According to police, on Sunday afternoon a pickup driven by an older man crashed into a stopped train at a railroad intersection at Kings Highway.
The driver was lucky.
His truck was a wreck. But he was able to walk away. Some folks aren't that lucky.
This comes a day after a front-page story in this newspaper reported a railroad crossing in Ashdown being named as one of the most dangerous in the nation.
The Federal Railroad Administration released a list of crossings across the U.S. where the most accidents had occurred over the past decade.
The crossing at Locke Street in Ashdown was fourth on the list, with 16 accidents and four fatalities.
It is one of just 15 railroad crossing sites with 10 or more accidents over the past 10 years. And with four deaths, it ranks just behind the deadliest crossing in the U.S. at Evergreen, Ala., where five have died over a decade.
Last year 244 people died in accidents at railroad crossings. While the figure is down a bit from 2014, it is still too high.
The site of Sunday's crash has crossing arms to warn motorists and hopefully prevent accidents. There are no such arms at the Ashdown railroad crossing.
While crossing arms obviously aren't 100 percent effective, they can and have saved lives.
In our view, it's long past time for crossing arms to be installed at the Locke Street railroad crossing in Ashdown. Being fourth on the Federal Railroad Administration's list of danger zones is no honor. It's a tragedy.
And it's time everyone takes railroad crossings very seriously. Most encounters between a train and a vehicle don't turn out very well. Don't count on luck or you might become a statistic.