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I had a car that was pulled over dozens of times so the cops could take pics with it. Most of the time it was cool. Two times pissed me off: one time a cop had
by qingcharles 4mo ago
I had a car that was pulled over dozens of times so the cops could take pics with it. Most of the time it was cool.
Two times pissed me off: one time a cop had just pulled me over on the highway for a pic, okay cool, I pull back onto the highway and went maybe a mile before I was pulled over a second time by his buddy.
Other time I was just rolling into LA for a comic con, it was 3am and I'd been driving for about 14 hours. I was minutes from my hotel and of course here come the cops. I had to make a big detour to find somewhere safe to stop. The next day someone said "Oh, I think my buddy stopped you last night!" so I had him call his cop friend and was able to safely cuss him out from a distance :)
On the other hand I had one awesome experience with the cops in Oxnard when we put my car on the train tracks and accidentally set off the barriers and caused an enormous tailback in each direction at the railroad crossing. I thought the cops would be mad, but they were hilarious and promised to figure out the traffic snafu for us.
https://imgur.com/a/pBcLKqz https://imgur.com/a/pBcLKqz (we didn't realize the barriers automatically detect stuff on the tracks)
Then an hour later when I was driving the car down the tracks again another cop walked up on me all mad and told me he was writing me a ticket for driving on the tracks, but when I read the ticket he'd written it out to Marty McFly and had a great laugh about it. Here's a pic of him booking Marty haha
https://imgur.com/a/vm0ud5y https://imgur.com/a/vm0ud5y
- fragmede 4mo agoThat's an awesome story! deserves to be more than a hacker news comment with imgur links
- qingcharles 4mo agoHere's where the barriers came down and we panicked a little bit as we couldn't figure out how to get them back up :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBo1DvKzRJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBo1DvKzRJ4 The city actually gave us permission for this and promised us there "probably" wasn't any trains using the track that day. This was actually the first time we'd ever tried to fit the train wheels, we didn't realise they wouldn't fit over the brakes, so we had to do some disassembly to make them fit :p https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLU4RPWjTY8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLU4RPWjTY8
- shmeeed 4mo agoI second the grandparent and would like to add that your name has stood out to me in quite a few stories you've told on HN. This is without a doubt one of the funnier and light-hearted ones, but I enjoy them all, and many had me thinking. It's nice to have a face to go with it now. You sound like a guy one could have a few beers with and never get bored. Keep it up!
- aidenn0 4mo agoI can neither confirm nor deny any first-hand experience with connecting the two sides of the tracks with jumper cables in order to trigger the signal.
- qingcharles 4mo agoWe assumed it was some sort of electrical connection between the two through the wheels of the car. Is that how the trains activate it?
- aidenn0 4mo agoThat's how it worked 30 years ago at least. There have been upgrades to the signaling system since then, but detecting a circuit being closed is so simple and reliable that it would be odd to do away with it.
- qingcharles 4mo agoIt definitely surprised us that it worked with the car. At least we know it was accurate in the third BTTF movie when he rolls through the crossing ;)