From: lfsheldon@gmail.com   
      
   On 2/17/2015 19:03, Nobody wrote:   
   > She doesn't need to know how many trains per hour use that main line,   
   >>given that she knew there was a specific train coming and she could   
   >>see it coming.   
      
      
   This thread has reach max tedium and I'm about to filter it off, but as   
   a parting gift.   
      
   One of my favorite sources ofexamples of the sheer idiocy of Important   
   People is the intersection of Churchill Road and Alma Street in Palo   
   Alto, California.   
      
   Now I have not been there in years so I have no idea what the current   
   situation is but when I lived, worked, and shopped in the area through   
   the 1970s and 1980s the intersection was light controlled and and there   
   was space for a total of four north-east bound cars between the limit   
   line and the place where passing west ("north") bound trains ("Caltrain"   
   nee Southern Pacific Peninsula Service) would remove bumper stickers.   
      
   Now the part that my memory fails to explain is the fact that there was   
   an interlock from the rail signals to the car signals such that when the   
   bells and lights started, Alma and south-west bound Charleston got red   
   lights and north-east bound Charleston got green lights.  This should   
   have drained the track crossing, but maybe the north-east lights went to   
   red before the guard came down.   
      
   In any case (and btw, the nature if the streets is that it is virtually   
   certain that all vehicle traffic is (was) local), every time a train   
   went by there would be four cars between the limit line and the tracks.   
     An d about 8 times in 10, a fifth car would come up behind and go into   
   a spastic panic; horn honking, arm waving,   
   spittle-coating-the-windshield panic.  But there was no place for the   
   four of us to go.   
      
   Hmm--nobody ever got hit while I was there--maybe draining green lights   
   had not yet come up for us, but did come up in time (nowadays I don't   
   know what happens with the mid-westerners that have moved there--they   
   never like to enter an intersection except on an amber or red light.   
   And we didn't have chat and angry birds and words cause additional delays.   
      
    From the descriptions in this thread I am betting "suicide"--we used to   
   get a lot of those.   
      
   --   
   The unique Characteristics of System Administrators:   
      
   The fact that they are infallible; and,   
      
   The fact that they learn from their mistakes.   
      
      
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