Teen girl kicked off Amtrak train in the middle of her trip

KING 5 News
Posted on April 5, 2012 at 5:37 PM
Updated Thursday, Apr 5 at 9:14 PM

A 15-year-old Steilacoom girl is kicked off an amtrak train in the middle of the trip to Portland.

It wasn't because she misbehaved, but because she was too young to travel without an adult. Her parents are furious at the way Amtrak handled the situation and decided to contact KING 5 News.

Amtrak has said it could have done a better job handling this particular situation and apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused. They also have offered to provide a full refund to the parents.

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We don't know the full story here.

If Amtrak, Homeland Security and all those other new governmental bureaucracies that have sprung up since 9-11 want total adherance and compliance with their etched-in-stone rules and procedures, then, as we've seen here, some occasional excrement will hit the fan.

Apparently the conductor thought it was best to have them removed. His weak point may have been not handing them over to law enforcement officers. There's a little bit of hypocrisy here wherein the parents are all bent out of shape over the kids being left on their own in Centralia, yet they had no degree of concern about the kids wandering around Portland unsupervised, had they completed their journey. What gives with THAT?

This whole concept of common carriers attempting to transport kids who are not supervised by adults is a real can of worms, and sometimes I'm surprised they even bother to be a part of it. Oh, but wait. There's money involved in it in the form of ticket revenue. That explains everything.

The horror stories abound. There was the story of an UM (unaccompanied minor) who was sexually assaulted by a seatmate on a Northwest Airlines redeye flight. America West managed to load two UMs on a wrong connecting plane at PHX. A few years ago, there was a female UM who willingly exited a train prior to her intended stop and partied with some Marines she met on the train. If its bad enough at Amtrak, it's even worse on commuter railroads. How is a conductor to monitor who's boarding his train when there are multiple air- or electric-operated entrance doors on his train and no employee standing there to observe who's boarding?

I know of a case years ago on a "major commuter rail carrier in the Los Angeles area" (do I need to draw you a picture?) where a divorced father dropped his son off at "Station A", with the understanding that the divorced mother (or stepdad or new boyfriend) would pick the kid up at "Station B", about forty miles and a couple of counties away. We can all guess what happened. No one was at "Station B" to pick the kid up. If the kid decided to flee the scene at that point out of frustration and anger, the carrier has no legal authority (that I know of) to detain him. To make a long story short, the commuter rail carrier had to hire a van that's normally used to transport train crews to ferry the kid back to his point of origin and his Dad's place. That probably put a crimp in Dad's style. Dad probably already had the new girlfriend there and the hot tub fired up. Look at the expense that the commuter rail carrier had to invest to correct a situation that would have, under perfect circumstances, only furnished them with the paltry revenue of the original ticket. Handled differently, you can be sure it would have generated headlines, and the commuter carrier would have come out as the villain.

The employees of these common carriers are not babysitters, but try telling that to some of the poor excuses that pass for parents these days.

Tomorrow's topic: The phenomenon of "granny dumping", where people take their senior citizen relatives (whom they can no longer tolerate and/or afford to care for) down to the train station and buy them a one-way ticket to anywhere, just so long as they're gone and out of their lives.