AlanBradbury
New member
That video is just scarily stupid. I suspect the guy had to have been drinking to try rolling between the bogies, because I can only imagine that the overconfidence borne of alchohol consumption was at play, either that or just plain stupidity, since nobody in their right mind would try that stunt.
Back when I was in college in Cornwall, I had a girlfriend who lived on the other side of Camborne (train trivia fans will know that was where rail pioneer Richard Tevithick was from), and so of course I used to see her at her house at night and then walk back in the small hours to my place, and that meant crossing the main twin railway lines to Penzance at a level crossing. This is way before there were Voyagers and Pendolinos, it was all Inter City 125s in those days, and those things really did travel at 125 mph down that stretch of track and you couldn't hear them coming either. I used to hate crossing those tracks; even though the barriers would be up, so in theory nothing was coming, I'd be edging out, peering up the line, before crossing. It used to scare the crap out of me, and I was used to trains too, I had a freight line running right past the back of my home in Stockport, and would play near those lines when I was a kid, so I knew how to be careful where trains were, but crossing that line where stuff did 125 mph used to scare the hell out of me. I've got a cool story about something which happened one night when I was crossing those railway lines in Cornwall, it's a bit off topic, but it is interesting, check this out...
I was just about to cross those tracks one night, when I heard a faint noise in the distance, so being cautious about those fast trains, I waited a few seconds, but it wasn't a train I had heard, it was a plane, at very low level. It was quite an overcast night and the street lamp glare on the low cloud obscured visibility a lot, but I could make out the orange engine glow from twin jet pipes on the tail of some kind of military aeroplane and could vaguely make out some swept back wings. It was pretty loud when it went over, it was at probably less than 500 feet but since I could not see its silhouette clearly, I wracked my brains for a military jet with twin tailpipes and swept wings which the RAF used (assuming it was the RAF, as you would), and so I guessed that it could only be a Panavia Tornado.
A minute later, I crossed the tracks and then I heard another plane, same thing, twin jets, some kind of military combat aircraft, this was pretty strange, and my thought, given that this was when the Cold War was still most definitely on, was that something scary was afoot, especially since there were only normally RNAS air/sea rescue choppers about in the daytime and rarely any other aircraft in the skies over Cornwall. Anyway, I carried on walking through the deserted streets to my place, and another jet came over, and then another, and another, and they kept coming, about twenty of them if I recall correctly, all heading roughly south. By now I was really a bit freaked out, but I had managed to spot the silhouette of one of them more clearly when there was a break in the clouds, and saw that these things were not Tornadoes, they were in fact United States Air Force F-111 Aardvark fighter/bombers and EF-111 Raven electronic warfare support aircraft. Now this was really weird, you never saw stuff like that there, this was over England and a fairly sleepy Cornish town, and certainly not at night, especially since I knew F-111s were deep penetration supersonic low level bombers, so I was thinking, Christ, is WW3 kicking off?
Anyway, when I got home, I went to bed wondering what on Earth that was all about and feeling a bit apprehensive as you can imagine. If I tell you that this took place in 1986, you might guess what it was that I'd seen that night... In the morning I turned the news on TV, and it was then that I found out that those aeroplanes had been the 48th and 20th USAF Tactical Fighter Wings from Lakenheath and Upper Heyford setting off for the famous raid they conducted on Libya's capital Tripoli, in response to Colonel Gaddaffi's support of the Red Brigade, Red Army Faction and the Irish Republican Army when they'd made some recent terrorist attacks. It was kind of spooky to see them going out that night, I knew something big was going off.
Al
Back when I was in college in Cornwall, I had a girlfriend who lived on the other side of Camborne (train trivia fans will know that was where rail pioneer Richard Tevithick was from), and so of course I used to see her at her house at night and then walk back in the small hours to my place, and that meant crossing the main twin railway lines to Penzance at a level crossing. This is way before there were Voyagers and Pendolinos, it was all Inter City 125s in those days, and those things really did travel at 125 mph down that stretch of track and you couldn't hear them coming either. I used to hate crossing those tracks; even though the barriers would be up, so in theory nothing was coming, I'd be edging out, peering up the line, before crossing. It used to scare the crap out of me, and I was used to trains too, I had a freight line running right past the back of my home in Stockport, and would play near those lines when I was a kid, so I knew how to be careful where trains were, but crossing that line where stuff did 125 mph used to scare the hell out of me. I've got a cool story about something which happened one night when I was crossing those railway lines in Cornwall, it's a bit off topic, but it is interesting, check this out...
I was just about to cross those tracks one night, when I heard a faint noise in the distance, so being cautious about those fast trains, I waited a few seconds, but it wasn't a train I had heard, it was a plane, at very low level. It was quite an overcast night and the street lamp glare on the low cloud obscured visibility a lot, but I could make out the orange engine glow from twin jet pipes on the tail of some kind of military aeroplane and could vaguely make out some swept back wings. It was pretty loud when it went over, it was at probably less than 500 feet but since I could not see its silhouette clearly, I wracked my brains for a military jet with twin tailpipes and swept wings which the RAF used (assuming it was the RAF, as you would), and so I guessed that it could only be a Panavia Tornado.
A minute later, I crossed the tracks and then I heard another plane, same thing, twin jets, some kind of military combat aircraft, this was pretty strange, and my thought, given that this was when the Cold War was still most definitely on, was that something scary was afoot, especially since there were only normally RNAS air/sea rescue choppers about in the daytime and rarely any other aircraft in the skies over Cornwall. Anyway, I carried on walking through the deserted streets to my place, and another jet came over, and then another, and another, and they kept coming, about twenty of them if I recall correctly, all heading roughly south. By now I was really a bit freaked out, but I had managed to spot the silhouette of one of them more clearly when there was a break in the clouds, and saw that these things were not Tornadoes, they were in fact United States Air Force F-111 Aardvark fighter/bombers and EF-111 Raven electronic warfare support aircraft. Now this was really weird, you never saw stuff like that there, this was over England and a fairly sleepy Cornish town, and certainly not at night, especially since I knew F-111s were deep penetration supersonic low level bombers, so I was thinking, Christ, is WW3 kicking off?
Anyway, when I got home, I went to bed wondering what on Earth that was all about and feeling a bit apprehensive as you can imagine. If I tell you that this took place in 1986, you might guess what it was that I'd seen that night... In the morning I turned the news on TV, and it was then that I found out that those aeroplanes had been the 48th and 20th USAF Tactical Fighter Wings from Lakenheath and Upper Heyford setting off for the famous raid they conducted on Libya's capital Tripoli, in response to Colonel Gaddaffi's support of the Red Brigade, Red Army Faction and the Irish Republican Army when they'd made some recent terrorist attacks. It was kind of spooky to see them going out that night, I knew something big was going off.
Al
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