Suicide on the Tube
July 30, 2008
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On July 13, my westbound train on the Central Line of the London Underground subway system was pulling into Queensway station when it abruptly stopped. The driver’s voice came over the intercom. The message was meant for the control room, but we passengers heard it too. “We have got one under,” the driver squawked. “Send emergency crews immediately. He jumped. We have one under.”
My memories of what followed unfold in a series of images. I remember filing to the front of the train and thinking how it felt like leaving the bus on a school trip. I remember putting my hand on the shoulder of the driver and saying “I’m sorry” as he gesticulated frantically at two platform colleagues. I remember glancing down under the driver’s carriage and telling my girlfriend not to look, and noticing how reassuring the warm bodies of the passengers felt as we crowded into a packed elevator to leave the station. I remember a blur of fire trucks and ambulances (how did they get there so fast?), the screaming sirens and, later, a woman I recognized from my carriage pretending to browse a window of real estate ads as she wept.
There are plenty of ways to commit suicide, but few more public than turning a multiton moving train full of passengers into a bullet. Last year in the U.K., 194 people killed themselves on the tracks of mass-transit systems, with some 50 of those choosing the sooty tunnels of the Tube. New York City’s subway averages 26 suicides a year. In Paris, 24 died on the tracks of the Métro last year. While it is a fallacy to imagine any suicide as a solitary act — even the tidiest affair leaves survivors stricken — death by train is a particularly declaratory form of killing oneself. It makes the act a form of theater — for the driver, watching it all from behind his windshield, and for the rest of us.
Read the rest of this article at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1827064,00.html
By EBEN HARRELL with reporting by Camille Agon
Did you know:
People who commit suicide by throwing themselves under tube are called “one-unders”. In New York they are known as “track pizza”
The peak hour for tube suicides is 11am.
Victoria and King’s Cross record the highest number of tube suicides each year. This isn’t surprising as Victoria is the tube’s busiest station with 85 million passengers each year and King’s Cross has 70 million passengers each year.
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