Railroad Suicide Delays Holiday Train Traffic

SANTA ANA — An apparent suicide Wednesday night on the Amtrak tracks backed up a dozen trains and delayed about 1,000 passengers for two hours, authorities said.

An Amtrak train from Los Angeles to San Diego with 115 passengers when it hit a 22-year-old man just south of the Garden Grove Freeway about 5:30 p.m., authorities said.

The train sat for about two hours while police investigated the scene, affecting 12 other trains in Southern California, said Amtrak spokesman Dominick Albano.

He said Christmas Eve is one of Amtrak’s busiest travel days, and the Los Angeles-to-San Diego corridor is the railroad’s second-busiest route, carrying 6 million passengers annually. Only the Boston-New York-Washington route carries more, he said.

All the affected trains were back on their way shortly after 7:30 p.m., he said.

The victim, whose last known address was in Garden Grove, was not identified pending notification of family.

No one on the train was injured. Albano did not know the train’s speed when it hit the man.

“The engineer was very emotionally distraught and asked to be relieved, which is very common,” Albano said. With suicides, he said, the victim often makes eye contact with the engineer before impact. “It’s almost as if they’re defying the locomotive.”