In 2005 Peter Wade made his directorial debut with the feature length film known as Tracks. The movie, starring Chris Gunn and Ice-T, was about the true story of a few teenagers who were looking for trouble back in the 1980’s. The film follows the story of a boy and his friends who were playing on some train tracks when they decided to flip a railway switch when an oncoming train was approaching. Their actions caused the train to derail, killing the engineer, destroying the train, and injuring others. The film follows the boys and how they lived with their actions in the events that followed. So what was the source material for the film? Well Peter Wade’s real life actually.
I’m sure we all have made some poor decision when we were younger, but they most likely weren’t serious actions that took the life of someone. Back on July 7th, 1982, fifteen-year-old Peter Wade and four of his friends were doing what teenage boys do best: looking for trouble. They often liked to hang around railway tracks in their hometown of Fairlawn, New Jersey. On that night they were out drinking beers and messing about. Suddenly someone said that it would be a good idea to mess with the railway switch when they spotted an oncoming train in the distance. They group obliged, and flipped the switch exactly when the train was passing. This caused the five car train traveling at 60mph to derail and crash directly into the walls of a nearby factory. On board there were seven passengers and two crew members who sustained injuries. However it was the train engineer at the front, Jack Duffy, who tragically died when protecting a small boy who wanted to see the front of the train. Wade and his friends actions caused irritable harm and damage that took the life of an innocent man.
Wade and his friends immediately fled the scene, and then learned that their actions caused a man to die the next day when they watched the news. Wade recalls that it was “one of the sickest moments of my life, I wanted to throw up immediately at realizing what I had done”. The Police took Wade and his four friends into custody, and subsequently charged Wade and two others as the ones responsible for the crimes. Wade plead guilty to his crimes and was incarcerated for manslaughter. He would spend 22 months in prison, a fraction of his total five year sentence, before being released at the age of 20. Now typically this type of event would ruin someones life, however Wade wanted to overcome his past.
After his release from prison, Peter Wade went straight into college to earn an education. After studying businesses and finance, he would go on to landing a job on Wall Street. There he saw considerable levels of success, and ended up in a job as a stock analyst that earned him around $1 million every year. He seemed to have turned his life around, however he was still plagued and tormented by that fateful night back in 1982. Wade still felt extremely awful, and described himself as “an actor, that I was there putting on a performance that hopefully was convincing enough that nobody would really find out who I was, which was a despicable human being”. After years of therapy, Peter Wade wanted to make a film documenting his life in an attempt to reach troubled and misbehaved youths.
Tracks depicts Wade’s childhood where we get an glimpse into his early years. In the film we see Wade’s violent and aggressive father, who Wade says sexually assaulted him when he was just eleven. His father would eventually commit suicide, and Wade was the first to discover the body. The movie recounts that tragic date and the events that followed the train derailment. Still despite Wade’s difficult upbringing, he does not blame his rough childhood for causing him to commit the crime. He accepts full responsibility of his actions.
While the film attempts to reach out to troubled teens, many people have been critical of the movie. Critics argue that it just shows teens that they could literally kill someone, and then go on to become a successful businessman and filmmaker. The biggest critics would be the family members of the engineer that died: the Duffy family. They feel that there could have been a better way to help troubled teens, not a “self-serving” movie that reminded them of that horrible night, says Joanne Duffy, sister of Jack Duffy.
Despite your personal feelings on the film and its true nature, it is very interesting to see Peter Wade overcome his previous aggressions and attempt to turn his life around. While he still lives with regret and great sadness, it does seem as though he did not let it consume him, rather he has learned to live with it and move on.
Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images
