(lighthearted music)
- Hi, and welcome to "Between the Lines".
I'm your host, Lea Woodford
and with me today is book author Lynn Radice.
Lynn, welcome to the show. - Thank you.
- "Terror By Rail".
Wow, that gets your attention right away,
let's talk about this.
- It does, I was actually,
I'm a survivor of Amtrak 188.
Been, basically May 12th of 2015.
I wrote a lovely book of my experience and
been doing a lot of speaking on it recently as well.
- Right? - Right.
- So, let's talk about that day
and why you had to write about it.
- Well basically this was,
my conductor went 106 miles an hour on a curve meant for 50.
And killed eight people, 46 were critically injured
and 238 lives had been changed forever.
He is still
out.
Basically, he will have a trial I believe in September.
So it's been a very long time
and you know, I'm not exactly sure.
I mean I have PTSD from it,
I've learned a lot from it.
I hit bottom because of it,
literally lost everything.
Had to move in with my mother,
my business cycled downwards, and
between my health issues, et cetera
and building myself back up.
So on the way up is much better. (laughing)
- But this book, you're very raw in this book.
Tell me, take us back to the day of the train crash,
tell me about that.
- Yeah, so basically on May 12, 2015.
I was in
Amtrak 188.
I
wake up and I'm literally unconscious.
I wake up and I have soot
and I don't know if I still have teeth in my mouth.
I was buried in luggage.
I did not know how to get out of a black box.
No one knows how to get out of a train.
There's nothing lit up,
there's no glow in the dark anything.
Literally it is so much different than anybody realizes.
To be stuck in a black box and not know how to get out.
You know in airports you have,
everybody knows you put on the oxygen mask,
you do this, you do that,
you know exactly what to do.
Not one person's ever told you,
"Where do you find an emergency window?
"How do you open an emergency window?"
No one tells you basically that doors shut upon impact
and it's locked.
There's only a sidebar
where a conductor lets you out of a train.
The whole thing to me is just spooky and I relive it.
But to literally you know have seats hanging on top of you,
and you have to you know,
A man held me up as the seats were there
and I had to figure out how to open a window in the dark.
And then literally to push the window,
I had a broken shoulder blade at that point.
Only 1% of people actually ever break their shoulder blade.
It's the hardest bone in the body.
And I had to climb up and
do a push up and a pull up to the top of the train.
- With a broken shoulder blade?
- (laughs) With a broken shoulder blade,
that to me is surreal.
It's like turning over a car you know
when people have a baby or something.
I realize now how crazy that was
and then to get up and then to look over
and see five tankers of oil and to realize
I was no longer alive,
like I could be dead again. (chuckles)
It was like, "I got air, yay I'm out!"
And it's like, "No, I'm dead again."
It was really like this mind-game with me and then
you know to have to jump
and know whether that's live rails
or basically you're gonna break your neck on the way down.
You know, to jump and land,
and then you know, literally,
I mean there's no helicopters, there's no lights,
there's nothing.
There's no one with cellphones.
You're thinking you're in the middle of an oil field.
(chuckles) You smell steel, you know everything's smoking.
It's just like you're gonna blow up.
I mean it really was life and death.
And even when I had to jump down, I mean I thought
there were still people in the train
and I get upset
anyhow.
But I knew the train was on fire and it's like,
it's what happens.
You know I had my girls, I had to live.
So,
that's a hard one.
- Thank you for sharing that with us.
How hard was it for you to write this book and relive it?
- It's impossible.
For me to go back in the past
and constantly live through this accident
where literally I did think I was getting blown up and
you know every step of the way
to have to go back through it.
And then you know as I said,
I did have a romantic relationship.
I traveled the world, I had a lovely gentleman.
You know, I lived a nice lifestyle and then
things changed after this, right?
So I became a different person.
You know I was working and successful and fun
and traveling the world and having this lovely lifestyle.
Well that's not who I was anymore.
I was kind of a grumpy idiot,
and I was on pain-meds and not succeeding,
and not being able to have the brain-fog and
I was just not myself for a very long time.
And so obviously, that didn't work out
and then I ended up, I couldn't focus on my business.
I couldn't focus on anything and you know,
it let it all hit the fan and it was very tough.
- Now you sharing your story,
is that changing the way the trains are,
the safety regulations for the train industry
or has that changed?
'Cause I am surprised
that we don't have
safety instructions on trains,
and seat belts,
and we do it for the airlines,
why don't we do it for trains?
And it's still a common problem.
They're still going too fast.
- Yeah, so I'm a very big kind of
accidental advocate, right? (chuckles)
I'm not a train expert by any means
but because I was in this.
Yeah, my train accident actually did change some things.
They do now have cameras
inside the cabins which is interesting, and
mine was the one that
set up the whole kind of thing where they're gonna have
the automatic breaking systems, right?
But still they keep extending, extending the deadlines.
They did not make the deadline,
they're not gonna make the deadline,
and it's only for certain trains which nobody knows either.
So it's only certain trains got that,
that it was mandated for which doesn't make any sense
because you have oil-tanker trains,
you have transit trains, you have
every different type of train should have
a breaking system when there's something on the tracks.
We have self-driving cars (chuckles).
Why can't we stop something before the train,
you know something's on the rail, like, why?
So you know that type of thing, but you're correct as far as
there are no directions, there's no instructions,
there's no posting, there's no sidebar from the top.
You know the train may tip, I mean
you would think a couple slats down the side.
You know how to open a window
should be a basic concept on how to open it.
No, there's nothing done on train safety.
I keep track of most trains that derail
because my Facebook friends send these to me,
but we've had almost 290 trains derail since last year.
- That's frightening. - 290.
- That's frightening. - It's crazy.
So you know, obviously, there's things on the rail,
there's people on the rail,
there's things that are going on, et cetera.
But you're right, should we have seatbelts?
Could they be going slower?
You know, there should be some kind of
mechanisms to be able to stop, but no, there's no one,
that's a very fun party question.
How do you get out of a train?
Not one person can ever tell you
how to open a train window or train door.
It's a very fun party question and why is that?
To me, it's unacceptable.
I don't know why that is.
You know it's happening more and more.
As I said, over 290 trains have derailed.
Everybody can tell me the one in Washington.
They're like, "Oh yeah, the one in Washington." (chuckles)
I'm like, "Yeah, everybody knows that one."
That's all they know.
So I mean, last week there was an oil-tanker train
that blew up in Texas
and the woman next to me at your conference
did not know about it.
She lives in Texas, you know?
There's strange things going on, there's no train safety,
there's no accountability,
and yeah, I don't know why.
- What are you hoping to gain through this book?
'Cause this book is really raw.
You really expose yourself in what you went through
and you're honest about the PTSD.
How do you hope to use this book as a platform?
- I had many different goals when I first came out.
When I first came out I really wanted to
set the world on fire and change train safety.
I mean that was my vision that you know,
my god, no one else can go through this.
Like whether it's the speed, or the safety,
or everybody knows how to get out of train.
But it's not just train, it's buses, it's subways,
it's every single thing,
and every country is a little different, right?
But besides planes, we don't have IDs to get on trains.
Not necessarily do you have to have an ID,
I mean you can walk on some trains half-way through.
Who are we hiring to get on the trains?
What kind of checks and balances are we doing?
Who has access to the rail?
- We don't have the kind of safety
that we do in the airports. - Correct.
- Or in the planes. - Correct.
And when 9/11 happened, we sured up every, every
you guys all know, every airline so quickly.
We put those doors on, boom, done,
like made sure that that would never happen again.
What the heck are we doing about trains?
- That's a good question.
- You know, like why are we waiting for something,
you know, we have to mandate security.
We have to mandate baggage checks.
We have to mandate who has access to the rail.
We have to mandate all these things that
we don't have in the rail.
That was my goal is to come out
and do a whole thing on kind of train safety.
It's really turned into much more of a motivational
book and really changed my life
and become much more of an inspirational book for women
who've hit bottom and back, and
entrepreneurs who've hit bottom and back
because I've done it
and really, you know, when I hit bottom
it's finding your way back
and that's really what the book has become.
But initially it was about train safety.
- Who knew it was gonna become a motivational book?
How great is that? - (laughs) I know,
it's awesome.
You never know where your life's going.
- Wow, thank you so much. - Thank you.
Thank you for having me on,
it's so much fun.
- Well, you had me at 290 trains.
That's amazing.
- Shockers, yes. - I know,
and we don't know that
and I think our viewing audience needs to.
Thank you so much for being
on the show. - You're welcome,
thank you so much,
thank you. - Thank you, you are welcome.
This has been Lea Woodford with "Between the Lines",
thanks for watching.