Especially when it’s an electrified train. This is an interesting and story from not far away from the Depleted Cranium headquarters. It seems that a man was hitching a free ride ontop of a Metro-North commuter train (yes ontop, as in holding onto the roof of) which was headed from New York to Connecticut. Everything went fine, or at least as well as could be expected, for most of his trip out of the Big Apple. The train uses a ground-level third rail to power it’s electric-driven cars when it comes out of Grand Central Station, so the gentleman was not in any danger of electrocution.

That is.. until a few stops later. After leaving the New York City area, the train no longer uses a third rail system and instead switches to an overhead wire system. According to this page, the trains are actually capable of dual-voltage and dual current operation. The third rail system is a 750 volt DC system but the overhead cables are AC and about 12.5 kilovolts. The warning sign on the tracks states that they are 11,000 volts, but who’s counting? But whatever the voltage and current type of the overhead wires, they were sufficient to give the hapless rider a rather rude awakening.

When the train pulled into Pelham station, the crew began the procedure to switch to the overhead electrical system by raising the electrical collectors. At first everything went according to plan, but then they suddenly lost power in one of the cars. When an engineer climbed onto the roof to investigate the problem, he found Ricardo Chavez, laying on the roof with his clothing on fire. The crew put out the flames with a fire extinguisher and a rescue crew removed Mr. Chavez using fiberglass lineman’s tools, as it appeared his body may still have been electrified or in danger of being re-electrified. He survived the experience but is apparently now in the hospital with some very nasty burns. He is said to be in good condition by a hospital spokesperson.

He’s pretty lucky to have survived such an experience and is expected to recover. So much for AC being the “deadly current.”

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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