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Themes: "Opportunity, Gift of God needs to be Accepted, Mocker's Consequences TEC In the late 1950's, the Erie Railroad merged with the Lackawanna. The Erie abandoned its Jersey City terminal and began using the Lackawanna's Hoboken, New Jersey terminal. To do this, they built a switch connecting the Erie's Bergen County Line to the Lackawanna's Main Line. It was not fancy and it wasn't up to modern safety standards. However, for almost forty years it caused no problems. That ended in early 1996.
One night, an engineer was assigned to work a "split shift." An engineer working a split shift would make the last outbound run of the night, arriving in Suffern, New York, about 1:30 AM. After just three and a half hours of sleep, he would make the first inbound run of the morning into Hoboken. The railroad gave him no place to sleep. Most engineers just curled up in a seat in a coach while the train was in the Suffern yards.
Usually, the engineer would go home after his morning run. On the morning of February 9, the railroad was short of engineers, so it asked the split-shift engineer to make one more run. It was a short one - to Waldwick, New Jersey and back. The engineer left Waldwick at 7:58 AM. At about 8:30, the train entered the Meadowlands - miles and miles of nothing but swamp grass, and the tracks as straight as an arrow. Slowly, the engineer dozed off. His train rumbled through a switch and past a red light. An outbound train was traveling at high speed on the Main Line. The sleeping engineer ran his train right into it.
Other trains could still pass by. It was quite a sight. A yellow tarp covered the first coach of the inbound train, where bodies lay. The coaches of the outbound train were strewn around the tracks the way a child would toss a toy train around.
Trains are not the only vehicles that get into wrecks when the driver sleeps. The greatest cause of death in car accidents is drivers falling asleep at the wheel.
Probably the major cause of eternal death is also sleeping. I do not mean dozing off while someone is preaching the gospel. No, many people are wide awake physically, but when warnings of judgment to come are given, they are asleep to their danger. In the book of Acts, Felix trembled when paul spoke to him. Some people do not tremble at all. Warnings of judgment and of wrath to come seem to pass in one ear and out the other. What a terrible shock it must be for people to be sound asleep and wake-up in hell. No wonder the Bible teaches us, "And that , knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep"(Romans 13:11).
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Bryon Meyers
