How about something covers the third rail or cuts power to it when the train isn't there.

Saw a bunch of them last year walking over BCs campus.

They deenergize it for non revenue hours service I think, but you still are supposed to act like it's live otherwise you get in a bad habit. Most of the work I've done was during revenue service so it was active. I've met some people who have touched it and lived.

When you roll over and play dead for the Nazis, you end up with really good rail systems.

Look, we all just want to get home to our hot plates

Don't touch the pantograph.

What the hell is train surfing?!!

I see them in Concord.

The third is not live constantly only gets you if you touch the third rail and another metal completing the circuit and shocked to death As kids we used walk the third rail for a hits and giggles . . you can walk it just don't touch anything else . 2 feet on the third rail no problem 1 foot on one foot on another rail huge mistake. Did he fall or !!!???. Walking the tracks still safer than train surfing!

Stranded is a bit dramatic. See this all the time on the cape. Odds are it's fine.

I think they are pretty good for on track work.

Saw them at world’s end in hingham near sunset last summer and it was like, unbelievable. I hadn’t seen any in ages and thought they weren’t around anymore.

Lol

This is super cool to know, thanks for sharing!

Yeah, always work as if it's live, but still, when you're on a hirail vehicle, not being 100% certain that another train isn't going to come on to your track is terrifying

> Everyone talks about it like it’s so obvious

There's a reason for that

But that's in a first world country

What if there’s a dunks gift card down there

you could have typed fewer words in to google and gotten the answer faster

I’d rather electrify the commuter rail than invest in platform edge doors

I see them all summer long on humid nights out in Holliston

As a kid in metrowest I remember them in summer, especially around raspberry bushes. Tons of them on the Cape and Islands nowadays.

Seen em in Middlesex Fells a couple years back. Just a few, but still felt like magic.

NO PADDINGTON

THE THIRD RAIL

So you have the two rails the train travels on, and then a third "rail" which is really just a thick (like, several inches thick) wire carrying about a thousand amps of current. The train has another wire that drags along this third rail as it moves, drawing current and making the motor moves.

Since it takes about 1 amp of current to kill a person, touching the third rail is usually a pretty quick way to get yourself killed.