Playing trains -- for real
Categories: Teens & tweens, Toys & games
We are very lucky in that there is a local model railroading club with a huge train layout that allows kids (big and small) to come watch their trains rolling about. We can run over there any Saturday and the kids can watch the trains climb mountains or roll through town. When they get older, if they're really interested, they can even join the club and learn to run the trains themselves.Kids in Lodz, Poland are not so fortunate it seems. Lacking access to an impressive model railroad system, fourteen-year-old Adam Dabrowski turned the local public transit system into his own personal playset. Adam used a TV-style remote to control the system's rolling stock, switching them onto the wrong tracks and causing four trams to derail.
"He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks," said Miroslaw Micor, a police spokesman. "He had converted the TV control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book the best junctions to move trams around and what signals to change."
While it all sounds like fun and games, a dozen people were injured in one incident alone. "He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set -- but it was lucky nobody was killed," said Micor. The boy will be charged with endangering public safety in juvenile court.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Judy 1-11-2008 @ 11:42AM
DO NOT teach my son how to do this. He's been obsessed with trains since he was an infant, and currently his life's goal is to be a "train driver" when he grows up. He would love nothing more than a life-size train set to play with.
(And btw, I now know more about trains that I ever imagined possible.)
Gotta give it to this kid for creative and initiative, right?
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EskimoPie 1-11-2008 @ 11:52AM
I'm sure we've all heard the polish jokes before, but seriously how smart is it to build a train switching system that a teenager with a modified TV remote can completely take over control of??? That's incredible!
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Meagan 1-11-2008 @ 12:24PM
Oh I'd be careful about saying things like that. Teens can be SMART, and who knows, it might be able to happen here. It's basically hacking, and the US is certainly not exactly universally protected electronically. It probably wasn't all that hard to do, it's just that most people wouldn't think to DO it.
Ethel 1-11-2008 @ 1:48PM
Does this have anything to do with the Potty Train my 3 year old keeps talking about?
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Uly 1-11-2008 @ 7:58PM
I'm reminded of Darius McCollum.
http://www.autismconnect.org/news.asp?section=00010001&itemtype=news&id=5945
It was actually an article about the man which sent me reading everything about AS I could get my hands on, and caused my mother to tell me that she thought I was autistic since I was an infant! (I really do wish she'd told me earlier, but I can see why she wouldn't.)
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