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Re: Community meeting to talk about ballast rock piles in Menlo Park
Author: Retired Old Head
Date: 03-24-2015 - 09:51
Basketball Jones Wrote:
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> U like putten rocks on them tracks dontya Speaker?
> Just likea littel kidd. We all seenya do that many
> a time. U gitta big kik otta it, dontya?
That made me recall a similar incident some years ago in Oakley, CA, on the BNSF. Just West of the end of two main tracks is a street overpass (the street name escapes me now). We were coming West at 70 mph (Z-train) and noticed some kids putting ballast on the South rail right underneath the overpass. Well, we started to laugh because we knew anything can happen as soon as the wheels hit the ballast rock. The kids had stepped all the way back to the bridge abuttment - well away from the track. Here we come and both the engineer and myself are looking out my window. They were waving at us and we waved back. We felt the wheels hit the ballast rocks and then all of a sudden, the kids broke into this "Wildman" kind of dance. They were shielding their heads, eyes, and every other part of their bodies. We just busted a gut laughing so hard because we realized that the kids were now being sprayed with rock pellets the size of 22 slugs - and maybe larger! We kept looking as long as we could and noticed that they took off on their bikes in quite a hurry. We never saw any kids doing that at that spot again.
Retired Old Head
-------------------------------------------------------
> U like putten rocks on them tracks dontya Speaker?
> Just likea littel kidd. We all seenya do that many
> a time. U gitta big kik otta it, dontya?
That made me recall a similar incident some years ago in Oakley, CA, on the BNSF. Just West of the end of two main tracks is a street overpass (the street name escapes me now). We were coming West at 70 mph (Z-train) and noticed some kids putting ballast on the South rail right underneath the overpass. Well, we started to laugh because we knew anything can happen as soon as the wheels hit the ballast rock. The kids had stepped all the way back to the bridge abuttment - well away from the track. Here we come and both the engineer and myself are looking out my window. They were waving at us and we waved back. We felt the wheels hit the ballast rocks and then all of a sudden, the kids broke into this "Wildman" kind of dance. They were shielding their heads, eyes, and every other part of their bodies. We just busted a gut laughing so hard because we realized that the kids were now being sprayed with rock pellets the size of 22 slugs - and maybe larger! We kept looking as long as we could and noticed that they took off on their bikes in quite a hurry. We never saw any kids doing that at that spot again.
Retired Old Head
