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As soon as her pickup truck lurched forward and she heard a loud crash behind her, Cheryl Debord knew she was in serious trouble. Rush hour was about to begin, and the railroad tracks at the intersection of 13th Street and San Fernando Road were not a good place to be stuck with a 21-foot camping trailer.She turned frantically to her sister, Betty Norton, sitting beside her. "What are we going to do? We're going to get hit if we stay here!"
After a relaxing early November weekend camping and riding motorcycles in the Nevada desert, the women were on their way to clean out the trailer's holding tank at an RV dealership near Debord's Santa Clarita, California, home. Somehow the metal pin attaching the brand-new $15,000 camper to her pickup had fallen off, causing the trailer to come unhitched as Debord drove over a small rise on the tracks. The women searched the asphalt for the missing pin, but it was nowhere in sight.
"Come on," said Debord. "We'd better try to move this thing!" The two women pushed with everything they had but couldn't budge it. Dozens of motorists drove slowly around them, gawking in astonishment. Nobody stopped.
Nobody, that is, except Cruz Caldera, who quickly pulled to the side of the road. The burly 32-year-old city zoning code enforcement officer had just finished a property inspection in nearby Placerita Canyon when he came across the desperate scene on the tracks. He knew that the Metrolink train zipped through the intersection every 40 minutes, carrying commuters between Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley, 50 miles north.
Caldera looked at his watch. It was 2:45 p.m. -- another train would come by at 3. And if it hit the trailer and jumped the tracks, all those passengers could be hurt or even killed.
With no time to lose, Caldera rushed over to help Debord and Norton. We might as well be trying to move a boulder, thought Caldera, pushing against the rig with all his six-foot, 280-pound weight. Sweat poured down his back, but the trailer stayed put.
"We're not going to be able to move it in time!" Norton exclaimed. She and Debord were close to panic.
"It's going to be okay," said Caldera. "I'll call my boss and tell him to get a message to Metrolink. They'll stop the train." He pulled out his cell phone and relayed what had happened to a supervisor at city hall and then to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Caldera tried to raise the trailer with its attached electric jack. No luck. When the trailer came unhitched, the front end had crashed into the asphalt, bending the jack and leaving it useless.
He glanced at his watch again. It was 2:48. Caldera prayed that Metrolink had contacted the engineer and told him to stop. What if there wasn't enough time?
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