(The following story by Steve Schmidt appeared on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on March 15.)
SAN DIEGO — Kids and trains are usually a can’t-miss combination.
Last month, when fourth-graders from an El Cajon-area elementary school rode Amtrak as part of a field trip to San Juan Capistrano, many of them had a blast.
It’s what happened on the way there that has the grown-ups concerned. The principal calls it strange. A teacher calls it unsafe. A parent says it appears illegal.
Staff members and parents at Vista Grande Elementary School say that on two separate train trips out of downtown San Diego, Amtrak personnel locked the children and their adult chaperones in a rail car during the nearly 90-minute ride north.
“We were aghast,” teacher Leslee Zitren said. “What if there had been an accident? What if there had been an emergency? We couldn’t get ahold of the conductor. That’s not right.”
Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham said yesterday that the doors weren’t locked, but “disarmed.” She said the groups still should have been able to pull the automated doors open manually to reach the adjoining cars.
Parents and teachers said they repeatedly tried pulling the doors, but that didn’t work either.
Federal railroad regulations prohibit the locking of passenger doors while in transit.
Graham said conductors often disable doors to keep other passengers from mixing with a large group or when they worry that the group may get out of control. In those cases, she said, train crews are supposed to show group leaders how to open the doors manually.
Zitren and others believe the doors were locked because they wouldn’t budge, no matter what they tried. They said that when they boarded, no one with Amtrak said anything about the doors.
During the Feb. 14 train ride, Zitren had 31 children in tow, along with 27 chaperones. A second classroom traveled two days earlier; it also was penned in.
The students rode Amtrak to San Juan Capistrano to visit the historic mission. This is the fourth consecutive year that the Cottonwood campus, south of El Cajon, has organized the train trips north.
Vista Grande staffers said their students have a track record of good behavior and were puzzled by any suggestion that the kids might get out of hand on the train.
“The teachers have total control,” Principal Craig Wollitz said. He called the groups’ confinement “awfully strange.”
Parent Leah Boucek, who helped chaperone the students, said adults in her group repeatedly tried to open the passageway door when they discovered they were stuck. They managed to signal passengers in an adjoining car to contact a conductor.
Zitren said that when the conductor showed up, she saw him unlock the door. He told her the group was being contained in the car for its own safety and to keep students apart from strangers.
Then Zitren saw him lock the door and walk away.
Whether the automated door was locked or disabled, the result was the same, Boucek said. “We had two adults literally hanging on the door and using all the handles and buttons, and we could not get out,” she said.
The doors weren’t locked during the return trips.
The two-level rail car had a bathroom, and the journey north went quickly for some. Amtrak often places large school groups in a separate car, next to the engine.
Zitren said some of her students had never ridden a train before. “The kids were having the time of their lives,” she said.