Horrors. The recent decision of Orangeville council to kill the walking trail beside the railway prompted me to spend much of Easter weekend looking for proof that such a trail would be hazardous — or otherwise.

After a diligent search of the Internet, I found lots of evidence that trains sometimes run off the tracks. I found no indication that any derailments had ever collided with people standing or walking beside the tracks.

There was evidence that people standing or walking upon the tracks have, indeed, been killed from time to time. Level-crossing collisions have been fairly numerous over the years.

I once came within a split second of having one myself years ago when I was transporting a hallucinating mayor of a small Saskatchewan town to the loonie bin or whatever it’s called at the Yorkton hospital.

I had been at the small town on business and had stayed overnight, intending to proceed to Hudson Bay Junction the next morning. Evidently the mayor had been celebrating his election victory a tad too much.

As I was preparing to leave town, I saw him running down the street pursued by an imagined giant gopher or something. I got him into my car, where he continued to have visions as we sped south. Suddenly, his “vision” was of a train.

By the time I realized the train was not a vision, it was too late to stop, so I had no choice but to floor the accelerator.

I won the race. But two locomotives had passed by the time I glanced in my rear-view mirror. The mayor suddenly sobered up and had no more hallucinations.

On the topic of derailments, I couldn’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been helpful for the councillors to have researched the causes and the locations of rail accidents, and to have considered those relative to the nature of the railway within Orangeville.

That is not to say that they did not, but in my opinion the council’s decision was counter-indicative of such a study. (Canadian rail accident investigations are available on the Website of the Transportation Safety Board.)

Mind you, I don’t cover Orangeville council. I do cover county council, where Mulmur Deputy Mayor Sue Snider has declared a conflict of interest with respect to the railway sale, on the bias of her opposition to trails beside rails — presumably as an officer of Safe Communities.

Personally, I have sufficient confidence in railways that I used to ride my high-spirited purebred Egyptian Arabian gelding beside the fast-moving freight trains at Lethbridge, AB.

As a child, I placed pennies and sometimes nails on the tracks to see how they would be flattened by the passing train. I was far from alone in that activity, nor was I alone in pressing an ear to the track to see if I could guess how quickly the train might come. None of us got hurt or killed.

Searching for safety factors of various kinds on the weekend, I found that pedestrians have been killed by automobiles that have run off the street and mounted the sidewalk.

Recently, I read a police report of a collision between a left-turning bicycle and a motor vehicle at a green light. The cyclist had dashed into the path of the automobile, whose driver didn’t have time to stop.

There is virtually nothing happening in our world that doesn’t pose some kind of hazard — no matter how miniscule or improbable the hazard might be.

Those single-engine planes flying over the towns could crash into residential areas. Satellites could stray out of orbit and plunge down on cities. A nuclear plant could explode. There could be an act of terrorism right here, or an earthquake although a tornado is more likely.

Fear not, though, Big Brother will legislate you safe.