themadturnip

Oh god. So many animals. This is an especially hard part of working on the railroad and for me, being vegan. A 10,000 ton train does not stop on a dime and is actually dangerous to try to do so. When an animal runs onto the tracks, I just have to close my eyes and make a silent apology.

One of my co-workers hit a moose. It was a large male and was running along side of the train and for some reason made the decision to run onto the tracks directly in front of the train. The train collided with the rear of the moose and split it in half, then behead it. The corpse rolled under the train and hit the traction motors (which are close to the ground) and actually lifted the wheels of the train. Luckily it did not derail. The train was put into emergency (all brakes lock up) and as it slowed, the antlers of the moose dug into the ground along side of the track spraying gravel and sparks as high as the engineer's window.

An engineer, now retired, once startled a polar bear who was sleeping in the middle of the tracks. He warned the bear by blowing the train horn. This scared the bear who jumped up and chose fight mode instead of flight mode. He charged the train and well, lost that battle, which is unfortunate because polar bears are awesome.

Luckily, I've never been involved in hitting other trains, vehicles or people.

I like oatmeal. I feel like this is a setup to choose a train related cereal I've never heard of. If so, I'm deeply sorry to ruin the joke.

Well our track is built on soft tundra. The yearly freeze/thaw warps the track so there are plenty of slow orders preventing the train from moving very fast very often. At 10-20MPH it can take 2-3 hours between inspections. The max speed on this railway is 40MPH.

No one has jumped in front of my train. As for the animals, read up, I answered a question like that.

Scariest moment would have to be going about 40MPH and having to put the train into emergency when, around a curve, we see a quad in between the rails. The driver saw us, but when he tried to leave the middle of the track, his wheels just sort of slid along the inside of the track. We stopped in time, but my engineer was SUPER pissed and went outside to yell at these numbskulls. They were hunters and just sat there, sheepishly, while getting yelled at by a 5'5" 60 year old train engineer. That was pretty exciting.

I think true prison sex can only happen in prison.