About North Carolina
Operation Lifesaver

Cross Crossings Cautiously - Train Safety Poster

Operation Lifesaver is a program designed to help save your life at the most dangerous spot on any highway or road -- the highway-rail grade crossing. Operation Lifesaver is an active, continuous public information and education program to help prevent and reduce crashes, injuries and fatalities by improving driver performance at the nation's aproximately 270,000 public and private highway-rail grade crossings and on rights-of-way. To achieve its mission, Operation Lifesaver developed a program that emphasizes Education, Engineering and Enforcement activities. These activities are called the Operation Lifesaver 3-Es.

Thousands of people are seriously injured and killed in nearly 4,200 highway-rail grade crossing crashes each year.
A highway-rail grade crossing, also know as a highway-rail intersection, presents a particularly hazardous traffic environment for motorists. Some drivers have not yet learned how to respond to the warning signs and devices placed at highway-rail crossings. Often they are unaware that trains cannot stop as quickly as motor vehicles to avoid a collision. Others simply ignore all warning signs because they are "in a hurry" and would rather play "beat the train" than wait. Driver inattention and impatience are the most common factors contributing to motor vehicle/train collisions at highway-rail grade crossings.
Each year more than 450 people are killed and nearly 500 injured as a result of dangerous and illegal activities on or near railroad tracks.
It is dangerous, and illegal, to trespass on tracks.

Operation Lifesaver was born in Idaho in 1972. A Union Pacific Railroad employee was disturbed by the number of the vehicle-train collisions and created the first public railroad safety education Program. The result? At the end of the first year, the highway-rail grade crossing fatalities decreased a resounding 43 percent. Autonomous Operation Lifesaver programs currently exist in 49 states and have contributed significantly to the over 50 percent reduction in crashes and casualties at highway-rail grade crossings since 1972. North Carolina Operation Lifesaver was started on April 27, 1979 after the North Carolina Rural Safety Council decided to take it on as a safety project.

To make highway-rail collisions obsolete by encouraging every motorist to...

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