It is Dangerous to Walk Across Railway Lines

What kind of a blog post is this, so trivial? Is he going to talk about a situation wherein he saw someone being run over a train? That would be macabre. This one is not for me, I hear you telling yourself.

Please do not be in such haste. Part of the title – “Walk Across Railway Lines” –  is where the crux of this post lies. This is a photo essay, with a number of photographs (I had taken while walking across the railway tracks) – four of them – and survived. It is this “journey” I am going to show and tell you about in this post.

 

There is nothing special about the above photographs except that it looks long enough to be the “Stairway to Heaven”, by Led Zeppelin. It is not just the look of the stairway, but the meaning attributed to the lyrics by others. So, climb up, nearly sixty steps (about nine meters) and when I reach the top I wait for the Heaven to open up for me. Alas, it did, but it was not the Heaven I had imagined.

 

The above picture is a compulsion of mine, to try to rebut in advance people calling me a liar. One can clearly see that the bridge (called an ROB, Road Overbridge, across three visible train racks and one not captured)

The Gates of Heaven are open to me – the footpath separated by New Jersey Turn Pike barriers on the traffic side of the pedestrian footpath, on either side; see picture below)

 

The above is what I expected and what I got are shown the following photographs:

Look at the heap of black stuff piled up on the footpath (the far side of the photograph). It must bring to your mind the collapse of a bridge just outside of Minneapolis where construction material were piled up on one side of the carriageway and was blamed for the collapse of the bridge. Yes, I am afraid that this black pile could lead to such an incident. I will go back to showing a few more pictures, brief comments as deserving of the photos.

(I had great difficulty negotiating the few steps without being pricked by a few of the thorny outgrowth on the side). The photo is taken from above the growth, fater negotiating the throns successfully!

 

 

(This is the most dangerous failure – on the footpath – because and only because it is not even filled up by mud and there are reinforcement bars protruding out from the edges of the remaining concrete slab). If you were to fall through this hole, you do not need to spend any money amputating your leg; the hole will do it for you, for free).

Now to the last photograph in this series. The Stairway to Heaven is not a heavenly, leisurely, pleasant climb. You do not have rails to hold on to, at least in one stretch,

 

No explanations asked and none given.

It is with this in mind, my title says, by implication,that crossing the rail tracks at the rail level is safer than taking the pedestrian pathway, climb up nine meters, walk along a treacherous stretch of perhaps 25 meters and climb down. Your pathway to heaven is more likely to lead you straight to the gates of hell.

Raghuram Ekambaram