This last Friday afternoon at 4:23pm, Metrolink train number 111 crashed head-on with a Union-Pacific freight train between the Chatsworth and Simi Valley stations on the Ventura County Line. For the last three years, I have ridden up and down this line each week day to school and work. This Fall, I’ve been taking the exact same 3:35pm train from LA Union Station to our home in Simi Valley on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Friday, that train crashed, killing 25 people and injuring 135 (80 are still in critical condition). Next Friday, I would have been on that same train, coming home from a scheduled event.

As a local resident and Metrolink passenger, I have been watching the news continually, and have grieved much amidst the emerging, horrific news that many people I have sat beside and across from the last few years were the victims of Friday’s disaster. As our modern drive to quantify disaster proceeds, and as statistics often denature and reduce very human realities to charts and projections (I hope that the news soon gets beyond its almost unthinking number-crunching coverage of the event), I would like to iterate that the loss of the lively faces, voices, hearts, minds, and spirits of the people I have shared transport with on this train the last three years have been simply irreducible. There has seldom been an afternoon or morning where one could not hear the caring discussions, laughter, and the general goodwill of passengers commuting on this train.

One of the best things about riding this train has been that it’s not only a more convenient, cost-efficient, and less stressful way of getting to school and work—but a way to truly travel and converse with people with whom one might have little in common otherwise. As we Southern Californians spend a great deal of time riding around in the private fiefdoms of our own cars, the train is a very public space where commonality meets diversity. For me, it’s been representative of the idea that, no matter what the challenges, life together is better than life apart. I’ve found it to be one of the truly civic spaces of local association amidst America’s increasingly privatized, simulated society. Those who were a part of this disaster on Friday constituted a unique community who will be dearly missed. I’d like to extend my heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims, and all those with injuries and in critical conditions in local area hospitals. I am taking a leave of absence from riding on the Ventura County line, and will be working with (and call on others to work with) our local community to make sure that no accident like this ever happens again.

Don Waisanen