Terror on the Trestle

It was a beautiful, sunny, early-summer morning. Our son, Jim, who was 12 and was a Boy Scout, decided that this morning would be the perfect time for him to earn his hiking badge. He asked our neighbor’s son, who was a couple of years older, if he would also go. I still did not feel really good about this, but then he told me that Dean’s uncle would also go. I thought, “That’s good, an adult will be with them. They left about 11 A.M. with their packed lunches. Jim was really excited and looking forward to his adventure.

It became mid-afternoon and they were not back yet. I reasoned that they probably had gone further than they had planned. I became more and more jittery with that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the kind that mothers get when something is wrong. I kept looking up and down the street, but no one was coming. At about 4 PM the door opened and there stood Jim, white-faced and trembling, with a stranger. The stranger said that Jim and his friends had had a bit of a scare and he offered to drive them home, but Jim was the only one who accepted his offer.

It took quite a while for him to calm him down and talk to me. He just hung on to me and I could feel his heart pounding so hard. Finally, he said, “The train! The train was coming.” When he was calm enough, he told me the whole story. They walked to Accotink Park and climbed up the hill to the very top where the trestle is. It is very high off the ground, and they thought it would be shorter if they just walked across the trestle to the other side. Halfway across, they felt vibrations and Dean knelt down to put his ear to the rail. In this way he judged on which track the train was coming. The three of them jumped over the open space between the two sets of tracks and they lay down between the rails of the other track.

The engineer, seeing three people on the tracks, leaned on his massive air horn. Knowing he was too close to even slow down, all he could do was blast the train whistle.

Soon the train roared by at a frightening speed and they hung on to the rails. It was a long freight train and it seemed to take forever. The whole trestle shook from the vibrations; the noise was thunderous. When the train was completely past them, they got up and shakily made their way back the way they had come. When they got down to the ground, there was a man there who had realized what had happened. The boys were really frightened and he offered to take them home. By the time Jim got home, he was almost incoherent with fright. As it turned out the Good Samaritan had encountered the same experience as a young boy. Giving a Jim a ride home was his way of giving back.

Hours later I asked why Dean’s uncle would even consider climbing up to the trestle. I learned then that the uncle was only a couple of years older than Dean! I don’t think Jim ever got the hiking badge.

Many times over the years I have thought of how much danger they faced and how Dean knew the only way they could survive. Someone was really watching over them through this terrible ordeal.