Claire Connelly from Highlands is a student at the Florida Gulf Coast University and was just one of the many thousands who was forced to evacuate the Sunshine State because of the impending and catastrophic hurricane. She made preparations to go back home to New Jersey and embarked on a very long trip back home. Unfortunately for Claire, that journey didn’t exactly go as planned.
“I had to drive six hours to Jacksonville and from Jacksonville, I had to take a flight from Michigan,” Claire said to Inside Edition. “I had a two-hour layover then a flight from there to Newark.”
The young woman had been traveling for 18 hours straight without any rest, but finally fell asleep due to exhaustion after she boarded her last train.
“I fell asleep reading biology notecards, I was just exhausted from all the chaos,” she said to NJ.com.
Apparently, the train conductor didn’t notice Claire sleeping on the train, because she woke up hours later completely alone with the train stationed in an abandoned rail yard.
only i would wake up on an empty NJTransit train parked and shut down in a trainyard 2 hours from my home. that was an interesting 911 call pic.twitter.com/cdSkCTtQry
— claire bridget (@claaiirreeyyy) September 6, 2017
No one was around and the train was deserted.
Claire realized she only had very limited battery life left on her smartphone and quickly dialed 911 to ask for help and her out of her predicament. She also posted a video of herself in the train which quickly went viral.
“I literally just fell asleep on my train. I’m on a train. There is no one on,” she said in the video. “I was screaming at the top of my lungs for help. No one answered. The train was completely empty and shut down for the night.”
Luckily, the police quickly arrived at the scene after Claire called 911 and she was rescued. It turns out that Claire had actually boarded the wrong train in the first place, two hours away from her home town.
“I was on the wrong train in general. I found out after I got saved,” she wrote on Twitter. “The guy who checks tickets didn’t even notice mine said Middletown.”
The incident is now under investigation by the NJ Transit, and a spokeswoman told reporters that ‘it is the conductor’s responsibility to check the train.”
Claire later posted a tweet stating that she doesn’t have any hard feelings towards NJ Transit and that the whole incident was “a mistake which hopefully won’t happen again.”
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