Riding the rails nets Ontario man $500 fine

An Ontario man who was riding on the locomotive of a train and allegedly filmed it for “social media content” was fined $500 in Brandon provincial court on Thursday.

“If this was all about creating social media content, you need to give some serious thought to what could have gone wrong here,” Judge Shauna Hewitt-Michta said.

Jonathan Hart, 25, pleaded guilty to the charge of trespassing on railway property under the Railway Safety Act.

Crown attorney Ron Toews told the court that on Oct. 11, the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Police Service received a report of a “possible train rider.”

The train was travelling east from Saskatchewan. The man was believed to be riding on the “middle remote locomotive,” Toews said.

A locomotive is a self-propelled engine that provides power to move the entire train.

“He was discovered by a CPKC employee that followed Mr. Hart on his Instagram account,” Toews said.

The man allegedly boarded the train in Moose Jaw, Sask., and “began posting updates on Instagram during his ride,” he said.

The employee recognized the train locomotive in the social media posts and contacted the Brandon train master, who then reported it to police, the court heard.

Once the train stopped in Brandon, police found a man on the locomotive who identified himself as Hart and arrested him.

“He was co-operative and was allowed to gather his things that he had been travelling with. He had a backpack, a ground pad for sleeping, his clothes and a half-full case of 24 pilsner beers,” the Crown said.

He said there are several aggravating factors, including that it seemed Hart’s “motivation for getting onto the train appears to have been to create content for Instagram.”

The fact that he was on a large remotely controlled piece of moving machinery was another, Toews said.

“This is not a simple matter of jumping a boxcar and taking a ride on a railway. He would have had access to all kinds of controls, even if he wasn’t intending operating any of them,” he said.

“He had no business being on there.”

Toews added that it’s fortunate for Hart that he wasn’t charged with mischief, since the facts meet the criteria.

The Crown and defence lawyer Philip Sieklicki jointly recommended that Hart be fined $500 for the offence.

Hewitt-Michta said that while the circumstances may seem “silly,” the result could have been much worse.

“There’s a lot of different things that could have gone wrong here … Over the years that I’ve been a judge, I have been involved a couple of times with accidents involving trains,” adding that one of the accidents was fatal.

“Fortunately, no one was hurt here.”

» sanderson@brandonsun.com