New London Tube: Train Avoidance

Every week, there have usually been at least a few interesting videos uploaded onto YouTube from New London. I tend to go after this ever-replenishing stream of more recent occurrences. I would do that this week as well, except I'm on vacation and most of a week has passed with Jayne Keedle filling in at the helm. So today I bring you the video you're most likely to see if you just decided to make an idle search for our city on the site.

"Nearly Killed in New London, CT!" was uploaded in November of 2008 by a person dubbed AmtrakFanNEC927, who not surprisingly has hundreds of videos posted from around Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. It's the first thing to show up when you search for New London, Conn., though it's not actually the most viewed video out of there despite gaining close to 350,000 views in three years. You may remember Johnna Kaplan briefly mentioning it in an .

In the video, the AmtrakFan starts filming from a platform as a regional train nears its destination. Suddenly, a man carrying a plastic bag - which contains a chicken, the uploader somehow determines - enters from the right, earning a scoff from the train buff as he brazenly walks past the lowered gate. The man gives a brief glance at the approaching train and doesn't even break step, crossing its path with about four seconds to spare. "Unbelievable," AmtrakFan mutters as Chicken Dude heads off toward and online semi-infamy.

"Had he been a few seconds later, who knows, would he have waited?" the uploader asks. "Or would he have kept going. Whatever the choice he is an idiot."

The video has over 1,100 comments, most of which are probably not worth reading. They include similar sentiments about the brain capacity of the pedestrian, cold-hearted hopes that his timing would have been off in a detrimental way, references to Chuck Norris, and complaints that Chicken Dude wasn't nearly as nearly killed as the uploader promised.

I have to agree that whoever he is, the guy is pretty lucky. It's foolhardy enough to try to beat the train in an automobile, so if you find yourself walking toward Waterfront Park and see the gates go down, you're better off just waiting. Your chicken in a bag is in no rush.