Track inspector helps puppies get out of a sticky situation
How do you “unstick” a frozen puppy from the tracks? That’s what Burlington Northern Santa Fe Track Inspector Will Stenberg wondered. The situation sounds like a bad railroad joke, but, in truth, it really happened.
Stenberg was inspecting the tracks in the Lakes Subdivision west of Cloquet, MN, Nov12, when much to his surprise he came upon two whimpering puppies. The dogs, which looked like they might be golden labs, he said, had evidently gotten wet in a nearby ditch. When they wandered onto the tracks, they froze fast to the metal.
Stenberg wondered for a moment how he was going to get them loose. Meanwhile, the puppies’ mother stood nearby, constantly snarling. “That was a little distracting,” he says.
Stenberg decided the best thing to do would be to sacrifice his morning coffee from his Thermos. So he poured the liquid over the tracks, which warmed them up enough so he could free the dogs without hurting them.
He then made sure the three dogs wandered away from the tracks before he left the area. “I didn’t see them near the tracks again on my next trip, so they must have learned their lesson,” he says.
Stenberg wouldn’t have bothered to tell anyone about the incident if Dispatcher Steven Kyllander hadn’t asked what had taken him so long to do the inspection. Kyllander said the dogs would surely have been hit by a train and killed if Stenberg hadn’t taken the time to free them. - BNSF Today