Railroaders place to shoot the shit.

(The following story by Robert Samuels appeared on The Miami Herald website on September 28, 2009.)

MIAMI The scraggly bearded savant who stunned detectives in February when he stole a 120-ton CSX locomotive has received a befitting punishment.

Stay away from railroads, the judge ordered Brandon Dowdy.

Dowdy, who is 22 and lives in Cutler Bay, does not have a criminal conviction on his record after admitting to being the bandit, got three years of probation this month and 100 hours of mandatory community service -- and the restraining order. He will remain behind bars until November.

``I think the [decision] was very fair,'' Dowdy wrote The Miami Herald in an e-mail. He added: ``It has affected my love of trains because I can no longer work around them or participate in any activities that deal with that form of transportation.''

Officials of CSX, a Jacksonville-based freight train company that chugs through 23 states east of the Mississippi, did not want to talk about the decision. Spokesman Gary Sease simply noted: ``This was a very serious offense.''

The offense took place in February, when Dowdy was arrested on charges of burglary and first-degree felony grand theft, a crime punishable by 30 years in prison.

He had sneaked onto an empty train on a Kendall sidetrack with a friend. Then he executed an intricate series of steps to start the engine. He took CSX locomotive No. 2617 on a seven-mile joyride.

The friend, Alex Johnson-Self, told cops they were trying to get to the Redland Tavern, a dive bar in South Miami-Dade that has parking for both cars and horses. A popular house band, Big Dick and the Extenders, was playing that evening.

By the time officers found the locomotive in February, the two were long gone. It was sitting all by itself on a track that ran through a dimly lit nursery, according to a sworn statement given by Miami-Dade officer Pedro Polo.

They prepared for the worst. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was called, fearing a terrorist mastermind stole fuel with some unscrupulous plot in mind.

The fuel was still aboard the engine, so detectives concluded a person took the train for a ride. Switches to control the tracks had been broken; an air hose was missing. They found the air hose in Dowdy's Ford pickup truck after catching him driving north to his father's house in Central Florida (he often went there by train).

``He knew the workings of the locks, the switches for different tracks,'' Polo told prosecutors. ``He knew the train. To my knowledge he knew the train backward and forward. He knew everything . . . And he loved trains.''

Ryan Gustin, a special agent for CSX's security force with a knowledge of trains, was also on hand. When Gustin would describe to the officer how trains operate, documents show, Dowdy would finish his sentences.

``I was staring at them,'' Polo told prosecutors.

Turns out, documents show, Dowdy did not commit the crime on a lark. He admitted to officers that he had scoped out the lonely locomotive that afternoon, and became fascinated by it -- it was the same model of train engine he had worked with when he volunteered at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum. He stealthy climbed aboard to see if he could start it. About 3:30 p.m., CSX records show, he moved the train for two minutes.

Around 11:30 p.m., he returned with an ax grinder, a hammer and a friend. He told detectives that he maneuvered switches and used something called a reverser key to get the train to move. He made a deliberate decision to go east, not west.

If he went east, Dowdy told officers, he knew the train would loop around and go north. Plus, he wanted to get to the bar down south. He tooted the horn at each crossing -- just to be safe. The move also allowed Dowdy to move the train through what's called ``dark territory'' -- a desolate area where the train doesn't trip a signal to Jacksonville.

An outrageous plan? It sounded that way to Dowdy's defense attorney, Jay Kolsky, too. He told judges that the defendant acted so oddly because Dowdy wasn't taking his medication for his bipolar disorder.

One of the side effects, Kolsky said, is an ``inflated ego,'' where Dowdy would want to see if he was so knowledgeable that he could start up a locomotive. After the incident, CSX stopped leaving the reverser key on locomotives. Gustin, the CSX agent, said in a sworn statement that they started to do things ``that probably should have been done long ago.''

``I have no issues with him,'' Gustin said in the statement. ``He was very forthright and stuff. He was caught. He was more than willing to provide the information.''

After Dowdy was arrested, he called his mother, Elizabeth Combs, to see if she would bail him out. The bail: $50,000. His mother, who used to put toy trains on his birthday cakes as child, told him no.

``As a parent,'' Combs said, ``we have to do tough love. And by doing that, in the long run, you could save this child's life in the future.

``Everyone that hears about the story laughs at first. They think it's funny. But I stand there without a funny look on my face, because they're not his parent.'' The two now talk every day. Dowdy expects to be home by Thanksgiving.

``I have learned from this experience and hope to build upon it,'' Dowdy wrote to The Herald.

When he gets out, he wants to go to school to become an expert in diesel mechanics.

Monday, September 28, 2009