Our town is lousy with train tracks. I love it, but at the same time, ever since I saw Fried Green Tomatoes, I am very careful around tracks that are still in use. There is one railroad bridge that runs over the sidewalk my middle child takes to school. There's no way for kids to get hurt so long as they don't try to climb up the hill onto the tracks.
I was walking with both older boys before the eldest started middle school, maybe about 2 years ago or so. In front of us was a woman walking with her two kids and the boy, perhaps about 6th grade, skittered up the hill and onto the train tracks and instead of climbing right back down, he started walking around up there. The mother just kept on walking, completely ignoring him and not even bothering to tell him to get down.
I knew this mother enough to know that if her child was hurt, she'd be blaming it on the train, not her son who shouldn't have been goofing off on the RR bridge in the first place.
Granted there was no train coming but this kid had walked to a place where there would be no safe way to get out of a train's way if it was coming through. Dh said "Well any train coming through town HAS to go slower than it would out in the open so it's unlikely he'd be killed." I still tell my children that trains and their tracks are nothing to play around with.
