Illinois State University students playing chicken with Union Pacific train

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I should start off with a disclaimer – I can not confirm that one are all of the people in the video are in fact Illinois State University students. The area they are headed to has always had a good amount of off campus housing. You will see many students traveling from that location.

What I can confirm is that low light recording on my Sony video camera is close to horrible. I can also confirm that what the people above are doing is a good way to get killed.

I’d venture a guess this isn’t the first generation to play this train car jumping game. People seem to like to do stupid things around trains. Many times we do things without thinking them thoroughly through. I’m sure these young people are in a hurry and think the train is stopped long enough that they can just hop in between cars to get to the other side of the road.

They don’t know how many railroad workers have been injured over the years by those couplings in between the rail cars. I’m sure they don’t think about what would happen if they got stuck and the train started back up and headed down the tracks.

At no time did the Normal Police show up. So I assume the city bus driver parked in the video never called the behavior into authorities. Police headquarters is right around the corner. The way one of their patrol cars scoped me out for walking around with a monopod at midnight – you would think the kind of behavior above would cause a police riot.

This time around these young people were lucky. From what I saw everyone made it over safely. I wonder how many have tried this while intoxicated. It’s not to hard to see how things could go badly quickly – just because of impatience.

Most of us are guilty of doing stupid things around trains a time or two. Many of us learn from these mistakes.

You think the young people would avoid this behavior so they wouldn’t get dirty and have to do laundry. No way jumping between cars isn’t going to get you dirty.

Video was recorded from my room at the Marriott Hotel in Normal Illinois.

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