The PATH is really unpredictable. Even in the middle of Route 1-9, rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 600-ft fully loaded PA5, heading east out of the low-lying lands of the Great Swamp NWR, will be right on your ass the next moment.

I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw 3rd rail underneath and heard “This is the train to….World Trade Center. The next stop is…Exchange Place.”

Deafening closing-door tones. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was an 8-car PATH, headed east towards the tunnel to the WTC Station. Majestic as hell: 55 mph, 51 feet (16 m) long by 9.2 feet (2.8 m) wide, a smaller loading gauge compared to similar vehicles in the US, due to the restricted structure gauge through the tunnels under the Hudson River. Whole house shook!

Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a PATH train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those trails?

A big hole in homeland security is subway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a PATH train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.