I can’t verify if this story is true or not but if so, we have a winner for the Darwin Awards.
Alan, a 43 year old electician, was hanging out with his 17 year old son and the son’s girlfriend. They were feeling cooped up, so they hopped the back fence to play by the railroad tracks that ran behind it.
Alan thought it would be a blast to watch a shopping cart being dragged by a train. He tied one end of a 20 foot rope to the shopping cart and the other to a full water bottle, which he planned to use as a weight.
When a 86 car Union Pacific frieght train rumbled through at fifteen miles per hour, Alan stood behind the cart and hurled the bottle at the train. The bottle broke, so he quickly tied another bottle to the rope. Standing in front of the cart, he lobbed the bottle under the train and gleefully noted that his plan had worked this time, until the shopping cart whpped into him and dragged him for more than a mile along the tracks, reportedly pulling up 2 spikes in the process.
Alan was dead before the engineer could stop the trian. A spokeman for the Federal Railroad Administration said that this was an extremely unusual occurrence." Alan’s son told reporters, “Alan was just the funniest guy.”
After the incident, Simi Valley Police Sergeant Joe May warned pedestrians not to loiter near train tracks.