“It Came Outta Nowhere.”

You hear the preceding statement a lot in my line of work. Mostly it comes from the lips of people with a motley collection of scrapes and bruises, standing on shaky legs next to the remains of their vehicle.

And mostly it’s true, at least in the sense that things can go from copacetic to chaotic in the blink of an eye. Such is the way of motor vehicle accidents.

But when the object that “came outta nowhere” is an eighty-car train, sitting stopped on the tracks, and there is only moderate damage to the front end of the driver’s SUV, no damage to the crossing gates, and barely a blemish on the train…

… then that’s pretty strong evidence that the driver of said vehicle may have had tee many martoonies.

It takes a special kind of drunk to maneuver carefully around lowered crossing gates, and then plow directly into the side of a parked freight train.

That’s Ted Kennedy drunk right there, folks.