Tomas was very sleepy. Like many folks without a job or fixed address, Tomas drifted down to warmth of Southwest Florida for the winter. As he was looking for a place to sleep around Christmas, he noticed a nice "bed", more properly, a railroad bed. There are many abandoned railroads around that part of Florida, with the tracks safely overgrown or taken up completely. Perhaps in the dark of the isolated corner of eastern Lee county, he didn't notice the shine on the tops of the rails that identified this particular stretch of railroad as an active line. Or maybe the abandoned ones just had too many weeds. Perhaps he also thought that someone was paying to maintain a 6-foot high fence along these tracks in the middle of nowhere strictly for their own amusement. At any rate, Tomas jumped the aforementioned fence and curled up in between the rails and went to sleep. Ironically, a Special Christmas Passenger train travelling between Punta Gorda and Fort Myers, utilizing passenger cars from the Railroad's "Murder Mystery" train, ran over poor Tomas. While passenger service by the private railroad industry in Florida is not completely dead, after being run over by more than 200 tons of vintage passenger train equipment moving at over 25 mph, poor Tomas was completely dead.

Submitted on 01/04/2010

Submitted by: Rick Kaserman
Reference: Fort Myers News-Press, 18DEC09 http://www.news-press.com/article/20091218/NEWS01/91218014/1002/rss01

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Jack said:
Definitely Keep: Darwin Award
While close - and fatal - encounters between people and trains are generally too common for a good DA, upon reading this submission and the account in the newspaper, I immediately thought of Agatha Chrisie's classic "Murder on the Orient Express". The passengers on the "Murder Mystery" train certainly had something more than your average make believe mystery to talk about! Thanks Rick, and please keep us informed - was it a simple accident, or was it "murder under the Murder Mystery Dinner Train"...?

Bruce said:
Definitely Keep: Darwin Award
I'm one to regularly toss train/pedestrian incidents since they're so darned common, but this one still stands out as unique enough for me to accept it. I really liked the original writeup as well. Thanks, Rick!

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