Loco thief sentenced

[John Ashworth]

LOCO THIEF SENTENCED

Posted on 02 October 2009 by Railways Africa Editor

Brandon Dowdy, the 22-year-old who helped himself to 120 ton CSX Railroad locomotive 2617 in Florida last February has been sentenced to three years’ probation and 100 hours of mandatory community service – and was forbidden by the judge to go anywhere near railways. He told The Miami Herald: “It has affected my love of trains because I can no longer work around them or participate in any activities that deal with that form of transportation.” His ambition is to become a diesel mechanic.

Dowdy was arrested on charges of burglary and first-degree felony grand theft, a crime for which he could have been jailed for 30 years. With a friend, he had boarded an unmanned locomotive parked on a siding. It happened to be the same model that he had worked on while a volunteer at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum. Having checked that he was able to start the unit, he left to fetch tools which he used to unlock the points giving access to the through line. At 23:30 he returned, started up the loco and drove it some 11km, being careful to sound the horn on the approach to each crossing. His friend explained to police later that they wanted to get to the Redland Tavern in South Miami-Dade where a popular band was playing.

Dowdy knew that if he went east, track-circuiting would pick up the movement and alert CTC operators in Jacksonville. The line to the west lay in what is termed “dark territory”.

By the time police located the missing locomotive, “sitting all by itself on a track that ran through a dimly lit nursery,” there was no trace of the miscreants. Thinking that terrorists might be involved, the United States Department of Homeland Security was notified, but when detectives found there was still fuel aboard, they concluded that somebody had merely gone for a joyride. A missing air hose found in Dowdy’s Ford pickup truck clinched the matter.

After the incident, CSX official Ryan Gustin told the court, the company stopped leaving the reverser key on unattended locomotives. He said in a sworn statement that they started to do things “that probably should have been done long ago.’

When Dowdy was arrested, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, he called his mother, asking her for $50,000 bail. “His mother, who used to put toy trains on his birthday cakes as a child, told him no.” Frank Malarky wrote in the paper: “What a moron. He should be behind bars for stupidity in the first degree”.