If you live in Walnut, CA like i do, I’m sure you’ve been stuck at the railroad track more than a few times.
You approach the tracks at 45 mph and suddenly, the red lights starts flashing at the gates. You try speeding up, but you’re too far to make it across the tracks. You are forced to stop at the gates at the railroad tracks.
Very frustrating, especially when the train is moving at snail pace or even stop altogether. We would usually make a U-turn and take a long detour to go around the train.
But 2 nights ago, we decided to see how long a train stays stopped on the tracks. Is it there for 1 hour, 2 hours?
My son, daughter and I were exhilarated after finishing a fun night of Vacation Bible School at church. Lo and behold, on our way home, we were stopped by a train at 10:12pm, according to our car clock.
We were stuck, the first in line at the gate.
The train was moving along fast at a good pace. Maybe we won’t be stuck long.
But then it began to slow down…and down…and down…and it came to a complete stop…
People behind and next to us are starting to make U-turns.The motorcycle next to us waited for a while, then gave up and left too.
“Let’s turn off our engine and wait it out”, we decided. Heck, the night was still young. We weren’t in a hurry to get home. Let’s see how long this is going to be…
We were having fun chatting about random things in the car, playing games on the iphone, having a great time…
Whoa! Another train started to come going the opposite direction of the first train…and it stopped too.
Interestingly, the motorcycle came back to wait! Hmm, what happened to the alternate routes?
Whoa again! The first train started to move backwards! That’s not good…
Fortunately it shifted to forward, picked up speed and moved on out of the way. So far it’s been about 15 minutes.
But that second train is still sitting there in front of us. Now the motorcycle again turns around and left. We wondered if he is coming back again.
Just when I said, “This is terrible. What would happen if an ambulance had to get through to save a life?” – we heard sirens and an ambulance was behind us. It immediately made a U-turn, now a big truck is behind us with glaring headlights.
Also worth noting for the record, we saw a man get out of a car and walked across the tracks.
At 10:35pm, the train started to move. We were finally able to go home.
A 5 minute trip home from church took us almost half an hour. That was exciting…
BTW, the motorcycle did not come back.