GENEVA TOWNSHIP —
Two teenage stowaways were on a railroad adventure Sunday morning, but their adventurous spirit faded with the thought of Ohio wilderness and hungry bears, Geneva emergency dispatch records show.
The boys hopped on a CSX train in Buffalo, N.Y., and held on until the freight train reached Conneaut, when fatigue, the darkness and fear of bears prompted them to call 911 just after midnight on Sunday, dispatch records show. The boys had to hold on until the train could be stopped at North Myers Road in Geneva Township, where an Ashtabula County sheriff’s deputy was there to meet them, the sheriff’s department reports.
“The cell phones they were carrying would only call out,” the dispatch record reads. “The train had stopped and they didn’t know where they were because it was very dark and the couldn’t see anything.”
The sheriff’s department reports the boys were held until 5 a.m. when their parents arrived to pick them up and take them home to New York.
CSX director of communications Carl Groleau said train hopping “is a romantic, but dangerous notion.”
“Unfortunately train hopping happens more often than we would like,” Groleau said. “Train hopping is very dangerous and it often ends in tragedy. Every year we have a number of injuries and fatalities because of train hopping.”
A Massachusetts teenager’s leg was severed in July when she attempted to hop onto a slowly moving train and fell, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette reports.
Groleau couldn’t comment on Sunday’s train hopping incident, but said CSX prosecutes trespassers “to the fullest extent of the law.”
“We ask that people think it through and act properly and safely around trains and train tracks,” Groleau said. “Thank goodness (the boys) are safe because so many things could have gone wrong.”
For more information on train safety, visit the Operation Life Saver website at www.oli.org.
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