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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!