Black Eye For Amtrak Conductor!

[Hytec]

This article is on today's Trains News website......

Pair gets "taken for a ride" on Amtrak



January 23, 2007

EUGENE, Ore. - There is an old saying that says "no good deed goes unpunished," and that certainly rang true for two good Samaritans who decided to help an elderly woman board Amtrak's southbound Coast Starlight on Jan. 12. According to the Eugene Register-Guard newspaper, Suzette McInally and Destiny Chavez were seeing a friend off at the Eugene station when they noticed an older woman with a walker calling for help as she struggled up the steps of the train. When no Amtrak employees responded, McInally, 42, stepped aboard to assist her. Chavez, 17, followed McInally.

The passenger's seat was on the upper deck of the Superliner equipped train, so the two helped her up the flight of stairs and got her seated. Then the train began to move. The pair found an Amtrak employee and asked him to stop the train, which was still along the Eugene platform. Instead, they were taken to the conductor who, according to McInally, didn't believe her account. "He told us to go to the lounge while he decided how to deal with us, whether to press charges," she told the Register-Guard. "I told him, 'We want off - we don't want a train ride, but he said he couldn't let us off now, that there was no way we could have gotten on the train without sneaking on, that we had to be stealing a ride."

The conductor said they would have to ride to Chemult, Ore., before they could exit. Instead, the pair was put off in Oakridge, Ore., after calling police there. The conductor rebuffed other Amtrak employees' efforts to give the pair blankets, since they'd left their coats inside their car parked back at the Eugene station. "They stopped beside this field - it was all snow. They pointed at some buildings way down to the right and said, "That's the police station,' the Register-Guard reported. They started walking when they were met by Oakridge police officer Stephan Ball. "At first he was all business because he'd been told that we'd tried to hop a train," McInally said. "But he warmed up after talking to us."

Ball eventually believed their account, Oakridge Police Chief Louis Gomez said, particularly after an Amtrak employee on the train called to say Amtrak officials had changed their minds about filing a "theft of services" complaint. The police officer let McInally use his phone to call relatives, and then drove them to a restaurant so they could stay warm while waiting for a ride back to Eugene. "Our experience with the police, who went up to us thinking we were criminals, was the nicest part of our whole trip," she said.

Amtrak spokesman Mark Magliari told the Register-Guard on Jan. 19 he was unable to reach the employees aboard the Coast Starlight that evening to ask about the incident. He said there obviously was confusion about how McInally and Chavez came aboard. "We're very sorry for the experience that this woman and her niece had," he told the Register-Guard. "We're looking into what happened there. And we appreciate the help of the Oakridge police in assisting these two people."

The trip was McInally's first train ride.