(The following story by Justin Leighty appeared on the Elkhart Truth website on August 1, 2009.)
ELKHART, Ind. — Police detained four teens after they brought a train to an emergency stop downtown early Friday.
The four — two juveniles and two 18-year-olds — were playing chicken with the moving freight train, seeing how close they could come to it without getting hit, according to Mike McCloughen, assistant chief of the Goshen Police Department. It happened at 4 a.m. on the tracks near North Fifth Street. The railroad contacted local dispatchers, who alerted Goshen police, McCloughen said.
Within a few minutes Goshen police found the four downtown near Main Street and Lincoln Avenue. They ran, but police caught up to them and held them until the Norfolk Southern police arrived. Goshen turned the four over to the railroad police, who gave them a trespassing warning and released them.
Rudy Husband, a spokesman for the railroad, said his reports said nothing about the group playing chicken, but said the engineer spotted the four trespassing, stopped the freight train and contacted his dispatch center.
“Trespassing on rail property is very serious for the rail industry,” Husband said. The issue is “safety, not only for trespassers but also for our employees,” he said.
Husband pointed to the Federal Railroad Administration, which shows that over the last three years, more than 2,700 railroad trespassers were injured or killed. People between the ages of 16 and 25 represented the highest-risk age group for rail trespassing injuries, according to the FRA.
McCloughen said what the four did was extremely dangerous. Even “walking the tracks or playing around the stopped trains, anything like that is highly dangerous and something that can get somebody hurt seriously or killed,” he said. “The timing of this, what’re they doing out at this time of the morning?”
The bottom line, said McCloughen, is “Stay off our tracks. We don’t want anybody getting hurt or killed.”