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- 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 a, 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.
- All 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 on 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 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, it's much better.
(laughs)
- 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.
In airports, everybody knows you put on the oxygen mask,
you do this, you do that, you know exactly what to do.
Not one person has ever told you
where you find an emergency window,
how do you open an emergency window.
No one tells you basically doors shut upon impact
and it's locked.
You know, 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 have seats hanging on top of you,
and you have to, you know,
a man helped 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 one percent of people actually 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.
And it's one of those--
- With a broken shoulder blade.
- (laughs) With a broken shoulder blade.
That to me is surreal.
It's like turning over a car
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.
(laughs)
I was like I got air, yay, I'm out.
And it's like, no, I'm dead again.
(laughs)
It was really like this mind game with me,
and then to have to jump and know whether that's live rails
or basically you're gonna break your neck on the way down.
To jump and land, and then literally to not,
I mean, there's no helicopters, there's no lights,
there's nothing.
There's no one with cell phones.
You're thinking you're in the middle of an oil field.
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 thought there was still people in the train.
I get upset.
(gasps)
(voice breaks)
But I knew the train was on fire,
and it's like it's what happens.
It's like you know,
yeah, 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 every step of the way to have to go back through it,
and then, as I said, I did have a romantic relationship,
I traveled the world, I had a lovely gentleman.
I lived a nice lifestyle.
And then, things changed after this, right?
I became a different person.
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 I ended up I couldn't focus on my business,
I couldn't focus on anything,
and 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?
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.
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.
Why can't we stop something before the train,
you know there's something on the rail, why?
And so, 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 over.
You know the train may tip, I mean you would think.
They're a couple of slats down the side.
How to open a window should be a basic concept
on how to open it.
No, there's nothing done on train safety.
We've actually had, 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.
And so, 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 seat belts?
Could they be going slower?
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?
It, to me, is unacceptable.
I don't know why that is that it's happening more and more,
as I said, over 290 trains have derailed.
Everybody can tell me the one in Washington, right?
- Right.
- They're like, oh, the one in Washington.
I'm like, yeah, everybody knows that one.
That's all they know.
So 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, 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 and what you went through,
and you're honest about the PTSD.
How do you hope to use this book as a platform?
- Well, 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,
my god, no one else can go through this.
Whether it's the speed, or the safety,
or everybody knows how to get out of a 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 could walk on some trains halfway 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 airport.
- Correct.
- Or the planes.
- Correct.
And when 9/11 happened, we sured up every,
you guys all know, every airline so quickly.
We put those doors on, boom, done.
We made sure that that would never happen again.
What the heck are we doing about trains?
- That's a good question.
- You know, why are we waiting for something?
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 of these things
that we don't have in the rail.
And I really, that was my goal is to come out
and do a whole thing on 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.
Really, when I hit bottom,
it's really finding your way back,
and that's really what the book is 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.
- Never know.
Now, Lynn, how can our viewing audience
get a hold of your book?
- My book's available in many different places.
Amazon, Target, it's available basically
Morgan James is my publisher, so they put it out
in many different places,
but Amazon is pretty much the,
Barnes & Noble, it's available.
Pretty much everywhere, it's definitely readily available.
- Wow, thank you so much.
- Thank you.
Thank you for having me on.
It's so much fun.
- Well, you had me at 290 train derails.
That's amazing.
- (laughs) 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.