Just a little story I read today, I thought I would share it.
Bill[:D]
Maine man chases, halts string of runaway passenger cars
ROCKLAND, Maine — Roy Allen was working on some equipment outside Chemrock’s small processing plant here Wednesday morning when he saw the Maine Eastern excursion train coming, according to an article in the Bangor Daily News. Allen turned to a co-worker and said, “That’s funny. They didn’t blow the horn today.”
When the five passenger cars reached the Buttermilk Lane crossing in nearby Thomaston at 10 a.m., they slowed, then stopped. That was when Allen realized there was no locomotive pushing them.
“Then she started to roll back,” he recalled. So Allen, 38, started running toward them. Once alongside, he managed to board the cars and halt the train about a mile from the railroad yard.
On his first attempt, Allen leaped onto the last car as it rolled back toward Rockland. He found the brake and yanked as hard as he could, over and over again. It didn’t seem to slow the cars much. Fearing a derailment, Allen recalled thinking, "Man, I better get off here while I can. It wasn’t just barely moving; it was moving real fast.”
So he jumped off.
Then he had second thoughts. What if it kept rolling through Rockland and derailed? In a flash, he was running again. About an eighth-of-a-mile later, he jumped aboard the moving passenger cars a second time.
The newspaper said Allen pulled on the rear car’s brake, then on the front car brake. Since he works around freight cars at the Chemrock plant, which processes perlite, a rocklike glass used in construction, Allen was familiar with their braking systems, although the passenger-car brakes were different from the “wheel type” he was used to on freight cars, he said. “This was a hand crank.”
Allen yanked on the brake “25 jacks before the brakes tightened up,” he said. “It was all I could do to stop it,”