Mother Of Girl Hit By Train Sets Out To Warn Others

Trish Hoehne was about to toss the Spokane Railway Credit Union newsletter when two sentences grabbed her attention.

“Ever met anyone who was hit by a train? I didn’t think so.” The words almost made her smile.

“‘Yeah,’ I thought. ‘I really have,”’ she says, and, as if to prove it, holds out a photograph of a hospitalized girl.

Metal clamps secure the child’s hips and thighs. A fresh red scrape slashes across her ribs. Tape immobilizes her bruised nose.

The girl is Trish’s daughter, Heather, the day after she tangled with a Burlington Northern Railroad Co. freight train north of Rathdrum three years ago.

The newsletter article was about Operation Lifesaver, a railroad safety awareness program aimed at the public, especially schoolchildren. Volunteers teach the classes, telling people there’s never a reason to challenge a speeding train that weighs as much as 20 million pounds.

A Union Pacific employee started the program with help from law enforcement 25 years ago in Coeur d’Alene.

Trish read every word and was fairly sure her two children at Coeur d’Alene’s Bryan Elementary hadn’t seen the program.

“Heather is one of those kids who wouldn’t have gone on the tracks if she’d been told it was trespassing,” she says.

The credit union eventually linked her to Operation Lifesaver’s coordinator. She invited Trish to the organization’s national symposium in Post Falls last June, where Trish told this story:

As she and her son watched morning cartoons in their pajamas on April 30, 1995, the phone rang.

The caller told Trish a train had hit 7-year-old Heather. Her daughter had spent the night with family friends near Garwood.

Trish shook the phone as if it were broken.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

The caller had no more information.

Within minutes, Trish had called one friend to drive her to her daughter and another friend to care for her son. As she stood outside, insurance card in hand, waiting for her ride, she called a third friend who asked her if she was dressed. She wasn’t.

It took 20 endless minutes to reach the accident scene.

“I chanted, ‘Please God, let her be OK,”’ says Trish, a 30-year-old single mother. “Then I finally got it. She’s been hit by a train. She’s not going to be OK.”

Rescue workers were loading Heather onto a medical helicopter when Trish reached her friend’s house.

They steered Trish to Spokane’s Deaconess Medical Center before she could see her daughter. But they told her Heather was conscious and talking.

“That calmed me so much,” Trish says. “I figured if she’s talking, she’s still my little girl.”

Heather was scraped, her legs were broken, and her liver and right kidney were bruised.

Sheriff’s deputies and the friend in charge of Heather, Lin Rimple, said Heather and two younger friends were playing on train tracks about 200 yards behind Rimple’s home.

As a train approached, Heather’s friends jumped from the tracks, but she wanted to wave to the engineer. She stood on a concrete railroad tie that extended about 18 inches beyond the rail.

Her friends yelled at her to move, but she apparently figured she was safe and interpreted the engineer’s frantic waving as response to her greeting.

The edge of the train’s cowcatcher knocked Heather out of her tennis shoes and left her face down in the gravel.

Trish waited four days to cry. She knew by then that Heather’s broken bones would knit and her bruised organs more than likely would heal.

People advised her to retain an attorney and not to talk to anyone from the railroad. It angered her.

“It’s not like the train jumped the tracks and chased her,” she says. “Heather was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.”

Heather’s experience isn’t unique. Nationwide, pedestrian/train fatalities outnumber car/train deaths, says Chris Arvas, Idaho’s Operation Lifesaver coordinator.

Last year, trains killed six people in Idaho, injured eight others and damaged 30 cars - the lowest number of train-related accidents in the state in 25 years.

Operation Lifesaver visits most schools in the state, including Coeur d’Alene’s, Arvas says, although visits depend on volunteers and don’t occur like clockwork.

Heather is 10 now and as healthy as anyone in her fourth-grade class. She doesn’t think of the accident nearly as much as her mother does.

Which is why Trish may participate in Operation Lifesaver.

“I believe in what they’re doing,” she says. “And I like to tell our story. It’s a good one, and it has a happy ending.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo