Dave Brown

A funny thing happened when I went out yesterday

I went out for dinner last night with a friend of mine, and that involved taking the train at about 5pm. My train is the Keihin-Tohoku line, and when I got to the station, I noticed that they’d rather ominously turned off the scheduled time for the next train on the pixelboards.

At first I figured there’d been an “accident” (i.e., someone jumping in front of a train), and those always take a long time to clean up. Then I noticed the announcements, and they were talking about an obstruction on the track.

As I stuck around, the reports became, as they tend to, progressively more detailed. At first, there was talk of the train hitting a bicycle on the track. I figured, oh, it’s some idiot who didn’t think that the flashing lights, bells, and barriers actually meant anything if he was on a bicycle.

Then it got weirder. It wasn’t a bicycle—it was several bicycles. The count kept going up, settling at 4 for a while. They were looking for a victim to see if anyone had been hurt or killed or anything. And they were looking for more bicycles. I vowed that I would be following up on this story in the morning.

So I just looked it up and discovered that what had actually happened was that someone had apparently gotten angry at people parking their bicycles outside the railway station, and had just started hurling them over the fence onto the tracks which were a few meters below. He managed to throw five bicycles over the fence before a train came along, smashing a couple of the bicycles, terrifying the train driver, and suddenly focusing JR’s attention directly upon him, at which he fled.

Well, this afternoon the police arrested a 50-year-old unemployed man. I expect he’ll be charged with destruction of property and made to buy his victims new bicycles.