Fitchburg Line train hits somebody in Waltham

It's of using standard railroad nomenclature. For whatever reasons, "trespasser" is the default term for a person who is standing/sleeping/whatevering on train tracks.

But, you know, it's not like there are gangs of rogue commuter-rail trains roaming the streets looking for poor innocent people to hunt and kill. No doubt, some people have died through no fault of their own (what if crossing gates malfunctioned?). But people drive around crossing gates and do other really stupid things on train tracks all the time.

I can attest to the latter, right at the spot where the person died, because for two years I lived in a Brandeis dorm across those very tracks from the rest of the campus. And I and every other kid who lived there ALWAYS would run across the tracks and cross over the athletic fields on the way to class, no matter how many times the school would tell us not to and no matter how many times they patched the fence that somebody kept cutting open again, because it was a shortcut over walking down to the South Street crossing and up the hill. None of us got run down, and we tended to think the more immediate hazard was the shotputters who practiced just on the other side of the fence, but that doesn't mean it wasn't stupid and we weren't just incredibly lucky (it's not like we would, oh, check train schedules, or even be able to hear trains coming from Boston until they were pretty much right there).