I finished reading A Conductor Tells... Unauthorized Train Stories, and I found this anectode very funny.
Chapter 11
Animals
“Birds get hit all the time as they try to fly and get caught up in the turbulence when the train goes rumbling by. I’ve hit pheasants, ducks, geese, owls, hawks, and sea gulls. Then your more common kind of birds like dove, sparrows, etc. get hit almost every day by trains. We were going by a bird sanctuary in the South of San Francisco Bay area early one morning and the sun had just come up. Engineer Mike Nunn Saw a flock of sea gulls gathered on a levy next to the tracks and decided to blow the horn and make them fly. He thought it would be a pretty sight for the passengers to see all those white gulls in flight with all the color of the early morning sun turning their wings reddish-orange.
He blew the horn and the birds took flight. To Mike’s dismay they all flew right in front of our 70 mph passenger train. One by one they kept hitting the front of the train. He said it sounded like a machine gun as he ducked down under the windshield for fear one might come trough the glass into his lap. He called me on the radio and said he just hit about 50 sea gulls. I didn’t believe him until I went up to the Cab car to talk to him. I looked out the front of the Cab and saw 3 sea gulls lying on the front of the Cab in the doorway. The next day when we were going by the same area I began to notice an abundance of feathers along the right of way and saw all the dead gulls. I was amazed as I tried to count the birds and discovered there really were about 50 dead sea gulls.”
- Ken Lothridge
Animals
“Birds get hit all the time as they try to fly and get caught up in the turbulence when the train goes rumbling by. I’ve hit pheasants, ducks, geese, owls, hawks, and sea gulls. Then your more common kind of birds like dove, sparrows, etc. get hit almost every day by trains. We were going by a bird sanctuary in the South of San Francisco Bay area early one morning and the sun had just come up. Engineer Mike Nunn Saw a flock of sea gulls gathered on a levy next to the tracks and decided to blow the horn and make them fly. He thought it would be a pretty sight for the passengers to see all those white gulls in flight with all the color of the early morning sun turning their wings reddish-orange.
He blew the horn and the birds took flight. To Mike’s dismay they all flew right in front of our 70 mph passenger train. One by one they kept hitting the front of the train. He said it sounded like a machine gun as he ducked down under the windshield for fear one might come trough the glass into his lap. He called me on the radio and said he just hit about 50 sea gulls. I didn’t believe him until I went up to the Cab car to talk to him. I looked out the front of the Cab and saw 3 sea gulls lying on the front of the Cab in the doorway. The next day when we were going by the same area I began to notice an abundance of feathers along the right of way and saw all the dead gulls. I was amazed as I tried to count the birds and discovered there really were about 50 dead sea gulls.”
- Ken Lothridge
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