It wasn’t easy to kill yourself when Kevin Harrington was at the controls of a New York City subway train.
From 1984 to 2006, the former MTA motorman says, his trains struck at least 10 people — but killed only one.
“The first time I hit someone was in the ’80s. He jumped in front of my train and bounced back off onto the platform,” said Harrington, 62, now a vice president with the Transport Workers Union.
Harrington’s tally is not as astonishing as it seems. Last year, 141 people were struck by trains and 55 died from their injuries, an average of more than one fatality a week, agency data show. The subway strikes are on a faster pace this year, with 93 people struck and 33 deaths recorded so far.
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And most of those chose to die: At 51 percent, suicide is the leading cause of straphanger deaths, according to data on all subway fatalities from 2010 through 2012 obtained by The Post though a Freedom of Information Act request.
“If that happened at Disneyland, it would be closed,” Harrington said. “It’s really unacceptable. The culture at the Transit Authority is that it’s just part of the cost of doing business. And lucky for them, most of the people who get killed are homeless people and they didn’t sue, and they get buried at Potter’s Field.”
In Harrington’s experience, many victims lost limbs but not lives through sheer luck and his quick action.
“I had one guy who had his ankle cut off, 1988. He jumped at the last minute in front of my train and I ran him over,” recalled Harrington, who in that incident used a subway ad as a makeshift gurney to haul the man off the tracks.
“I just ripped it off [the wall] and stuck his butt on it and dragged him out.”
In another incident, along the No. 2 line, Harrington recalled gently placing a severed foot atop a victim’s belly, with the hope that doctors would be able to reattach it.
Not everyone was grateful for surviving a brush with death.
“I ran over a lady at Grand Central and she climbed back up on the track,” he said, recalling how she fell in the trough between the rails and escaped injury. “She spit at my supervisor, then she ran away.
“She killed herself a couple of days later,” Harrington recalled. “A supervisor said she saw it, the woman jumped in front of another train.”
Most of his victims in the 1980s were homeless.
“The number of people from mental institutions was growing in the subway. It became an underground insane asylum,” Harrington said.
He’ll never forget the day that his luck — along with that of the person crushed by 426 tons of rolling steel — ran out.
“I made the 8:01 out of Woodlawn. It was the next stop, so it was 8:02 or 8:03 when I hit the guy. And I was coming into the station, downhill . . . the guy jumped. I threw the train into emergency, and over we went.
“I think he died instantly. He was mangled into a million pieces,” Harrington said, recalling the gore that rained down from the elevated No. 4 tracks. “His shoulders and arm and head were in one place, his torso and one of his legs was in another place. The street was covered in blood.”
Still, Harrington views his low kill ratio as fortunate.
“I’m lucky. A guy I knew, a woman jumped in front of his train with her newborn baby. He was so traumatized, he went to another job title and lost a lot of money.”
Harrington said it’s his worldview that keeps him grounded amid tragedy.
“One of my philosophies on life is that the world gives you a hard time, and I’m not going to help it,” said the Irish Sikh, who lives in The Bronx with his wife and two kids.
He doesn’t understand why people kill themselves.
“I always stay to the end of the movie, no matter how bad it is. Movies get better sometimes.”
Today, Harrington is pushing for policy changes to mandate that train operators slow down as they enter stations, and for more psychological support for motormen with a “customer” under their train — known in sterile transit code as a “12-9.”
The MTA says it’s working hard to thwart 12-9s by warning customers to stand back, initiating an intrusion-detection system that would sense if someone’s on the tracks, and studying platform doors that would open only when there’s a train in the station. “It’s pretty callous to say we don’t care,” agency spokesman Adam Lisberg said.