Watch: With seconds to spare, women trespassing on railroad tracks miss being hit by train


Two women with incredible luck and terrible judgement survived being run down by a freight train in southern Indiana.
The tape of the July 10 incident, caught by a camera mounted on the train, was released on Tuesday by authorities. The women were trespassing on the railroad tracks and on the middle of an 80-foot-tall, 500-foot-long bridge when the 14,000-ton train began to approach, ABC News says. As soon as the engineer saw the women, he used the emergency brake and began blaring the horn.
At first the women try to outrun the train, then one lies down in the middle of the tracks. The other looks as though she might leap off the bridge, but at the last second also lies down just as the train reaches the pair; to call it a close call is an understatement. The train stopped past the bridge, and the engineer was convinced the women had been killed. He immediately called the Monroe County Sheriff's Department, but then noticed that not only were the women alive, they were up and running away from the scene. The pair got into a car and took off, but have since been identified, and now the case is considered a criminal matter. Watch the video of this terrifying incident below. --Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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