6 MBTA Commuter Rail vs. motor vehicle crashes this year: What’s to blame?

Since the beginning of this year, a half-dozen MBTA Commuter Rail trains have collided with vehicles that crossed onto railroad tracks, some with deadly consequences for the drivers.

In February, a commuter rail train struck a car in Concord, leaving the driver with minor injuries. Three other collisions followed in Canton between late February and early April, injuring a person in each case.

Then, in separate incidents days apart in late April and early May, vehicles entered the paths of commuter rail trains in Abington and Cohasset, killing the drivers in both collisions.

In all six recent incidents, authorities said safety mechanisms, including railroad crossing gates and warning lights, had functioned as intended and that driver errors were to blame.

Nationally, collisions between trains and motor vehicles have fallen 81% in the last five decades, according to Operation Lifesaver, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving safety around railroads.

About 2,200 such incidents occurred last year, down from a high of roughly 12,000 annually in the early 1970s, the group says, citing Federal Railroad Administration data.

Out of nearly 160,000 commuter rail trains that ran last year, nine were involved in collisions at railroad crossings, according to Keolis, the company that operates the MBTA’s 14 commuter rail lines.

Which makes the spate of recent incidents all the more dismaying and confusing to local officials and public transit authorities in Greater Boston.

“It’s terrible for everybody. Nobody wants this,” Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, said. “One is too many.”

Of the commuter rail’s 63 collisions at street crossings since 2019, the warning system functioned properly in all but one case, Keolis said.

The lone exception appears to have been a January 2022 crash in Wilmington in which the MBTA said human error played a role. A maintenance worker did not return the railroad crossing gates to their normal operating settings after routine work earlier in the day, likely preventing them from dropping as a train approached, the T said. The train hit a car, killing the 68-year-old driver.

Authorities have not described similar failures in any of this year’s crashes.

“In a lot of cases, the train was doing train things” — that is, proceeding forward at an appropriate speed when a road vehicle crossed into its path, to devastating results, said Christopher Podgurski, the president of Mass Coastal Railroad and representative for the town of Canton on the MBTA Advisory Board.

Commuter rail trains, weighing potentially hundreds of tons, can reach 80 miles per hour, according to the T. While their ability to stop can depend on weather, train size and other variables, braking a moving locomotive is never a simple or quick feat.

Even a train moving slowly “can’t stop on a dime, and it can’t swerve,” said MBTA Transit Police Officer Dana DeLorenzo, who serves as the Massachusetts state coordinator for Operation Lifesaver.

There’s a reason trains always have the right of way — even over police cars, fire trucks and ambulances.

What’s behind the recent collisions?

Accidental collisions between trains and vehicles can often be attributed to distraction, confusion or impatience on behalf of drivers, DeLorenzo, who has served with the Transit Police for two decades, said.

After the first collision in Canton on Feb. 26, a Wednesday morning, MBTA officials said the driver had failed to stop at the gate, drove onto the tracks and struck a passing train.

Two occupants of the car were uninjured. A train passenger was brought to the hospital for evaluation, the Canton Citizen, a community news outlet, reported, citing local public safety officials.

The following evening, on a Canton street just a half-mile away, another driver entered a railroad crossing and was struck by a commuter rail train.

“For unknown reasons,” the Citizen reported, the driver stopped on the tracks.

The person escaped with minor injuries. Their vehicle did not.

If a driver finds themselves stuck on railroad tracks and unable to drive away as a train bears down, they should leave their belongings behind and run from the car as swiftly as possible, DeLorenzo said.

“You’ll get a new car,” she said. “That’s why God invented insurance.”

On April 9, a commuter rail train hit a tractor-trailer at the same Canton railroad crossing as the Feb. 27 collision after the vehicle stopped on the tracks between the two protective gates.

The truck driver escaped as the train barreled toward him and was uninjured. A train passenger had minor injuries, according to the Boston Globe.

In all three cases, the railroad crossing gates and flashing lights and bells that signal an inbound train functioned properly, MBTA officials said.

It was strange that there had been three recent crashes so close together, Canton Town Administrator Charles Doody wrote in an email to MassLive.

A train hadn’t collided with a motor vehicle there in his memory, and he had worked for the town for more than 30 years, beginning as a firefighter and serving as fire chief from 2009 to 2023.

“Anecdotally, 2025 has seen a noticeable increase” in railroad crossing collisions between trains and motor vehicles, MBTA Chief Operating Officer Ryan Coholan wrote to Podgurski in a letter last week. “This is not exclusive to one area of the system, but spread out across several locations.”

Since the three collisions, Canton officials have repainted warning stripes ahead of the railroad crossings and added signage, Doody said.

The gates and warning systems were also properly functioning when commuter rail trains struck a woman driving in Abington on April 30 and a man driving in Cohasset on May 3, killing both.

In Abington, the woman appeared to have driven onto the tracks despite the safety gates being lowered and the warning system activated, Transit Police Superintendent Richard Sullivan said.

Witnesses told WCVB-TV that they heard the train’s horn sound and brakes screech before the crash.

Preventing train vs. vehicle collisions

In post-crash investigations, officials examine video footage and interview witnesses, including train engineers and conductors, seeking to understand why a vehicle or person entered the train tracks — and whether the driver or pedestrian may have done so intentionally, DeLorenzo said.

From the moment railroad crossing gates reach the ground, 25 to 30 seconds pass before a train appears.

“It’s not supposed to be longer than that,” Podgurski said, since drivers may suspect a train isn’t coming and go around the gates.

But sitting in their cars, drivers still sometimes become impatient, assume the gate is malfunctioning, that no train is coming, and make the tragic error of steering around the barrier, DeLorenzo said.

“We say, ‘I’ve got to get to this doctor‘s appointment,’” she said. “We don’t see a train coming and drive around the gate. That’s the sad part of life — we all make mistakes.”

Other drivers are distracted, perhaps in tandem with their impatience. They may not see the gates lowered ahead, blocking off a railroad crossing and a nearing train.

“Don’t tell me there isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t answered a text or picked up the phone, or whatever it may be,” while at the wheel, DeLorenzo. ”We get distracted. We all do. It’s human nature."

Tailing too close to the car in front of them, some drivers become trapped on the tracks when traffic stops. If at that moment the gates begin to drop, some people freeze in panic, she said.

If caught in a circumstance where they can’t drive off the tracks, Operation Lifesaver advises drivers to leave their car and belongings behind and run away at a 45-degree angle in the direction the train is approaching, to avoid debris.

But drivers should also know they can drive through a railroad crossing gate if needed to get off the tracks, DeLorenzo said. The gates are designed to break off easily or swing out of the way if a driver needs to go through them. Breaking a gate is preferable to remaining in harm’s way, she said.

Gates rarely malfunction, she added. And if they do, they are designed to default to the down position, blocking traffic as a failsafe.

Operation Lifesaver hopes that greater awareness of the causes of railroad crossing collisions can reduce their frequency, and that drivers knowing how to react to being trapped on a train track can save lives.

In recent weeks, DeLorenzo said, T officials have increased their messaging to communities in Southeast Massachusetts, where the agency reopened commuter rail service in March for the first time in decades.

In recent years, the MBTA has also painted new lanes and fog lines on roads and added reflective markers near rail crossings, and installed brighter LED lights on crossing gates to make them more visible to drivers — measures MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng adopted on the Long Island Railroad when he served as its president, a T spokesperson said.

The agency also partnered with navigation companies such as Waze to notify drivers when they were approaching a railroad crossing.

Operation Lifesaver also stresses that pedestrians should never walk on railroad tracks. It warns that people who venture onto tracks are sometimes unaware of their surroundings, whether because of headphones, inebriation or another cause, increasing their chances of being struck by a train.

“Tracks are for trains,” DeLorenzo said. “Not for people.”