Dr. Antoon Leenaars recalls a patient who saw the same train pass by her kitchen window each day as she sank deeper into depression. Eventually, she jumped in front of it.

“This woman would see this train and see this train. Every day, she was reminded of this method,” said Leenaars, a Windsor-based psychologist known for his research on suicide. And the more fixated someone is on a particular means of death, he said, the more likely they are to act.

“If they fundamentally focus on just one method, you know the lethality is higher,” he said. “They’re mentally constricted and they don’t think of alternatives.”

Leenaars said people considering suicide will fixate on just about anything they consider a near-certain means of death. It could be a bridge or a cliff — but for dozens of people across the country each year, they choose trains.

Over the past decade, more than 1,200 people have been struck and killed on railway systems in Canada. At least two transit agencies, the Toronto region’s Metrolinx and the Montreal region’s Exo, have estimated how many of those deaths are suicides: between 70 to 80 per cent.

Agencies created for the sole purpose of ferrying people from place to place by rail have been thrust onto the front lines of a mental-health crisis. And while it’s taken decades for them to fully embrace this role, they are now some of the most important organizations around when it comes to saving the lives of people driven to desperation in Canada’s urban centres.

Safety barriers are a common proposal to prevent suicides, but the automated devices have largely been dismissed by officials for reasons of cost and feasibility. Increasingly, transit agencies are pairing up with mental-health professionals to create plans, train staff and establish systems to actively prevent people from using the tracks to end their lives.

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Still, getting ordinary workers to act as first responders is a significant challenge.

“When we were first developing our program, we found that those who are trained to be helpful in their disciplines were afraid of the issue of suicide,” said Richard Ramsay of LivingWorks, a Calgary-based organization that helped develop the suicide-prevention curriculum now used in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver.

“They had all kinds of issues. Why they wouldn’t approach somebody — (that) if they talked about it, it would cause it.”

Trainees are taught to look for warning signs. Those could include someone standing on a platform without boarding as train after train passes by. Another example would be someone wandering too close to the edge, perhaps stepping on the warning stripes, seemingly “testing” the area.

Usually, a transit officer can intervene simply by striking up a conversation. But sometimes they arrive too late — and the job changes from crisis counsellor to paramedic.

“If someone is really determined to end their life, they feel it’s a quick way and instantaneous, which isn’t always the case. If the train is going slow enough coming into the station, there’s more chance of being injured than there is of death,” said Chief Special Const. Jim Babe, who patrols the O-Train system in Ottawa with 46 of his colleagues. All of his officers carry tourniquets, which can be wrapped tightly around limbs to stem blood loss in the event someone is hit by a train.

Despite the chances for verbal or medical intervention, transit workers often struggle with a feeling of helplessness. Suicide deaths are intentional, and employees fears there’s very little they can do to stop someone who is truly determined.

“I’ve been involved in a few, and yes, they definitely stick with you for a while,” said Tony Rebelo, president of CUPE 7000, a union representing transit workers in Vancouver. “For folks who want to end their lives, they’re going to do it one way or another, whether being on transit or other means.”

For some, like Toronto Transit Commission driver Kevin Freeman, it’s the reminder that someone else made the decision that helps them get through the day. A man jumped in front of a train he was driving in June 2008, just six months after Freeman finished his training.

“As horrible as that sounds, that’s how most of us deal with it. That person has decided to do it. Unfortunately, I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Freeman said.

But despite the doubts and the pain, efforts have only increased. Training has become standardized across multiple cities. Transit agencies now have crisis call-boxes at platforms and on trains themselves. It’s common to see a combination of patrols and surveillance cameras being used to detect people who may be in crisis.

Breaking from well-established tradition across the country, one agency has chosen to fight stigma by being completely frank about deaths on its tracks.

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Anne Marie Aikins, spokeswoman for Metrolinx, said that whereas other agencies continue to use terms like “medical emergency” and “track-level impact” to inform passengers of suicides, her organization has started using the s-word.

“(Previously), they were kind of talking euphemisms,” Aikins said. “Now we say, ‘There’s a fatality on your line’ ... We’ll say it’s a suicide. Someone tragically ended their life that day. Riders have a lot more compassion for what’s going on at that moment.”

Even the federally regulated agencies that have traditionally been more concerned about the general category of “trespass” on the tracks are now recognizing the increasing concern of suicides. In November 2017, the Railway Association of Canada — which represents Canadian Pacific Railway, Canadian National Railway and numerous other companies — began funding a suicide prevention strategy for the first time in its history.

The group tasked with developing that strategy, Operation Lifesaver, plans to launch a Canada-wide campaign in 2019. To harmonize its efforts, Operation Lifesaver is in negotiations with another group developing telephone number, text message and online messenger services in order to provide a single point of contact for crisis intervention on the tracks.

Roberta Fox, chief technology adviser at Crisis Services Canada, said the project is in its pilot phase, with trackside crisis intervention services currently being tested in Calgary, Toronto, Brampton, Mississauga and Nanaimo, B.C.

Though the service has already been used 11,000 times, the cross-Canada railway crisis line is still in its infancy. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to precisely locate those who call for help. Often, the only point of contact will be the cellphone that sent the text, online message or call.

At best, current technology can only identify your cell tower location unless a user decides to switch on and share their GPS co-ordinates. Fox hopes that by partnering with police dispatch, many of whom are upgrading 911 technology to detect caller locations, that the service will be able to pinpoint the location of those experiencing distress. So far she has managed to sign up 208 dispatch centres across the country.

But that technology is not expected to be in place until 2021. Until then, Crisis Services Canada is relying on a series of crisis intervention signs placed along rail lines, each associated with a number that identifies its location, as a means of finding those in distress.

“Our first night, we had an 11-year-old girl from Toronto whose life was saved from a Calgary-based support person via chat,” Fox said. “Since then, we’ve had over 141 active rescues where somebody was saved in the suicide process.”

But despite the best efforts of agencies across the country, there will still be suicide deaths on railway tracks. Leenaars, the mental-health professional, remembers how surprised he was by the suicide of a friend during his teenage years. Quite simply, he said, some people don’t want to be helped.

“You can throw out lifebuoys to people, but there’s always somebody who’s not going to grab it. With trains, you can put up fences, put up cameras, but if someone was really constricted and bent on it, they will find a spot and they will jump,” Leenaars said.

“I was not able. I didn’t know my friend was going to kill himself in Grade 11. But I think it’s true, I’ve helped, or tried to help, a large number of people.”

Crisis Services Canada’s suicide prevention hotline can be reached at 1-833-456-4566.

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