Students told to climb under train car at bus stop
By Lisa Crane
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TALLADEGA COUNTY, Alabama (WVTM) — Children in Talladega County were told to crawl under a train after getting off the school bus to get home on Wednesday.
It happened at a train track crossing Diamond Lane in Mardisville, where six kids usually get off at the stop and the parents park nearby to pick them up.
On Wednesday, a train was blocking the road.
Parents assumed they’d have to wait for the train to move before the kids got off the bus, but they were let off.
One of the children’s fathers described the moment he saw the kids crawling out from underneath the train.
“I seen kids pop up from under the train, I’m like, ‘I know y’all ain’t coming up from under that train.’ And they were like, ‘He told us to do it.’ So I’m like, ‘Who is he?’ And he popped up like in between, you know, like ‘I’m sorry. I told them, go up under the train and everything’,” Leon Estelle said.
The kids said the person who told them to do it was the train conductor.
Willie Bell Fuller said she was mortified when she saw her 6-year-old granddaughter under the train car.
“And what if that train had moved, and that thing would’ve killed my kids. That would have been real bad and real ugly,” she said.
Estelle’s two children crawled under that train car. He works for a rail line and said any railroad employee should know better than to instruct children to do something that dangerous.
“It can be just slack roll and not even, you know, for any reason, any kind of movement, any one of them could’ve been killed or hurt. That’s never OK going up under a train; that is a serious problem.”
A parent shared a text, saying it is from the school district to parents of Sycamore and Winterboro students. It said the bus driver has been placed on administrative leave and the district is committed to ensuring all transportation staff meet the highest safety standards.
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