"..nice going Rocky, next week Fantasy Land"
Posted on 05/31/2012 3:33:26 PM PDT by rawhide
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. - Waiting at Walt Disney World is not uncommon, but recent park guests had to wait longer than usual because of a squirrel.
A video recorded and posted to YouTube on Monday shows a monorail train heading from the Grand Floridian to the Magic Kingdom moving slowly -- starting and stopping -- because a squirrel was on the track and wouldn't jump off.
The video was recorded by a park guest awaiting the train at a nearby station.
Monorail passengers at Disney World had a 45-minute ride between stops because a squirrel got on the track and the woman driving couldn't bring herself to run it over," the YouTube poster said. " They made progress a few feet at a time, honking at the squirrel to continue further down the track."
The video shows the squirrel finally entering the train station and eventually jumping off the track, bringing a round of applause from the awaiting guests.
(Excerpt) Read more at clickorlando.com ...
I don’t have a problem with this. It makes me smile.
Ramming speed!
"..nice going Rocky, next week Fantasy Land"
It’s GAY days at Disney, right?
They should have started and run over the furry-tailed rat.
With how many hundreds of moms and kids watching? Look, I know that squirrels are just as dirty as rats and out of sight of the guests, I am sure Disney has a much tougher policy, but hey... why ruin the kid’s vacation?
And if they did squish the wee beastie, you could be damn well sure that somebody would have sued the park for emotional shock and trauma. Disney would have had to spend millions making the suit go away because of all the shocking bad publicity.
The driver did the right thing, IMHO.
It was just trying to get away from the Mockingbird.
I LOL at that video every time I watch it. Reminds me of hooking the bug zapper to the bird feeder. Squirrels did not like that when I hit the switch.
Nuthin’ new in this story. Been there myself.
It was 1985. I’d just made the move from Conrail to Amtrak as a locomotive engineman.
On my “first call” from the extra board, I had to have a road foreman of engines ride with me from New Haven to New York (Penn Station) to make sure I was qualified for the run.
The guy was an older gent named Jimmy. Very nice guy, in his late 50’s at least. The train was “Mail 13”, mostly mail-handling cars with a few coaches on the tail.
Back then, the speed limit in the New Haven station complex was only 15mph. Once you got outside the station limits, it jumped to 75.
So Jimmy and I are on the engine, conductor says “go”, and we pull out. We clear the slow-speed area, and just as I’m ready to start throttling up, I look ahead, and there’s a dog up on the track, not far off.
Now you need to understand something about dogs and railroad tracks. When just about any animal is in the tracks, and a train bears down on it, it will leap off “to the sides”. Any animal, EXCEPT a dog. They almost always turn and start running down the track in front of you as if they, too, were “on rails”. And then you run them down. There’s something — perhaps it’s a high-pitched whine from the rails themselves — that keeps them from jumping across the rail on either side. Few folks know this, who don’t work on the railroad. Now you know it, too.
Well, this old dog did the same thing, started running ahead of us. Only thing was, we weren’t going fast enough to overtake him, he was just loping along ahead of us.
And, like the monorail operator, I didn’t want to run him down, either.
So we’re just poking along behind him, on the (so-called) fast mail train, for a quarter mile or so.
Finally, I slowed down to a near-crawl, and Jimmy gets down and starts trotting along trying to shoo the poor animal off. For anyone who might have seen that, it must have looked strange — a passenger train creeping along, following an old guy on the tracks, trying to chase away a dog, on the 4-track New Haven main line!
Well, the pooch somehow got the message and veered off. I got all requalified on the New York run, and kept running for 27 more years. And Jimmy, now gone, bless his soul, got his exercise that day!
Good for you and Jimmy!
Thank you for sharing that!
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