I have no clue what you expect to do with police phone number to prevent train suicide. People don't just camp out on the track for an hour before the train comes. It's a last second ordeal.
"According to a police report on the death, on the evening of Aug. 11, Davis was walking along the railroad tracks, with his back to an oncoming train, when he turned and faced the train before it hit him. The train engineer considered it a suicide, according to the report."
In this incident at least, there might have been enough time to halt trains on that section of the tracks until police arrived. There are signals beside the track and radios in the driver's compartment. This happens semi-regularly in my city. The train operator will come on the PA and announce that we are standing while police attend to a person on the tracks at the next station.
We'll never know what he was feeling that night. It's so sad that he's gone.
Even in otherwise (mentally) healthy people such accidents happen with some regularity but with the history of this particular illness afflicting him and the nature of the incident (walking away and then turning back before impact) makes the police's statement sounds dismissive and reckless at best and a coverup for the train company and/or avoidance of some significant workload (investigation of an avoidable death by train company vs a suicide of a mentally ill person) for themselves.
People with such illnesses typically hear voices and at any given time they could be engaged in a rather deep conversation with them(selves). Even if he was not listening to music and such or was otherwise distracted by something else it would not be surprising for a person of his illness to not being able to hear the train approaching. When he finally heard it, he apparently did turn but it was - unfortunately - too late.
Someone with more insight into the manner of train suicides would hopefully weigh in with more informed opinion but as far as I understand the typical way is to jump (not always literally) in front of the train.
Simply walking away from the train provides ample opportunity for an alert driver to stop or slow the train both of which are undesirable for the suicidal person and one (the slow train running over you) could be much worse than the other options.
Rather it seems the train driver failed (some one with more technical train knowledge would correct me here if there are some other reasons for not applying brakes in train even after seeing an - apparently - oblivious man walking away from the train) to stop the train in time and prevent an avoidable death.
I could be wrong but there is the possibility that it would be much desirable for the train company and easier (given the history of his illness) for the authorities to dismiss his death as suicide rather than hold the person(s) responsible for the accident accountable for their actions.
Depending on the train, it could take over a mile to stop. In some cases a train never fully stops (even during shift changes) as to get it going again from a dead stop would waste time.
Other hand a friend of mine with psychosis threw himself in front of a BART train.
Also with a train there nothing to engineer can do since the coefficient of friction between the steel wheels and track is like 0.05 vs close to 1.0 for rubber and asphalt. The engineer can't stop the train in time. These accidents take a bad toll on train engineers.