Three people died last week in south Sacramento when a car cut past guard gates and was broadsided by a light-rail train. But there was a hidden victim too: the train operator.

Regional Transit officials declined to identify him. He wasn't physically injured. That doesn't mean he'll come out unscathed. He had a front-row seat to tragedy. It was his train, his hand on the brake, but there was little he could do. He may have seen the driver's face, feet away, the instant before impact. They may well have locked eyes.

We talked this week to several former rail employees – a conductor, engineer and brakeman – who say the incident touched a nerve. They've been there.

One was conductor on two trains that killed pedestrians. Worse, possibly, was the day his train struck a car carrying a woman and two children, sending it spinning. He knows its occupants were seriously injured. How bad, he's never wanted to ask. His company chose not to tell him.

"The last thing you see is the people looking at you with a terror on their face," he said. "They know they are going to get hit. There is nothing you can do."

There's the crunch of metal, followed by a debris cloud of car parts, gravel and dirt in the windshield.

Gary Smith of Sacramento, a retired Union Pacific engineer, experienced three fatal incidents. One was in Redding. He saw a woman on the tracks ahead, waving at him slowly. "She just looked at me as complacent as can be. I blow the horn, blow the horn, hit the emergency brake. You hope they move. She didn't move."

Another incident seemed, for a moment, even worse. A car stopped on the tracks ahead, stuck behind a truck. Smith saw the driver, a woman, jump out as the train bore down. Then she turned and yanked at the car rear door. His thought: Oh no, there's a baby in there! "My heart went down to my ankles."

The woman didn't get the door open. She scurried away seconds before the train obliterated the car. "We cut it in two," Smith said.

A crewman found the woman and learned: There was no child. She'd been trying to get her purse.

Regional Transit officials say the operator in last week's crash has talked to a chaplain and was on leave pending drug tests. When he returns, RT official Mark Lonergan said, he will be invited to talk with operators "who have been through this before."

Some operators can handle the experience, Lonergan said. Some can't. In either case, it leaves its mark.

"There is a chunk that goes out of you that can't be replaced," Smith said, years after retirement. "You don't forget."

The former conductor, who asked that his name not be used because of the personal nature of his story, added: "Some people say, I know what you're going through. But they don't know. They've never had a hand in killing somebody."

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